Happy Birthday: What's Your Word?

Tomorrow, I turn 20. I am currently trying to revel in the meaning of my last 24 hours as a teenager, before plunging into the awkward limbo of no longer being a teen, but not really an adult.

Birthdays are my favorites. It’s probably very self-centered of me, but I love the idea of having a holiday just for you. After spending 364 days thinking of others, you get one day to think of yourself. But more than that, I love having an opportunity to see my favorite people, enjoy tasty foods, and celebrate how wonderful life is. Birthdays are also an important time to reflect on your year and the year to come.

A few weeks ago, I started attending a program called “One Hour a Week.”. Girls from McGlinn meet Sunday afternoons in our Rectress’s apartment to pray and reflect together. I really enjoy the opportunity to take a break from a studying and socializing to go on a one hour “mini-retreat.”

Recently, Sister Mary Lynch has started talking to us about discovering “our word.” It’s the idea that all of us have a word, for the semester, or maybe longer, that we are called to reflect on in our faith life. She insisted that our word find us and not for us to search for it. She and several other girls in our group shared how words have caught them and how they have grown from the experience. Sister Mary talked about how the word “believe” stood out to her in movies and books. Another girl noticed the word “aware” everywhere. One girl said that her word was “grow.” I wondered, what would be mine?

I thought back to the past year. I think my word for at 19, would be “brave.” Between lots of stomachaches and Hail Mary’s, I felt like in the past year God challenged me to be braver than ever before. Some of these moments were small acts of courage- going to serve at jury duty in Downtown Detroit or driving on the highway by myself for the first time. Others were larger in size, such as learning to be comfortable sharing my thoughts (especially on politics and feminism—with links) on this blog and going to France (also link) on my own.

Then I became aware of how I described many things as “happy.” I realized that happy was becoming my go to word to describe my mood (happy or lack of happy), moments in my life, and even colors, foods, or ideas. The more and more I thought about it; the more I realized that my word moving forward must be happy.

As I transition into being 20, I hope to embrace “happy” as my new word. I can’t wait to start looking for it other places in my life and I’m excited to see how God will bring this word into my faith life. I hope to be able to live this year being more jubilant, more alive, and more “happy” than ever before.

Prayer for Peace

“We had a national curfew so everyone knew to be off the streets by 7. We all knew not to go places alone and what places to avoid.” These were the words of my friend Magy when I asked about her summer. While I spent my summer staying out late with friends, her summer was spent in her apartment avoiding the violence that lurked outside. “The sad part was watching and hearing about the burnings of all those buildings, especially churches.”

I met Magy my freshman year of high school. We were both members of our school’s performing arts program and became good friends. We’ve since gone to different colleges, but we still stay in touch and get lunch whenever we are both in town.

Although she has lived in the United States for five years now, Magy grew up in Egypt and returns there every summer to reunite with her family and friends. It’s easy to ignore the violence when you are safe in the United States, but when your friend is in the heart of it, the way you look at the state of crisis changes.

This Wednesday, September 25, is International Peace Day. These silly sounding “holidays” come up all the time. But this time, with Magy’s stories fresh in my mind, I’m forced to think harder about what it means to be a member of this world, a world with a goal of peace, safety, and tranquility.

In accordance with International Peace Day, Pope Francis recently said, “I invite Catholics around the world to join other Christians to continue imploring God to bring the gift of peace to the most tormented places on our planet. May peace, a gift from Jesus, live always in our hearts and sustain the ideas and actions of United Nations leaders and those of all men of good will.”

His call for prayer is a chance for us to focus on and invest our time in praying for peace. It is easy to find something else to do. It is easy to say that between rehearsal and classes and practice and homework that you don’t have time to pray for peace. But here is an occasion to commit to praying for something greater than yourself and your own problems. It is a chance to focus on people far away and problems that are far away, but none the less real. It is a time to pray for young people just like Magy.

“Let us all be committed to efforts for a diplomatic and political solution in the hotbeds of war that are still a cause for concern. My thoughts go out especially to our dear Syrian people, whose human tragedy can only be resolved through dialogue and negotiation, in the respect for justice and the dignity of each person, especially the weakest and the most defenseless,” the pope said.

See, each person in Syria and the Middle East is a Magy. Even if you don’t know them, they are our friends, our family, because they are someone else’s friend and family. As violence and terror continue across the world, we must stand for peace. We must stand for what is right.

So let us follow our Pope’s plee and pray for diplomacies and dignity. Let us take the time that we have and use it to pray for others. Let us pray for no more destruction, for happiness and hope, and, most importantly, for peace.

Music Ministry: Bearing Beams of Love

I spent the first half of my Spring Break touring with my choir, the Celebration Choir[WU1] , and the Notre Dame Handbell Choir. Our trip took us from Bowling Green to Pittsburg to Washington DC and finally Cleveland. We stayed with host families and in sketchy dorms. We sang at masses, performed concerts, and even did mini-shows at several schools. It was a whirlwind trip, with five days consisting of no more than perform, eat, travel, perform, eat, sleep, and repeat. However, by the end of the trip, my idea of music and performance was completely transformed.

As we visited each location, I began to realize how important music was as a ministry. Some parishes are lucky enough to have large congregations, with lots of talented musicians, but many are smaller and aren’t exposed to choirs, even small choirs like mine. In many places we stopped, the congregations were truly excited by our presence. Our concerts were packed with people who were really eager to hear our music and let it touch them.

            

Our concerts were also part prayer service, as we included excerpts from Pope Francis’s Evangelii Gaudium. The place where the Pope’s reflections and our music met is where I felt like our ministry really began. We allowed our audience to enter into a place of not just music, but prayer and reflection. I realized that in a unique way, we were really ministering to them. We were giving them an opportunity to grow closer to God.

            

I also realized that part of our ministry was to each member of the choir. I spent every night on tour staying up late talking to whoever was my roommate (it changed each night). Our exchanges ranged from our relationships with God to boys to how we planned to spend our summer. Sharing our stories and struggles is part of God’s constant call to community. God is always leading us to the people we need to encounter at the precise right moment.

            

I realize now that the performing arts have a capacity to bring joy and grace into people’s lives. I see that each time our choir goes to sing, we are taking part in a real mission. One of my favorite songs we sang on tour was called, “Partners for the Mission.” It pulls from the William Blake quote, “And we are put on earth a little space, that we may learn to bear the beams of love.” I thought that image spoke so clearly to what music ministry means, radiating God’s love to all who hear us.

Diversity

Being white, middle class, and Catholic, I fit the Notre Dame stereotype to a T. I love being in college with people from different backgrounds and I really enjoy hearing about different cultures, heritages, and traditions, yet I’ve never considered myself a very “diverse” person.

Recently, however, I was at Celebration Choir rehearsal and we pulled out a song we had sung the year before with the Voices of Faith Gospel Choir as part of the Interfaith Prayer Service. Part of the song was in Swahili and I realized how excited I was to sing it again. As I continued singing and thinking about the delight this song has brought me, I realized that so many parts of my spiritual life were products of a diverse community.

Meditation and Yoga come from Buddhist and Hindu traditions, yet it provides me richness in my prayer life. Meditation helps me clear my mind and focus on God. I often like to use the mantra “Be still, and know that I am God.” Yoga for me is an extension of my meditation practice. It allows me to cherish and appreciate the body that God gave me.

The music from Africa and the African-American tradition really excites me about my faith and my love for the Lord. Last year I had a great opportunity to sing in the Concert for the Missions. I loved learning and performing our repertoire because it was such a joyful expression of God’s love for us and our love for God.

One of my favorite ways to celebrate mass is with the French speaking community at Notre Dame. As a French major, it’s a really unique experience to have monthly mass with my classmates, professors, and members of the community. It continues to remind me the way our faith goes beyond language barriers and it’s never ending way to bringing people together.

The America’s brings us many beautiful role models of faith. They give us people who stand up for what is right, like Archbishop Oscar Romero and Jean Donovan. At my mom’s work, the Solanus Casey Center in Detroit, MI, there are two life size statues of them. Whenever I visit there, I am reminded of our immense responsibility to live lives that serve others and work for justice.

The thing about the church is that it is catholic. The small “c” means universal. Despite the fact that Catholicism and Christianity are spread out and practiced throughout the world, we are brought together by the same God and the same faith. As we are drawn together, we become one body, one church. “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus,” says Galatians 3:28.

In the end, it doesn’t matter where you are from- we are all part of our own rich traditions and we partake in a myriad of others. But most importantly, we are beyond that, we are part of a nation like no other, that of Christ.

Want to take part in some of the activities mentioned in this article? Notre Dame Campus Ministry offers Zen Meditation every Thursday at 5:15 p.m. the CoMo first floor Meditation room and the Voices of Faith Gospel Choir rehearses every Friday from 7 to 9 p.m. in Crowley Hall. The Concert of the Missions will take place on Friday, November 1^st and will feature the Folk Choir. For information on French Mass, contact the Cercle Francais: http://www3.nd.edu/~lecercle/

Call to Community

“I don’t know a perfect person. I only know flawed people who are still worth loving.”

― John Green

It was only a year ago that I was sitting in the pew of the Basilica of the Sacred Heart beside other freshman as we listened to the wise upperclassmen talk about their college experience and what awaited us. Moments later, guided by our candles we would gather to pray together at the grotto, like freshmen grotto trip tradition holds. Here we were in this ensemble, this new community- yet I didn’t feel like I was connected. It was this feeling that haunted my first couple weeks at Notre Dame.

In my head, I had this image of what a Notre Dame person was. This person was organized, well dressed, and responsible. They were overly involved in athletics, performing arts, and service. They were engaging and intelligent. Although I didn’t consider myself “good enough” to fit the Notre Dame mold, I had expected my classmates be perfect models of this Notre Dame ideal.

Soon after my arrival, I realized that my new floor mates and soon to be friends were not perfect robots, but real people. They had struggles- with classes, with their families, with finances, and their relationships. At first I was thrown. I had a hard time reconciling these human people with my image who I had thought my college friends would be. I spent the first few weeks feeling oddly disconnected.

Over time, I began to realize it that was through these flaws that the connections were made. It was hugging my friends as they sobbed or laughing at them when they did something ridiculous, where our connections were fostered. Our friendships were made while listening to their fears and staying up late sharing secrets. The more I began to know my friends, the more of a community we made.

God has given us all a beautiful call to community. We crave friendship and connections. But the call to community is also a call to honesty. We come before each other and before God as real people, not superficial models of overachieving college students.

My rectress recently reminded us during a hall meeting this week, that the foundations of building a community rest in Micah 6:8- “He has told you, O man, what is good; And what does the LORD require of you But to do justice, to love kindness, And to walk humbly with your God.”

In our call to community, God isn’t asking us to be perfect Notre Dame students. He is only asking us to do what is right, to love each other as humans, and to follow our God. We all come as we are and love each for who we are. These words are some of my favorite and are reflected in one of my favorite church songs “We are Called” by David Haas (note the title of this blog… and my about page…). Our call to community is the same as our call to discipleship. After all, look at Jesus. He didn’t surround himself with saints and good men. He was with tax collectors and fishermen. The man he chose to carry on after him, denounced him three times. Jesus did not surround himself with perfect disciples, but real people.

In learning this, I realized that I didn’t have to hold myself to high standards of being that perfect Notre Dame student, but only to being my self- my beautifully flawed self. And I let my friends hug me as I cried and I told them my secrets and my worries- and in doing so I made the final link the connection- myself.