50 prayers a day will bring Jesus to campus for free

I’ve been pitching in my 50 “e-messages” a day to invite Dave Matthews Band to campus in November. Mine went something like, “You guys will really like SMU, you should come hang out here.” Light. Breezy. Yet, to the point and compelling, at the same time. I hope he takes me up on it and the 1000s of other SMU students who have been issuing similar invitations on a daily basis since last week.

The mobilization for this contest has been impressive.  Thanks to the miracle of Facebook groups and innovative, take-charge students, SMU closed the gap from 100 to 5 in just over a week. It's exciting to feel the school spirit that the effort has sparked, too.  As I fell into a Dave Matthews-inviting zone, clicking away over and over and over again, I began to imagine all of the other people doing the exact same thing around campus. It made me think of the power of simple, repeatable acts. It made me think about mantra-like prayer. It made me think of Father Ted Hesburgh.

Father Ted Hesburgh, a walking legend at Notre Dame and the University’s 25th president, is now 90 years old. He often spoke around campus, recounting tales about marching alongside Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. or about founding the Peace Corp.  For more than 50 years, Father Hesburgh has been an influential figure in U.S. and world affairs. He was an adviser to every U.S. president between 1950 and 1990. His 150 honorary degrees put him in the Guinness Book of World Records. Among other things, he served on the Knight Commission that overhauled college sports and that is now chaired by our own University President, Dr. Gerald Turner. Through it all, Father Ted, as he insisted others call him, claimed that he turned to one simple prayer, over and over again, on all occasions, momentous or mundane: “Come, Holy Spirit”

“Come, Holy Spirit” That’s it, over and over again. “Come, Holy Spirit.” That was his invitation, or better yet, his self-reminder that God was always present and that he only needed to call to mind that Divine Mystery as he went about his daily routine – a daily routine that sometimes included happenings of historical proportions, but mostly was filled by the everyday things each of us knows. "Come, Holy Spirit."

I hope we get Dave Matthews to come play here. I also hope that when the 50 message-a-day madness ends, I can find something more like “Come, Holy Spirit” to say over and over again, like Father Ted, to remind me that, wherever my day takes me, I’m not going it alone. Imagine if we all committed to a common action like that – a simple, repeatable prayer, like “Come, Holy Spirit”. What would happen then?  It might just make a Dave Matthews Band concert on the Boulevard look like a Typical Situation instead of the Best of What’s Around.