Fr. Andy Downing, SJ

In some people’s imagination, the very air of Notre Dame is Catholic, and though I don’t personally believe in that fact, there is perhaps some reason for believing it.  “Touchdown Jesus” looks down benignly from the side of the university library; his Mother watches over all from the top of the golden dome; and lesser luminaries, such as Fr. Ted Hesburgh and coach Knute Rockne, are cast in bronze and scattered across the campus.  For such people, finding God at a place synonymous with both Catholic education and college football should be as easy as visiting the Lourdes grotto or watching the Irish surge to home victory (albeit a bit more difficult lately) with Mass to follow in the Basilica.  As a Jesuit, and therefore as one who has been taught to seek God in all things, however, I have learned that actually finding God in all things is never quite that simple and that it is a matter of waiting upon God to reveal himself when and where he chooses.  Such has been the case for me, at least, these past three years, as I have taken up my first assignment as a priest to return to school and pursue doctoral studies at Notre Dame.

I was ordained in 2007 and looked forward to continuing my study of theology, which had played a large part in attracting me to the Society in the first place and which had now been given to me as a mission by my superiors.  After the initial excitement of a new place and new people began to fade, however, I soon learned that graduate school was far less about leisurely discussing the big questions of life in cafés over a cup of coffee and far more about frantically making the little deadlines of the program in a windowless room after too many cups of the stuff.  As much as I still loved the subject matter and could see my work as further preparation to serve God and the Church, I realized that reading theology – even beneath the golden dome – is not a sure path to finding God in one’s daily life.  I needed some reminder that God encounters us in the lives of others, and – with the oils still damp from ordination – I needed some reminder of why I had become a priest.

That reminder came when I started helping at the local parish to which the Jesuit community belonged.  In presiding and being present at Sunday Mass, I was welcomed into a community of people who pray, sing, and honestly like being together.  It was in worshiping at this church that I felt my faith refreshed and my hope to find God in all things renewed.  With people, who believe that Christ meets us in the Eucharist, it is easier to believe that the Spirit is truly present, turning our eyes to see God where he chooses to reveal himself.  And so it was for me.  As I got to know the parish, and the parish got to know me, it became easier for me to believe God also desired to be with me, and to show himself to me, in the very people to whom he had led me.  With each person, who came to communion, I could catch a glimpse of the body of Christ, just as surely as Christ is present in the bread and wine.  With hands young and old, callused and smooth, they reach for the one in whom they believe – and in whom they have become members.  Of course, not everyone there is a saint, and there is not a single person who doesn’t bring a mix of trust and doubt, attentiveness and distraction, to their celebration on Sundays.  Yet each one appears to me to be a member of the same body all the same.  I have grown more and more confident in the fact that I had little if anything to do with this new way of seeing what goes on at the heart of the Mass.  I think instead that it is God’s way of turning my eyes away from the places I would like to find him, in mastering the thoughts of theologians and the movements of my own heart, and of turning my eyes to the place where he wants me to find him.  No doubt God may be found in reading and in praying, but for now at least God seems to want me to find him in the people he calls his own, which I suppose is another way of saying that God wants me to find him as his priest.