What a fantastic reunion! We start with this very special invocation written by Br. Leo Ryan and delivered on his behalf by Mark Nishan at our class dinner in the DeBartolo Performing Arts Center on Saturday evening, June 4th:
Remarks for the Concluding Banquet, Saturday June 4, 2010
Praise the Lord, bless the benevolence of our Lady, Notre Dame, and thank the University for this wonderful Reunion.
Reunion 2011 has been about being ”Forever Young” and” Forever Note Dame” Thank you Planning Committees.
Reunions remember, recall, and reconnect us with the “Forever Young Days” of enthusiasm, energy and engagement spent here at Notre Dame where the spirit of “Forever Young” met the challenges of maturing adulthood molded into a fierce loyalty to “Forever Notre Dame”
Notre Dame/Forever Young was about dreams, hopes, ambitions, ideas, ideals, plans and visions. This Reunion is about “forever” remembering , reconnecting and reliving. Reunion is about “Forever Young” stories - happy, comic, sad and/or serious – expanded, embellished, extended, Reunion is about our oral campus history remembered, retold, revised, rewritten and relived. Reunion is about romances, rejection, rebounding, recovering and sometimes reconnecting.
Notre Dame/Forever Young is about dreams, decisions, discovery and destinations ahead. About our hopes and happiness. Notre Dame/Forever Young is about the Dome, dorms, classes, majors/degrees, the Grotto, football weekends, book store basketball, field house, tail gates and partying. But Notre Dame/Forever Young is also about commitments, honor, truth, rights and obligations, duties and responsibilities.
We came here to Reunion 35 without pretense (that was Reunions l0 and 25) but now we come to be none other than who and what we really are. We know God is Eternal, Faith is real, life is challenging and unpredictable and that friendship and loyalty are virtues and of lifetime value.
We leave enriched in memories, renewed in fellowship, recommitted to the understanding that the ideals of “Forever Young” are best preserved by loyalty to the aspirations and to the ideals espoused here under the patronage of Our Lady since the days of Father Sorin. Let’s go and be “Forever Young/Forever Notre Dame.” Thank you.
Reunion Recap Video
We will be updating our class website in the days ahead with more about our 35th Reunion. Check back for more later this week!