Former Notre Dame linebacker Manti Te’o visited campus a little over a week ago to address the students of the class of 2016, my class, all of whom were freshmen during his senior season. In his speech, he articulated his frustration with the passage of time: “You spend four years here at Notre Dame trying to get out of college,” he said,” and you spend the rest of your life trying to get back.”

As a sentimental person, given easily to nostalgia, I understand what Te’o was getting at and am tempted to agree with him. I become misty-eyed nearly every day as graduation approaches—as I go to my last Mass in the Basilica of the Sacred Heart, as I share final meals with some of my professors or underclassmen friends, as I attend my last classes, as I think about living far away from the people I love.

But, considering Te’o’s point more carefully, I think he was actually wrong. If we spend the rest of our lives trying to get back to Notre Dame—or, more broadly, trying to get back to any past period of life—we are viewing our past from the wrong perspective.

There is, of course, the stale point that we must appreciate the present moment because it’s all we’re given. Though this is certainly true, and important to remember, my point goes deeper than the need to make the most of our God-given time.

In looking back at the past, especially as we move forward to a new stage of life, it is essential that we don’t reflect with despondency or sorrow. There is, to be sure, a sense of nostalgia present in reflection, nostalgia coming from the Greek words nostos and algos and meaning “a pain at returning home.”

This nostalgia is natural and proper, but we must train ourselves to experience such melancholy in the context of our own story—and the story of the world—as a play that is always unfolding. Our individual journey is but a small part of Christian history, and when we feel pain at a loss of the past, we should remember that new stages of life give us the chance to fulfill God’s will in a new way.

This is not to say that we should never reflect on the past or should even callously forget it in favor of fixing our eyes on the future. But when we do reminisce, it must always be with a sense of lachrymal joy, one that recognizes and even relishes the pangs of sadness as a product of having loved deeply the past that has made us who we are today.

In his memoir A Severe Mercy, Sheldon Vanauken includes much of his correspondence with C. S. Lewis.  One letter from Lewis to Vanauken notes the human aversion to time:


Notice how we are perpetually surprised at Time. ('How time flies! Fancy John being grown-up & married! I can hardly believe it!') In heaven’s name, why? Unless, indeed, there is something in us which is not temporal.

Near the end of the book, Vanauken tells the reader that “the longing for eternity is built-in to us all.” And, later:
If we complain of time and take such joy in the seemingly timeless moment, what does that suggest? ...we have not been or will not always be purely temporal creatures. It suggests that we were created for eternity. Not only are we harried by time, we seem unable, despite a thousand generations, even to get used to it. We are always amazed at it—how fast it goes, how slowly it goes, how much of it is gone. Where, we cry, has the time gone? We aren’t adapted to it, not at home in it. If that is so, it may appear as a proof, or at least a powerful suggestion, that eternity exists and is our home.

In light of this understanding, we are called to view with joy the passage of time, for everything has its season, and each new phase of life brings with it unique blessings. And, always, we must remember that our time on Earth exists so that we may have the chance to reach eternity.