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| With Dad on graduation day |
It was my Dad’s greatest wish for me to graduate from Notre
Dame. It is still, to this day, one of the greatest joys of my life to have
done so… because it made him so proud.
On this Father’s Day, having recently visited my alma mater
for Reunion Weekend 2018, I reflect on three of Dad’s favorite topics, in
reverse order…
Notre Dame
Like Nigel Tufnel of Spinal Tap, Notre Dame likes to amp
things up to 11.
This is engrained in the school’s DNA. After a fire
destroyed the campus’ main building in 1879, Notre Dame’s founder, Holy Cross Fr.
Edward Sorin, walked through the ruins, gathered students into the church next
door and put the blame on himself for not dreaming big enough.
“I came here to build a great university to honor Our Lady,”
he said. “But I built it too small, and She had to burn it to the ground to
make the point.”
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| Welcome home |
This is how the present-day Golden Dome was born. It is the still
the centerpiece of the campus, and still gives chills to anyone turning the
corner on Notre Dame Avenue to see it gleam a mile away in the distance. The
sight impresses visitors, and welcomes alumni home.
But it’s a very different home than I remember. In 2018, one
overheard first impression of campus was, “It’s like a golf course with a
starburst of buildings.”
The comment brought to mind the image of myself, standing
next to my young daughter on a visit here nearly a decade ago. She took in the sweeping
expanse green fields outlined by new dorms and academic buildings of Collegiate
Gothic design, distinctively colored by Sorin Brick made from lime-rich marl, a
mud that lines the campus’ two lakes.
“Dad, you went to school here?”
My young daughter asked, with a touch of awe Fr. Sorin would have delighted in.
“I went to school HERE?”
I found myself repeating, with a touch of wonder. The entire quad she was
looking at didn’t exist when I went to school at Notre Dame. I couldn’t believe
it either.
By 2018, the campus had expanded even further. The new law
building housed an entire courtroom, suitable for full-scale mock trials. The new
performance arts center was built around not one, but seven stages. The new
science building encases an entire planetarium.
A new football stadium was build around the old stadium... and then, as part of a $400 million
development project, geo-thermal wells were installed beneath the parking lots
and even the surrounding stadium was surrounded itself by four new, adjoining
buildings, including a student center with a rock-climbing wall and a two-story
ballroom overlooking the 50-yard line.
It’s as if Notre Dame cocoons itself every few years, and
then explodes into something bigger and brighter.
Country
Bigger, brighter, bolder. This is, after all, Indiana, the
heart of America.
The Reunion Weekend included a reception in one of the
football stadium’s new concourses. It was, quite literally, an open bar the
size of a football field.
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| It is Catholic; I renewed my marriage vows here. |
Consider the scene: strobe lighting, DJs and dance floors at
both entrances, a sea of people drinking heavily. Tables upon tables of free
food and drink. Blue-shirted workers hustle dirty dishes and try to keep the
common areas clean. At one long table, dozens of plastic cups are lined up for
an epic, recently abandoned, game of beer pong.
I am approached by a member of the cleanup crew. He seems
upset, and he thinks — because of my age or sports coat or skin color — that
somehow I am in charge of all this.
“This is not right,” he says to me earnestly, in a thickly
accented voice. “This is a Catholic college.” He pointed to the beer pong table
and to trays of hardly eaten food. “Too much,” he says. “Too much beer.”
He asks me to let the other organizers know his feelings. I
agree to pass his comments along, transcribing his email address from a cracked
phone screen.
I consider the maids and janitors in the dorms; the people
who drove the golf carts and shuttle vans to transport alumni around the
sprawling campus; all the workers at the two large dining halls; the gardening,
maintenance and construction crews who were working in the hot sun that day;
the salespeople at the bookstore; the ushers at the arts center; the grounds
crew personnel at the stadium, and the temporary help they employed to stand
guard at all the entrances to the football field.
All these people — the people at the party and the people
cleaning up after the party — are part of what this university has become. It reflects
the heart of America today. We aren’t necessarily divided by purpose, but we
are still divided by race and age and gender and economic means. Even at a
Catholic college.
God
Which brings me to God. Here’s a joke I overheard not once
but twice during my weekend visit regarding Fr. Ted Hesburgh, the university’s legendary
president from 1962 to 1987 who passed away in 2015:
Q. What’s the difference between God and Fr. Ted?
A. God is everywhere. Fr. Ted is everywhere, except Notre
Dame.
Fr. Ted traveled far and wide in pursuit of social justice
missions and the greater glory of Norte Dame. He embodied the bigger-than-life
spirit of Fr. Sorin.
He struck up friendships with popes and presidents.
President Carter appointed him to the U.N. Conference of
Science and Technology, to a commission to create the Holocaust Museum and to
the Select Commssion for Immigration and Refugee Policy Reform.
In return for his services, airplane-loving Fr. Ted asked
for a ride on an SR-71 Blackbird, the fastest plane in the world. When the
president balked at letting a civilian do so, Fr. Ted barked: “I thought you
were Commander-in-Chief!”
That’s how, on the last day of February 1979, Fr. Ted traveled
2,200 miles an hour in a top-secret airplane, setting a still-held record for
the fastest any non-astronaut has ever flown.
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| Fr. Ted's library |
Fr. Ted’s library, with the iconic “Touchdown Jesus” mural,
was the tallest building between Detroit and Chicago when opened in 1963,
filled with more than 3 million books – half of which are now archived in
another location due to the changing nature of libraries.
Fr. Ted insisted on infusing his university with a diversity
of thought despite, or because of, its Catholic roots… which he always took pride
in. To this day, there’s a crucifix in every classroom, although at a lecture I
attended in the new DeBartolo Hall, it seemed to be hidden behind tech
equipment.
His leadership in social justice issues was his ultimate claim
to fame. I was reminded of this while wandering through the former student center,
the one without the rock-climbing wall. The LaFortune building now houses what’s
purported to be the nation’s highest grossing Subway fast-food franchise. In
the center hall between its two wings there’s a large, impressive black-and-white
portrait of Fr. Ted linked arm-in-arm with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. at
a civil rights rally at Soldier Field in Chicago in 1964.
I was in LaFortune accompanied by my wife because I wanted
to show her the offices of The Observer, the daily student newspaper where I
had happily volunteered countless hours as an undergraduate. However, I learned
that The Observer, in a metaphor for print journalism itself these days, now
occupies part of the basement in the South Dining Hall.
I told my wife that Kathy, my best friend on The Observer
staff, used to put laundry soap in the fountain next door to LaFortune. She
just liked to watch the bubbles. But that the fountain no longer exists.
Then I tried to show my wife the hidden sculpture garden
that Kathy and I once stumbled across in a remote area of campus behind Holy
Cross Hall. But the sculpture garden no longer exists either.
Beyond this, around a bend, I assured my wife, there was a
cemetery.
It was getting late, nearly 9 p.m., and our home for the
weekend was a dorm on the other side of campus. The dorm didn’t
exist when I went to school there, and the naming rights were purchased by a
classmate of mine. Still, my wife humored me because, with South Bend on
Eastern time, it seemed to be the land of the midnight sun, and sunset was nowhere
in sight.
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| Fr. Ted's grave |
The cemetery I explored with Kathy decades ago was still
there. It was filled with small cross headstones in neat rows. Years ago, I had
simply assumed they were veterans’ graves.
No, my wife said, reading the markers in 2018, these are
graves of all the brothers and priests who had lived and worked at Notre Dame. They
are buried in chronological order… one right after the other, with no marker
more distinct than the next, speaking to the perspective of those who offered
their lives to be part of the Congregation of the Holy Cross.
That made it was easy for us to find Fr. Ted Hesburgh’s
grave. It was here, in a remote Indiana cemetery, marked with the same stone as
all his brothers.
Everyone buried there had done his part, lived and died, to
the best of his talents, for a higher purpose than individual glory.
Fr. Ted was bigger than life… just like his legacy, the
Notre Dame campus, still is today. But the message I learned in my time travel
to this small cemetery after so many years is that no one is bigger than death.
No person is more important than another; everyone contributes to everything.
God, I believe, is the only judge of our lives. Only the passage
of time reveals the true import our efforts. Our biggest heroes are buried in
the most modest graves.
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| Dad's grave |
