By Victoria Fassett
Campus Minister
UNL Newman Center
In late October, we held our annual Eucharistic procession around the UNL Campus. If you were a student walking home from the library that night, you would have seen hundreds of college students bundled up against the recently-turned-cold weather, cupping their hands around their candles to protect them from the wind.
You’d have heard solemn hymns sung, echoing off the overhang that connects the north and south parts of the library, and perhaps a few giggles as people get back on pace with the song. You might even have heard some expletives of confusion shouted from a fraternity house as police lights, intended to direct traffic for our procession across intersections, flashed.
If you ventured closer, you would have been able to catch a glimpse of the Eucharist between the protective shoulders of seminarians going before our Lord, and a crowd of priests and sisters and students following after.
You would have seen the canopy protecting Jesus, its golden silk texture against the night sky, denoting that something different was happening.
Each year we hold this procession, I think, “This night is different from other nights, because this night, Jesus is coming to campus in a different way.”
In the procession each year, Jesus goes before homes and places of study, he goes to places of recreation and drunkenness, places where hearts are broken and trampled and great accomplishments are celebrated. He goes both to the place where hearts are given over to idolatry, and where He is already transforming lives. He comes onto campus in the humility of a simple white host, but as Victor, desiring to win all the hearts on campus for Himself.
The purpose of the annual Eucharistic procession is to make Jesus present on campus in a new way, to pray for everyone who will walk where we walked, and to consecrate this place to our Lord. But in the midst of the flashing red and blue lights, the beautiful singing, the Gospel readings, and the flickering candles, you are not able to see, hear, or even witness with your senses all the mini processions happening in the heart of each person following our Lord that night. In many ways, the procession serves to make the invisible, visible.
What happened that night in the procession happens every day when students leave the chapel and go back out on campus after receiving Jesus at one of the 14 Masses each week. As He dwells within them, they are bringing Him to every corner of campus, to the faithful and indifferent alike.
On that late October night, the 400 students who walked with our Lord through campus are only a fraction of the students who carry him onto campus each week. It’s amazing to witness the faithfulness of the students who find a home at Newman, as well as their desire to help their friends know Jesus. Seventy students are leading their friends in Bible study each week. Countless more are extending invitations to attend Mass, OCIA, community nights, or simply to study at Newman. Each of those encounters – moments of receiving Jesus in Mass and then carrying Him within their hearts to their friends on campus – are radically changing lives and campus.
Please continue to pray, not only for the students who walk through our doors each year, but also those who will come to know Jesus through their friends. We hope the encounters they experience here will only continue to grow and deepen as they graduate and enter into parishes around the diocese.
