Freshmen (but not just freshmen):
Welcome! You have been overwhelmed with orientation, instruction and advice this last week. I am sure much of it has been very necessary and beneficial, but how much has addressed the most important part of your upcoming life at Notre Dame (and of your whole life)? How much has mentioned the nuclear reactor dormant within you, the secret and infinite longing of your restless hearts, or the person of Christ for you — in a word, your spiritual life at ND?
The most important thing that we do as students, and as people, is to grow in holiness. As St. Augustine said, “The entire life of a good Christian is in fact an exercise of holy desire.” Yet, if we survey where we spend our time and direct our attention, many of us will find that it is dominated by academic and professional goals, social joys or anxieties and miscellaneous daily tasks; meanwhile, our life of faith and prayer is an afterthought, a routine and perhaps something to maintain rather than zealously cultivate. It is a curious and lamentable fact that what has been gifted to us to put on grand display in the center of our inner home, we carelessly toss into a dusty closet.
We are like soccer players who, in the middle of a match, turn away from an open goal to maximize our time of possession or completed passes. We are like test-takers who spend 90% of the exam on a few multiple-choice questions that make up 10% of the exam grade and are left hastily scribbling answers to the essay questions that make up 90% of the exam grade. We are like a family on a beach vacation that has gotten so worked up over choosing a restaurant that we are no longer in the mood to go to the beach. We are like drivers who use their entire phone battery texting and playing music and so become lost without their Apple Maps. We are easily distracted, easily uprooted and we fail to see clearly and soberly the true purpose, which lies hidden in plain sight.
It need not be so. Let us resolve to foreground our spiritual life at Notre Dame! We may not be able to spend hours every day in prayer; we may not be inclined to go to adoration or daily mass; but, so long as we keep always before our mind and heart the person of Christ, we shall be heeding the instruction — the most important instruction — of St. Paul: “Pray without ceasing” (1 Thessalonians 5:17).
A commonly held view in the Church has been that lay people enjoy neither the calling nor the potential for the level of holiness attainable by priests and monks. Vatican II, once and for all, rejected such clericalism while affirming a universal call to holiness: “All the faithful of Christ of whatever rank or status, are called to the fullness of the Christian life” (Lumen Gentium, 40). The lives of many lay saints also testify to our great potential for holiness. Let us live our lives as students with the hope, ambition and practice of achieving the great holiness and sanctity which, as we now realize, we are most definitely worthy of and called to.
At Notre Dame, we have the opportunity and good pleasure of frequently seeing and interacting with priests — be they our priest-in-residence, our professor or a man wearing the collar walking beside us on the quad. We come to realize that, indeed, “priests are people too.” We then, in turn, realize that if they can be holy, so too can we be holy (although our holiness might, in our active exterior life, manifest in different forms of work).
This realization was amplified for me last summer when I was in Uganda living in community with Holy Cross priests and brothers. Living, praying, eating, laughing and sometimes working with these priests and brothers gave me the sense of true spiritual equality with them and with all religious; or, if not an actual equality of holiness (since certainly they were more holy than me), at least an equal potential for holiness. Although I enjoyed my time living more or less as a seminarian, I felt more confirmed than ever in my lay vocation. I have felt in my soul the truth of the Church’s “universal call to holiness,” and am more eager than ever to answer this call in my own life. I hope you will join me!
Richard Taylor is a senior from St. Louis living in Keenan Hall. He studies physics and also has an interest in theology. He encourages all readers to send reactions, reflections or refutations to rtaylo23@nd.edu.
