Loyola University Maryland - Evergreen / Green and Gray Yearbook (Baltimore, MD)

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4 Dedication

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Sports 142 125th Anniversary Section. 192 Senior Directory 202 Ads and Patrons 208 Yearbook Staff 228 3 Table of Contents

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In Memory of Michael J. Billmann Michael Billmann, class of 1978, was killed in 1976, while walk- ing home from school across an Arbutus rail line. The class of 1978 would like to dedicate EVERGREEN ' 78 to Mike, because, to many and various people, he exemplified St. Ignatius ' ideal of a man for others. Ideals are very often airy and insubstantial things, but Mike ' s example shows us that the lesuit ideal is not such an ethereal goal. In his short life, Mike walked many paths and sailed many straights most of us will never find. Mike was a doer, and the astonishing thing about him was that he had time for himself; he was a volunteer at University Hospital, a counselor at Camp Shiloh, a volunteer at the Rosewood Center, and was, in short, committed to others without regard for his own benefit. Predro Arrupe, the world head of the jesuits, asked a congress of jesuit-educated alumni in Europe: What is it to humanize the world if not to put it at the service of mankind? Mike Billman could have skipped that lecture, since he already understood the lesson. Once faith is imagined as being ' Ironic ' , Mike wrote just before his death, there appears value in even the smallest human action. Weakness becomes one of the great forms of power, and it challenges men repeatedly to test their spiritual strength. As a class, we are now poised on the verge of an exodus, a going out, into jobs, higher education, and families. In our eagerness to tes t our abilities, our strengths, and our energies on the world, we might do well to remember Mike Billmann ' s glimpse of the truth, that it is the challenge of sacrifice which best tempers our strengths. . . . Teach me, friend, to see with your eyes: God as the glue between cell walls, Christ at the heart of each tumbling atom. And how, when the Spirit breathes, the planet quakes as silently as a spinnaker, swelling towards the moon. from a poem for Mike Billmann, December, 1976 5 Dedication