Weekly

By Anastasia Tejeda

I loveee people watching (I am incapable of studying at the Morris Inn for this reason) and ever since I met the Lord I’ve been so struck by His love for every single one of the thousands of people I’ve ever passed by in my life. Yesterday while tailgating I was brought to tears watching all of the many people around me. The desire and accompaniment that the Lord has shown me He also felt (in the most perfectly intentional and personal way!) for every single one of them.

When you ask for Christ’s heart it changes your own. It can be filled with joy by the smallest beauty. It can be broken but the most trivial hurt. It can be set on fire by the most ordinary glory - basically, go read Acts. There’s a sensitivity and externality that makes you capable of giving and loving in a way that only He can. Because that’s exactly what He’s done. He’s given us the keys to His heart and He wants nothing more than for you to unlock it so you can just be by Him.

Jesus, this week give us Your heart that loves; be so captivated by us that we can be free to invite every person we know into what it’s like to live with You!!

By Josh Weimer

As I was thinking about this reflection for Unify, my heart was drawn to what Unify is all about: unity! While this beautiful group aims to bring Catholics together in worship and community, another aspect of unity within the Christian life is a union between our own will and the Lord’s will. We were all made to be in relationship with Christ, and He desires us to be united with Him. This not only manifests itself in our everyday practices, habits, and prayer life but also in our interior relationship with Him, especially regarding our trust in Him. 

I believe this idea of unity between wills is rooted in trust and surrender. As we seek to conform our lives to Christ, we must radically trust in Him and become totally dependent on Him. The first step in uniting our will to the Lord’s will is acknowledging that His will is fully good. God’s plan is far more interesting and beautiful than we could ever imagine or plan for ourselves. So, we must trust that placing total dependence on Him will not leave us more destitute but rather free us to live and love more authentically. From this trusting dependence on Him, we must be willing to surrender our own wants and desires. Now, these can be very good and virtuous, and it is important to understand and pursue those things which our heart desires. However, in discerning the Lord’s will for us, we must be willing to surrender our own wants. By this surrender, we place our very beings in His hands, entrusting our lives to Him. Through this, we can work towards unifying our wants and desires with the Lord’s will.

Our loving Mother, Mary, is a perfect model for what it means to unite one’s will to the Father’s will. She lived out the fullness of this unity of wills by humbling herself in her prayer. So, in the beautiful words of Mary, let us pray, “Let it be done to me according to Your word.” By these words, we can express our deep desire for a union between our wills and the Lord’s. In the most honest sense, we can place our very desire for a conforming of wills into the trusting hands of our Lord.

So, as we begin this week, let us ask the Lord for the grace of trusting dependence and total surrender, knowing that He, alone, is enough and can fully satisfy us. Let us seek to discern the Lord’s will and work to unite our everyday wants and deepest desires with those of our Lord.

Jesus, meek and humble of heart, make our hearts like unto Thine!

By Mia Solorsano

In the Gospel reading for today, a deaf man's ears are told to “Be Opened”. It is that simple, yet it may sometimes seem so hard to simply be open. Mary exemplifies this simplicity in the best possible way. When the Angel Gabriel came to Mary, she was open to God's will for her and simply said yes. No questions, no doubts, no reservations but a simple "Yes" to God, for she was the handmaid of the Lord. She trusted the Lord with her life and was open to His will for her. We should be open to the Holy Spirit to allow God to transform our lives the way God transformed Mary’s since the day of her birth. 

Today is the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary which the church has celebrated for several centuries. Mary has always been such an important part of our faith because of her "Fiat" to the Lord. She is an example of both how to love God and how to trust His will.

A few years ago, I did my Marian consecration for the first time and after several years now I have contemplated the beauty of the Virgin Mary and why we recognize her birthday in the Church. I have come to understand that children are a gift from God and they show the perfection of love between two individuals. This love is a small glimpse into the love the Lord has for all of us. Mary is this glimpse of love, this foreshadowing of love, this perfect example of how to love fully and wholeheartedly. So why would we not celebrate her birthday like we do our own?

By Owen Dorweiler

I was going through a very dark season of my life the summer before my senior year of high school. I remember sitting on the left side of the chapel at a retreat, staring at the tabernacle, numbly asking God, “Where are You? Where have You been while I’m dealing with this, Lord?” Over the two years prior, my struggle with habitual sin had only gotten worse. My prayer life was in shambles. I was barely going through the motions of my faith. I served Mass weekly, had theological arguments with friends at school, and convinced all the people around me that I was indeed that “perfect Catholic kid”... but deep down I was empty, and questioning everything. I was a failure, I had betrayed God! How could He love me after I messed it all up, over and over again? Then, in that quiet, dimly-lit chapel, He broke through every wall I had put up and revealed the extent of His love for me, despite all my brokenness and sin – and that night He changed my life forever.

This is one of the things I love about our Lord most. When Jesus breaks into our lives, He changes us completely just by reminding us of who He is: our Savior, the One whose love is so overwhelmingly relentless that even St. Paul fails to capture its wholeness in Romans 8: “For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor present things, nor future things, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” Thank You for Your love, Jesus. I don't deserve it, yet You give it to me anyway.

That day set in motion in me a hunger for the world to know Jesus. It gave me newfound compassion for the people searching in all the wrong places, the people who think they’re too far gone for the Lord to love them, like I did. I’ve become a firm believer that if we let the Lord reach others through us, the conversion will follow. It’s not always our place to directly call others to repentance, but it is always our place – in fact, our moral obligation – to show them the love of the Lord. He will take care of the rest, because an encounter with Jesus requires a response and a conversion. God, work through us so that when people encounter us, they encounter you.

I started Unify last fall in an attempt to introduce this campus to Jesus through the fullness of our Catholic faith. What a privilege that we get to live on a campus with 167 Masses and over 50 hours of adoration every week; how blessed we are that we can walk into any building, dorm or academic, and visit Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament; how wonderful it is that we are all trying to seek holiness together. But how sad it would be if we never told anyone. How heartbreaking it would be if we missed an opportunity for evangelization on a campus like ours. How tragic it would be if the people around us never knew Jesus because we didn’t care enough to tell them.

The vision for Unify was never to just be a website; the end goal is a group of students passionately in love with Jesus, who want to bring others to Him like the men in Luke 5 who lowered their paralyzed friend through the roof and placing them at the feet of the Lord. To do this, we must be okay with being uncomfortable. We have to be at peace with the reality that when we stand up for the Lord, friends might turn their back on us – but that just means that we must pursue them all the more.

I'm confident that this year, a Catholic revival could begin. The first year class wants to lead others to Christ, and it fills me with so much joy. Let's start by first surrendering ourselves to the Lord with the words of St. Ignatius:

Take, Lord, and receive all my liberty,

My memory, my understanding, and my whole will.

All that I am and all that I possess, You have given me.

To You, O Lord, I return it.

Give me only Your love and Your grace,

With these I will be rich enough,

And will desire nothing more. Amen.

By Elliott Kirwan

Now that the semester has come to an end, it is natural to feel a bittersweet mix of nostalgia for past fun with friends and excitement for summer ahead. With summer comes great weather, warm sunshine, and fun times, like cheerful hours at the beach or a pleasant hike in the mountains. The splendor of creation is the presence of God around us.

I encourage you to be attentive to the beauty of the world this summer. For me, nature reminds me of my smallness, calling me outside of myself to worship. Let the setting sun and the gentle breeze be reminders of the love of the triune God who holds us in each moment.

This time of transition is a great opportunity to reflect on the past semester and prepare for the opportunities for growth in faith during the summer. How will you deepen your relationship with Jesus this summer? When can you set aside time for prayer each day? One suggestion is to wake up 15 minutes earlier to begin the day with prayer. Let that time align your heart with the will of God and ask him to guide your day for his glory.

Safe travels home and have a wonderful summer. God bless you!

By Anonymous

Because Unify catalogues the hundreds of Holy Masses that occur each week on campus—6:45 AM Crypt, and 10:00 PM Fisher, and everything in between—we can see clearly how richly Notre Dame is blessed with the gift of God dwelling among us. No other university in the United States offers the opportuning to run from South Grab & Go to Flanner between classes while passing God in ten different tabernacles on the route. Clearly getting to Mass to receive the Eucharist is no problem at Notre Dame. But is that enough?

The Catholic Church does teach that the Sacraments give us grace by the very fact that we perform them (ex opere operato). But God is not a vending machine, and we treat Him like one at our peril. This is a relationship, and like any relationship, we need to put hard work into it to flourish. It’s a mistake to think that just showing up at Mass is enough to become holy; we need to be ready to receive God’s grace. To receive the Eucharist we absolutely must not be knowingly in a state of mortal sin. “For anyone who eats and drinks without discerning the body eats and drinks judgment on himself” (1 Cor 11:29). Some theologians have even thought that desecrating Jesus in the Eucharist by receiving in a state of mortal sin is actually a worse sin than murdering Christ in the crucifixion, because now we sin against Christ’s glorified body when he has already loved us so much by dying for us. This is one reason why regular confession and campus resources like AsceND and Magdala Ministries are so important.

But if just showing up isn’t enough to radically pursue God, be transformed by the Eucharist, and become a saint, then what is? Well, look at the lives of the countless saints who succeeded in this goal. The saints loved the Eucharist radically—not just saying that the Eucharist is truly God, but acting like it. If the President or the Pope were coming to a dinner party at our house, how long would we spend painstakingly cleaning, cooking, and preparing for his arrival? And if this is how we treat a mere man, how much more should we prepare to receive God Himself? The saints lay out three steps that we can follow by coming five or ten minutes early before Mass to prepare for the objectively most important thing we will ever do in our lives, being united to our Lord and our Love and our God:

1. Examine. Unless you’re pretty dang fast, there’s no way you can think of all you’ve done in the 0.3 seconds after Father says “Let us call to mind our sins, and so prepare ourselves…”, before he keeps talking. Examine yourself before Mass. How have you sinned and fallen short? How do you need to love better, as God has loved you?

2. Confess. Feel true contrition for your sins which have crucified our Lord, and ask God to forgive you, making use of the Sacrament of Reconciliation if necessary. But never forget that God’s mercy is greater than our sinfulness.

3. Offer. The Second Vatican Council “earnestly desires that Christ's faithful… by offering the Immaculate Victim, not only through the hands of the priest, but also with him, they should also learn to offer themselves” (SC 48). Give yourself to God along with Jesus' self-offering in this Mass. We lift up to God our sacrifices, joys, and sufferings, we give Him ourselves, and through his Passion and Resurrection he transforms us. For God gave us himself in the Eucharist that he may be totally ours and we may be totally his. “My Beloved is mine, and I am His” (Song of Songs 2:16).