Live from los EEUU

So I was nervous about returning to ND from Chile. As I discovered freshman year as I tried to digest my summer in Nicaragua as I adjusted to life in the veritable paradise of Notre Dame du Lac, it's quite a thing to try and reconcile the poverty and classicism and endless adventure and bus rides and lack of personal space and color and winding streets and endless rhythm and endless lines and endless rice and bread and potatoes; with a nation in which everything is clean to the point of surgical, regulated to the point of impersonal, where everyone wears brand-name clothes and says whatever they want to as loud as they want with the security they don't even realize they enjoy and complains about things that don't matter and waits only with the most visible of impatience and talks about convenience, convenience, everything is either convenient or inconvenient, where news is Britney Spears and politics is an inconsequential soap opera; this land of unnecessarily large cars and zealous, almost religious consumerism, bleach-white and beige, grocery stores that always carry exactly what you want and coupons and white twinkling perfectly-spaced Christmas lights.

But I was surprised to realize last weekend that the thing about the so-called "Notre Dame bubble" is that the "real life" from which it supposedly insulates us isn't the problems of the world but rather the sheer, petty ridiculosity of this nation and its quotation-marks culture. With the exception of a wonderful post-mass coffee date with Laura Zaps and Jackie yesterday morning, as well as a conversation in my dad's hospital room with his superintelligent, outspoken Israeli friend Ginya, I'm hard-pressed to find anyone here who really wants to hear about my semester, beyond the backpacking adventure parts. And I don't blame them, but the fact is I was only at ND for a weekend and the questions didn't stop coming about the culture there, the poverty, the social issues, the faith, my faith, my struggles. I've always been so humbled and inspired and impressed with how socially conscious my friends are, how unwilling they are to be content with what they have, embracing as a sort of mission the idea that those to whom much has been given, much will be expected. Whitney, Erin Ramsey, Jess, Laura B, Stew, Reidy, Keane, Booth, everyone wanted to know - and they cared. One of their own spending half a year immersed in the vibrant, turbulent, inspiring, heartbreaking world of Latin America was a matter of consequence to them - suddenly I was a resource and, more than that, one more person who cared about what they cared about, who studied what they studied, who was passionate as they were passionate. I can only thank God for the gift that is this university and for the incredible blessing that was my first weekend back in the States.

"We must be men with hope to bring." -Fr. Moreau. I missed out on The Semester of Basil Moreau, and I'm sure that if I'd been here, I'd have a lot more Moreau quotes stored up in the ol' arsenal, but this one came up in just about every homily I heard during Lent last year, and I love it for the simplicity in the mission it expresses. And I think Notre Dame is just that - hope to bring. Imperfect, self-important, idealistic, just like all of us who fill its halls and dorms, but full, full, bursting with hope.