The Hawkeye Wave!
Hatred of Notre Dame football and “The Fighting Irish” is a long-lasting family tradition.
Part of our DNA.
Celebrated. Embraced. Preached.
Dating to the day a miscreant fifth grader, who once “flunked Religion” and then became a priest – horror of horrors, despite Sister Marie Anita, I.H.M.’s insistence, unrepentantly refused to stand and participate in a prayer for the South Bend team’s victory over The Miami Hurricanes.
[It was the only time a Flynn kid was not punished more severely at home than he or she could ever be punished by one of the Sisters at Epiphany School or the Marist Brothers at Christopher Columbus High School.]
Downright hatred of ND was so pervasive that the mere appearance of a certain coach on television could elicit from Mrs. Flynn words that… Well, we won’t go there.
Now comes a new tradition. Or value. Or cause for celebration. Perhaps a tear and prayer of gratitude. Please, God, a respite from the cruelty and hatred of post-2016 politics!
Fifteen-hundred miles from Miami, at the end of the first quarter of University of Iowa Hawkeyes home games, 70,000+ men, women and children in the UI Kinnick Stadium – Hawkeyes players, coaches and fans and those of the visiting team stand, face the football-throw-away UI Stead Family Children’s Hospital and wave.
They wave!
It’s the Hawkeye Wave!
To the child-patients and their families watching the game from hospital room windows and the hospital’s floor-to-ceiling glass-enclosed top floor.
And the kids and their families wave back!
Dating to 2017, “the wave is the greatest tradition in college sports,” declares UI vice president for external relations Peter Matthes,
And, like real traditions, the wave has changed and evolved over time.
In 2019, the team added The Kid Captain program – for each home game selecting a former patient with an inspirational story to join the team on the field, receive a commemorative jersey, special recognition from the hospital and team, and other behind-the-scenes activities. Until this year, the Hawkeye Wave was accompanied by country music singer Pat Green’s “Wave on Wave” over the PA system.
Beginning this season, the Kid Captain gets to choose the musical accompaniment for that magic moment when he or she waves – from the field – to kids and parents whose pains and sufferings, joys and hopes, dreams and disappointments he or she knows all to well.
Waving at each other from a few hundred feet away – massively burly football players and tiny chemotherapy patients who sometimes weigh barely more than those players’ shoulder pads and protective gear.
It’s not magical.
It’s miraculous!
So amazingly simple!
A mitzvah!
A simple act of Kindness!
And, like the Hawkeye Wave, to a nation ripped asunder by nightmarish voices shouting “Jews will not replace us” and “stolen elections,” a life – a Jewish life – lived in kindness, integrity and simplicity offers hope.
As for what concerns our relations with our fellow men,
the anguish in our neighbor's soul must break all precept.
All that we do is a means to an end,
but love is an end in itself because God is love.
Edith Stein
The youngest child of a large, observant Jewish family, Edith Stein was born on Yom Kippur 1891 in Breslau, Germany (now Wroclaw, Poland). An outstanding scholar, she enrolled at the University of Gottingen in 1913 with plans to study philosophy. She later admitted, “When I was at school and during my first years at university, I was a radical suffragette. Then I lost interest in the whole issue.”
The onset of World War I and a nursing course interrupted her studies and Stein served as a volunteer Red Cross nurse, first at an Austrian field hospital and then in an infectious diseases hospital. She saw the horrors of war up close - young men dying in the typhus wards and operating theatres. “I no longer have a life of my own,” she realized.
Stein earned her doctoral degree summa cum laude in 1917, after completing her thesis on “The Problem of Empathy” in which she wrote “There have been people who believed that a sudden change had occurred within them and that this was the result of God’s grace.”
For Edith Stein there was no “sudden change,” rather a subtle confluence of simple encounters.
In the Frankfurt, she watched a woman with a shopping basket enter the cathedral and kneel in prayer:
“This was something totally new to me.
In the synagogues and Protestant churches
I had visited people simply went to the services.
Here, however, I saw someone coming straight from the busy marketplace
into this empty church as if she was going to have an intimate conversation.
It was something I never forgot”
A visit with the widow of one of her professors, a woman of faith, was “my first encounter with the Cross and the divine power it imparts to those who bear it.”
The summer of 1921 brought a chance encounter with the autobiography of St. Teresa of Avila. “When I finished the book, I said to myself: This is the truth.” Years later she observed, “My longing for truth was a single prayer.”
Edith Stein was baptized as a Catholic on January 1, 1922 – the Feast of the Circumcision of Jesus:
“I had given up practicing my Jewish religion when I was a
14-year-old girl and did not begin to feel Jewish again
until I had returned to God”
Stein spent the next eleven years teaching – mostly at Catholic institutions - as one of Germany’s and Europe’s most outstanding philosophers, until Hitler’s Aryan Laws made it impossible for her to continue teaching. In 1933,
“I had heard of severe measures against Jews before.
but now it dawned on me that God had laid his hand
heavily upon his people, and that
the destiny of these people would also be mine…
I had become a stranger in the world.”
In 1933, Stein – who “consciously decided” to stop praying as a young woman, former “radical suffragette,” once “purely pragmatic” and outstanding philosopher and academic – entered the Carmelite monastery in Cologne, eventually receiving the name Teresia Benedicta a Cruce – Teresa, Blessed of the Cross, and making her final vows in April 1938. The memorial of this profession carried the words of St. John of the Cross: “Henceforth my only vocation is to love.”
After Kristallnacht – the Night of Broken Glass – November 9-10, 1938, the Carmelites smuggled Edith Stein across the border to their monastery in Echt, the Netherland. On June 9, 1939 she wrote:
“Even now I accept the death that God has prepared for me
in complete submission and with joy … for the salvation
of Germany and the peace of the world.”
On Sunday, August 2, 1942, Gestapo arrested Edith Stein and her sister Rose, who had also converted and was a nun at the Echt monastery. Among the charges: her scholarly support of the Dutch bishops protests of the injustices perpetrated against Dutch Jews. Her last words heard in Echt were to Rose: “Come, we are going for our people.”
Two days later, at the Westerbork Transit Camp, 1,200 Catholics of Jewish heritage – including Trappist monks and Trappistine nuns - were isolated from other prisoners. One Jewish prisoner who survived observed:
“Among the prisoners who were brought in on 5 August,
Sr. Benedicta stood out on account of her great calmness
and composure. The distress in the barracks and the stir caused
by the new arrivals was indescribable.
Sr. Benedicta was just like an angel, going around among the women,
comforting them, helping them, and calming them.
Many of the mothers were near to distraction;
they had not bothered about their children the whole day long,
but just sat brooding in dumb despair.
Sr. Benedicta took care of the little children,
washed and combed them,
looked after their feeding and their other needs.
During the whole of her stay there, she was so busy washing
and cleaning as acts of loving kindness
that everyone was astonished.”
On Friday, August 7, a cargo train of prisoners – many of whom died of suffocation en route – passed through Breslau. Edith Stein was able to pass a simple and straightforward message to her Carmelite sisters: “Tell them I am on my way to the East” – perhaps a simple metaphor for “going to eternity.”
The transport train arrived at Auschwitz at ten o’clock in the evening of August 8. Despite strict orders against any communication between prisoners and their captors, two workers on the platform noticed Edith Stein in her Carmelite habit and commented later that she was the only one who did not appear completely crazed. The following morning guards ordered prisoners to remove their clothing in preparation for “a shower.” Striped of clothing, dignity and their humanity, the prisoners were forced to walk a quarter of a mile to an improvised chamber called the White House. The steel doors were slammed shut and locked and hydrocyanic acid gas was released - suffocated them.
Edith Stein – Sister Teresa, Blessed of the Cross – was just one of 60,330 people – including the young diarist Anne Frank - transported from Westerbork to Auschwitz.
Edith Stein, Sister Teresa, Blessed of the Cross - who “consciously decided” to stop praying as a young woman, former “radical suffragette,” once “purely pragmatic,” philosopher, academic and one of the most important theologians of the Twentieth Century – was canonized – declared a saint and martyr of the Catholic Church - on October 11, 1998.
Almost as if he were anticipating the fractious debates that have torn us apart since 2015 or 2016, General and President Dwight D. Eisenhower cautioned, “I don’t think the United States needs superpatriots. We need patriotism, honestly practiced by all of us, and we don’t need these people that are more patriotic than you or anyone else.”
Edith Stein – Carmelite nun, a Jew, killed because she was a philosopher, a theologian and a Jew – reminds us that, as a Nation and a People, we do not need anyone who shouts “Jews will not replace us” or people who “other” everyone but themselves and those who agree with them.
The next time a hate-promoting politician or anti-just-about-everyone would-be radical rightwing “leader” spouts his or her anti-Semitic vitriol, remember Edith Stein and understand that no one is safe from “Jews will not replace us” and “Go back too your own country” hatred.
And wave.
Goodbye!
It’s time for a new national tradition. A tradition of “great calmness and composure…comforting… helping… and calming…” with “loving kindness.”
Over the next few weeks 70,000+ fans in the University of Iowa Kinnick Stadium will pause for a moment and wave.
A simple act of Kindness!
While we will never pray for a “Fighting Irish” victory over The Miami Hurricanes, we will pray in thanksgiving and gratitude for the Hawkeye Wave and its simple “loving Kindness.”