Formative Reading

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For over 20 years, Mike Sacco has led small groups of Boston College students on service trips to rural Jamaica as part of an ongoing collaboration between St. Mary Parish and BC’s Center for Student Formation, where he is executive director. Each time, he makes sure to tuck Anthony De Mello’s The Way to Love in his suitcase.

Required reading for participants, the book helps students explore what it means to love and be in relationship with the communities they serve, each other, and themselves, says Sacco.

“In this book, De Mello asks you to slow down and see things—and people—as they are, not as you want them to be. That emphasis on awareness, against the backdrop of everything that goes with doing service immersion work in solidarity with a developing country—thinking about poverty, spirituality, justice, and then you’ve got the heat, the bugs … it’s a really fertile way to plant new ideas and see real growth.”

Key for Sacco is the book’s accessibility: “It’s not overtly intellectual, it fits in your back pocket, and it’s got these short, easy-to-read chapters. In the kind of frontline work I do with students, it’s a perfect fit.”

Back at the Heights, Sacco works closely with students through the center’s popular mentoring programs and retreats, as well as the custom formation experiences his team develops with academic departments, student affairs, and other campus partners.

Sacco has introduced the book so enthusiastically to successive generations of Eagles that he often hears from alumni who’ve rediscovered it in a bookstore or pulled out their old copy to navigate a difficult moment. “It’s helpful at any point of discernment. Maybe you followed a certain path into adulthood—a career or relationship—and realize now it isn’t authentic. This book can give you the courage to step off that path and make a change.”