If the Rev. Barry Fischer wasn’t exactly thrown to the wolves when he began his work 47 years ago, he sure felt like it sometimes.
Fischer, a missionary who received an honorary Humanities degree Saturday from Calumet College of St. Joseph in Hammond during commencement exercises, was overwhelmed by the differences between what he thought missionary work entailed and what it was in reality.
During his first stop, in Lima, Peru, he watched as a pastor tried to explain to a woman who grew coffee that paying her employees 75 cents a day wasn’t “quite just.”
“She said, ‘What more do they need? They have a home,'” Fischer said. “(She) considered herself to be a devout Catholic, but her faith was divorced from life. I had to come to grips with the bigger picture, that the world was polarized between rich and poor, and that it is a violent, unjust world.”
But his time spent all over the world has taught him there’s no such thing as “independence,” but there is “interdependence,” and people – especially Saturday’s 346 graduates – would do well to tear down the walls they’ve built around their hearts because they fear “other.”
“The poor teach us so much. They taught me how to pray and to share lived experience,” he said. “I learned to be open to see life from the other side, and that if we take off our shoes, we must tread lightly because we are on sacred ground.”
Class Valedictorian Adam Webb said he started at Calumet College when the “Science wing didn’t exist and Literary Arts was in the basement.” Now, he said, the school is doing Alzheimer’s disease prevention research.
“I end with a quote by Frank Zappa: ‘A mind is like a parachute; it doesn’t work when it’s not open,” he said.
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Michelle L. Quinn is a freelance reporter for the Post-Tribune.