Well, I'm back from our football weekend at Notre Dame. We had a great time. No miracles, other than the game score (59-33!) Dave says it was the highest score that ND has had in their house...so some kind of record anyway. It was in the 80's and gorgeous all weekend. And the fall colors were in full bloom! My mom and daughter both had a great time, we spent a lot of time at the Basilica and the Grotto, especially on Sunday. We always nab one of the Basilica guides and get an official tour, and every time we learn something we didn’t know before. So many just browse around and come and go, and never hear of all the richness within the beautiful church, about the Carmelite Nuns in Spain who made the stained glass, about the stories each pane tells, about the priest buried in a chapel room in the back of the church and another one in its crypt, about how Fr. Sorin managed to get a 3 ton marble sculpture of the death of Jesus over here from Europe, about the over 250 saints' relics displayed in another chapel, including every apostle, the Virgin Mary, and even St. Anne and St. Joachim. And all the art!!! so many stories and so much history. As I have said before, the game is fun, but I go there for the pilgrimage - to pray, and to light a candle at the Grotto, to drink from the water fountain there - which has a story too, not well known...while they were digging out the place for the Lourdes replica grotto, what do you think happened? You guessed it, a spring popped up! Well, the priest in charge said, "No way is this college going to be a place where lines of people are coming every day for healing," so instead they made it into a drinking fountain and kept it quiet. I found it in a book about Notre Dame that is not a mainstream text. Maybe its a legend, who knows, but still I love to drink from the fountain and think about it. Its the only place I know of on campus that has a public drinking fountain, and it is running constantly all summer with 4 spigots, immediately to the left of the grotto. Sitting next to us were a couple of young guys. When we started talking to them, we found out they were football players from Germany! Not Soccer either, American Football! They were seeing the sights of America, but the pinnacle of their trip was this football game at Notre Dame! At our table at the luncheon was a slightly famous Doctor of Nuclear Science, and it so happened that while my husband was in the Air Force many years ago, they worked at the same Nuclear facility in Albuquerque NM at the same time! Every time we go to Notre Dame we meet interesting people, and/or something interesting happens. In two weeks my husband goes back with his Father, to take him to what will probably be his last football game, as he is really getting up in years and can’t get around well anymore. We are renting him an electric scooter for the weekend, in fact (to his protest, but finally he agreed he needed it). It was he who took my husband to his first game back in the 70’s when Joe Montana was in college there. What goes around comes around. This weekend we are off for a one-day event in Elk Grove IL with Matthew Kelly. We have been quiet “groupies” of his for some time now, but haven’t seen him for quite a while. So that will be great for us as well. His new Passion and Purpose event. I feel like I need a kick in the you-know-where to get my faith moving forward again, and Matthew is just the guy to do it!
