I'm back! I know I have been terrible at keeping up with the one blog per week that I usually do, but that will change soon. This post will be about the inspiration behind the most recently posted poem, Miss Thee, Notre Dame.
After coming off a tough loss to Alabama last week, I found myself Domesick once again. I'm not really sure what caused the Domesickness. It may have been Christine leaving after 12 amazing days together or that I've been thrown out of my "routine" of packing up and going back to Saint Mary's and Notre Dame after a break again. I don't know. All I know is that I feel like I don't have certain things at home that I did at Saint Mary's.
I think it all comes down to feeling an insane amount of love for every single aspect of the Saint Mary's/Notre Dame community. My friend Mike put it extremely well. After the loss to Alabama, he said, "There are a million reasons why I love Our Lady's University, and football is only one of them." While Notre Dame football and everything that comes with it is amazing, there are tons of other reasons why I have so much love Notre Dame. I love Saint Mary's too, but I love Notre Dame more. I am not ashamed to say that while I was a student at Saint Mary's, Notre Dame always felt more like home to me than Saint Mary's ever did. I remember the exact moment when this realization came to me. It was the end of the first week of my senior year. After working at my Notre Dame job, I had planned to meet up with some friends for dinner and a play. So after work, I made my way towards the Keough Hall, one of the male dorms at Notre Dame. I was extremely excited and made it there as quickly as I could. The second I stepped into Keough, I got this almost overwhelming feeling of "I'm home." I got this feeling every time I stepped onto Notre Dame's campus or even thought about going over there.
Because Notre Dame always felt like I was at home there, there was rarely ever a time when I felt truly alone. I always knew that there would be someone that I could go to for anything no matter how small it was. It could be anything from needing a ride to the store to emotional support during a time of distress. I don't think I can count the number of times that this happened. I was always happy to see anyone and everyone and I looked forward to meeting up with my friends. Heck, I even looked forward to going over there to study in the library or the student center. Most days, I could be found doing something at Notre Dame whether it was working, studying, or just hanging out.
Another thing I loved and miss about Notre Dame and Saint Mary's is going to mass there. Everything about Notre Dame and Saint Mary's masses is perfection to me. To start off with, it is almost impossible to leave mass feeling like you didn't get anything useful out of the homily. Holy Cross priests make their homilies applicable everyday life and I would be hooked on every word for the entire length of the homily, be it 4 minutes or 24 minutes (although I don't think I encountered a 24-minute-long homily). We also had a beautiful sung version of the Our Father that we prayed when it came time for the Our Father. Saying the Our Father still feels strange to me even after almost a year of doing it. My favorite thing about mass, specifically Notre Dame masses, is that the giving of the Sign of Peace is a hug fest. For me, there is nothing like a hug fest to make you feel loved and happy. One time, the Peace hug fest served as a sedative for me. Essentially what happened was that I started having a minor panic attack during the Our Father and by the time the Peace hug fest was done, I was totally calm and out of my panic attack. Usually it takes me a good 10 minutes to come out of even a minor one.
I guess, in summary, those are the things that I miss most about being in the Notre Dame environment: 1) football fun, 2) the feeling of being at home, 3) knowing I am never truly alone, and 4) all the small things that make a perfect Mass. While I do have items 2 and 3 here at home, they aren't fully solidified for me yet. Perhaps I will make it my goal to solidify those items within the coming months.
