A reunion with myself

By Michael Patrick O’Brien–

A mere 35 years ago I graduated from college. I could not attend my class reunion recently at the wonderful University of Notre Dame, and so I had a reunion with myself. Perhaps aware that someday I might need them to remember what I once had learned, and nerd man that I am, I had saved all my old college notebooks and tests and papers. During the time of the reunion, I pulled them out of storage and read through them again. To make it seem like a real reunion, I had Jack Daniels close by.

STEM (Science, technology, engineering, and math) is big today, but engineering and technology courses were not a major part of the ND College of Arts and Letters curriculum in the early 1980s, so I have nothing to report there. Instead, I reviewed my old Calculus tests (everyone enrolled had to take some math). My math professor was very nice, but sometimes it seemed like his lips were not in sync with the actual words he was saying. Classes with him often were like watching old dubbed Japanese Godzilla movies. I did fine in the class back then, and so I overconfidently tried to do a few of the test problems today. Turns out I am the one out of sync…I could not do any of them!

ND offered a science course for non-STEM folks like me, called “Unified Science.” We covered physics, chemistry, biology, earth science, and introduction to thoracic surgery in one action-packed year. I think I provided a few good laughs to the test graders, who likely were seniors and real scientists. Answering one question on chemistry, I apparently implied that under certain circumstances rain water could become sulfuric acid once it hit the ground. The test grader put a smiley face by my answer and noted how this could be bad for our shoes and feet.

All Notre Dame Freshmen were required to take a philosophy course. I found my old term paper written about a book called Leisure, the Basis of Culture by Josef Pieper. Essentially, Pieper said that culture is based on our ability to take time to step back, think, and create. Despite a lot of coffee, I did feel chill, and quite relaxed, on the morning when I wrote this blog post. Feel free to use it as a test of Pieper’s theory on how well we create culture.

I obtained my bachelor’s degree in Government, with a second major in Theology. Classmates often asked me why I combined the two subjects, but when I responded that I grew up in Utah, they nodded with sudden understanding. The next two questions typically were: “Can you really float in the Great Salt Lake?” and “Do you know Donny and Marie?”

I found notebooks full of interesting tidbits on the American Presidency (but no mention of fake news), political theory, the regulatory state, and how Congress worked, because, apparently, it actually did work back then. One of my old tests from my “Soviet Foreign Policy” class was very useful when my wife Vicki asked for some background details after we saw the recent political satire movie, The Death of Stalin. I held forth for several minutes on Molotov, Malenkov, and secret police man Lavrenty Beria. (By the way, the movie was well-received at the 2017 Toronto International Film Festival but, surprisingly, was banned in Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan.)

The range of the theology papers I wrote also was fascinating. In just a few years I managed to compare Aquinas and Augustine, analyze Jeremiah’s Old Testament temple sermon, delve into the apocalyptic mind, reconstruct and tour Herod’s temple, distinguish between the children of light and the children of darkness, and explain how early Christian thinking and interpretation of signs had to evolve when the second coming of Christ did not arrive as quickly as anticipated. It’s all great stuff, but some of it has been tough to fit into cocktail party conversations: “Well Jim, now that you mention the Parousia…”

I also had a full year of a class called “Church Evolution,” almost two thousand years of church history packed into just eight months. Each week we read a new book and wrote a paper about it. I think I can use many of these works in future Boy Monk blog posts. Stay tuned for upcoming articles about: the third century theologian Hippolytus, the love affair between Peter Abelard and Héloïse d’Argenteuil, how Thomas Becket eventually understood the (very sharp) point of his friendship with King Henry II, the mysticism of Julian of Norwich, the ten colloquies of Erasmus, and demonic possession in seventeenth-century France as described in Aldous Huxley’s The Devils of Loudon.

Just a few years before I started college, Joni Mitchell wrote her famous song “Big Yellow Taxi” with its well-known line of lyrical poetry, “Don’t it always seem to go, that you don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone.” I hummed the tune during my recent reunion with myself, fondly recalling the four years of my life 35 years ago─a time I probably took for granted─when my only responsibilities were to read, write, think, learn, and spend some time with some amazing people who were doing the same thing.

The reunion with myself ended with a much-anticipated keynote speaker…me. He (I) explained, “The real classes we took at Notre Dame were not as we thought. We actually were enrolled in programs like: (1) Reading More 101, (2) Writing Thoughtfully, (3) Thinking Clearly, and (4) Living Humanely. Our time beneath the Golden Dome was a success, for we have used these skills over an entire lifetime.”

He (I) was right. And so with thanks to those who gave me the opportunity─family, teachers, school─and thinking fondly of those with whom I shared this wonderful experience, I concluded the reunion with myself by reaching for my glass of Jack and toasting the members of Notre Dame’s Class of 1983.