The Mission

Fr. Dennis Gallagher, A.A. '69, Vice President for Mission

Games People Play: Bowling Alone (Spring 2004)

In addition to obligatory weekly chapel attendance, older alumni may remember the stretching and jumping jacks at the beginning of required physical education classes. Such requirements may seem at least quaint, if not oppressive to later generations of students, but they did signal the College’s commitment to an education, which formed both soul and body. The conventional division of college life between curricular and extracurricular activities, while it has been accompanied by a proliferation of opportunities in both areas, arguably does not express quite so well the distinctive wholeness of a liberal education.

How many of our alums, I wonder, count participation in a sports team among the most formative elements in their Assumption education? I still recall with pangs of regret the errant pass which led to a heartbreaking defeat in the finals of the intramural playoffs my sophomore year. Where are you, Wally Wondolowski ’69? Jack Bresnahan ’69?

To say this helped prepare me for more important losses in my life totters on the edge of cliché, but cannot simply be dismissed. Where else does one so deeply learn the lessons of working together to accomplish a goal, stretching oneself beyond self-imposed limits, subordinating individual achievement to the common good, and accepting the results with a measure of grace? Athletics at its best is an education to citizenship.

With all that isolates us from one another, there is much at stake here. My first experience of our “bowling alone” culture, long before that term was coined, was a fateful summer day when the neighborhood kids stopped showing up for pick-up baseball games. Where did they go? I never could figure that out, but I do remember some joy passing out of my young boy’s life from that day on. There were other forms of communion still to come—the first experience of getting lost in a book, for example—but to be deprived of the pleasure of passing time in play was itself a prototype of the loneliness that shadows all of our lives.

Catholic liberal education is an education to communion. In moments of discouragement about one or another aspect of our mission, I take heart in seeing a play practice come together, or our chapel choir sing, or a class discussion take wing, or a coach who gets the very best out of his or her players. Besides being fertile ground for friendships, these are all forms of that exodus from self, that lifting up of spirit, that enlargement of mind and heart, which make education such a hopeful enterprise. And then again, there is that lifelong pleasure of getting lost in a book.