Capstone Integration
Moreau FYE
4/29/2022
Prof. Andrew Whittington
			
 My Mission: Growth at Notre Dame and Life

In life, I see the ultimate goal as reaching heaven. If that is not foremost in my mind and actions, I am doing something wrong. Therefore, it is important to consider my relationship with God in all things, and ask myself whether they are bringing me closer to god. As a student, I seek to pursue wisdom. I wish to be able to more clearly identify God, and know better how to seek him through my actions.  I wish to seek what is good, true and beautiful. These things I believe are all identifiable with God. Therefore, by seeking them in my life as a student, I am seeking God. I believe that it is better to learn truth and seek your creator than to pursue worldly ends in studies, and I try to uphold this. I also seek to apply this to everyday life. I want my relationships and interactions with those around me to bring both myself and those I engage with closer to God. By helping others, and allowing them to help me, we can seek God together, rather than alone. This means being willing to be unselfish and caring towards others, recognizing and supporting them through suffering, and being willing to accept their support.

I wrote this mission statement a few weeks ago, and nothing has changed in how I view these words since then. I stand by everything I said then. The point of a mission statement is to put down values that are key to who you are and how you live your life. If I am not sure about them, I cannot be sure of anything. They are my anchor, the core principles that I hold by. Everything I put down in the writing of that orchestrating work that should help me define how I live my life is something I have always believed, believe firmly now, and certainly without a doubt will always believe, I have learned how to use these values at Notre Dame by what I have learned in the weekly Moreau experiences and readings. The learning of Moreau has helped me to grow and envision my role at Notre Dame for the next three years.

In week one, I learned about distilling information. The reading said: “the more facts come streaming in on us, the less time we have to process any one of them.” (week 1). I hope to learn to use this information to figure out even more what is important to me and what is not. In week two, I learned about self knowledge, and I learned that “We are often not taught to recognise the sin in ourselves” (week 2). I hope to be able to see when I fall into sin, and stray from my values, so that I can steer myself back. The next week I learned about complications in life. There, the author talked about how “ Experience has taught me a few things about tying knots.” (week 3) Life is full of complicated situations, and I hope to use my values to resolve or at least come to terms with them.  In another week, the author mentioned, concerning the French revolution, that “Reason alone was to be the new religion.” (week 5) I believe that it is important to keep God first and foremost in my values and my life, and not reduce my values to a subjective standard. In week six one of the authors pursued even more the idea of humility, saying: “the act of thinking about ourselves isn’t necessarily correlated with knowing ourselves.” 6 I want to know myself, my strengths and weaknesses, rather than simply being self centered. I want to know myself, not obsess over what I mistakenly think is me. For this will lead to obsession with others, as the next week describes, the author claiming: “We are the guys who hate those guys” is the self defining assertion of every gang.”  (week 7) When you do not know yourself, you define yourself by things outside you, and this causes tribalism. I hope to avoid this, and be able to flow across ideological borders. This means, again taking a humble attitude, as the mission worker in Chile did. He states “Even though I had landed on their doorstep with plans to be “their helper,” they accompanied me.” (week 9) He needed to really see them as humans to live with them well, and humble himself. I, too, seek to do this. I also seek to be able to move past misunderstandings and life as simply as possible, relying on my values to guide me. This is one challenge Notre Dame’s philosophy poses to me. One Notre Dame affiliate writes “Most whites have a very limited understanding of racism because we have not been trained to think in complex ways about it and because it benefits white dominance not to do so.” (week 10) I am against labeling people as unable to think about things. I believe this leads to elitism and even more tribalism. I believe that if we simplify life and worry about good core principles we can live life best. This openness and simplicity of thought leads to the week 11 topic, where the author gives the definition, “Echo chamber: A social structure from which relevant voices have been actively discredited.” (week 11) This is why I take the classes I take. I try to take classes where I will encounter diverse intellectual thought, with many different inputs, where a truly lively discussion and learning experience can take place.

	I seek to gain divine wisdom and grow in relationship with God at Notre Dame and for the rest of my life. I hope to do this by growing in humility and self knowledge, and knowledge of god and those around me. I hope to have a good impact on the world and ultimately reach God in heaven.