Hello St Ann’s! Y’all have been so gracious and welcoming to me in my initial weeks here, so in this first article I’d like to share a bit of my story of how I came to be where I am now, and some of the graces I’ve experienced on this journey.
First, a quick introduction is necessary: I was born in New Jersey- Mom is from New Jersey and Dad is from Brooklyn. Dad’s work took us to Raleigh when I was 3 years old, and I was blessed to grow up there and call Raleigh home. We were a pretty normal Catholic family- we went to Mass each Sunday, we prayed before meals, and mom and dad sent us to Catholic grade school. It wasn’t until high school, however, that I began to take my faith seriously for the first time and first thought of becoming a priest. That initial discernment in my high school years was a rollercoaster experience with many highs and lows. The decision to trust God and enter the seminary wouldn’t come until later on, in my freshman year of college, when God helped me to see this calling not as an impossibly lofty burden but as a gift from my Father in Heaven who loves me. But more on that another time…
So after one year at Roanoke College, I decided to withdraw and enter seminary at age 19. This means that I have had the unique experience of coming of age in the context and environment of seminary formation, which has been a very interesting adventure to say the least. I’d like to reflect a little bit about seminary life and my journey thus far.
There is such mystery surrounding seminary formation. I myself had no idea of how the process worked, or even what a seminarian was, until I actually started the process. Do we just sit in cells and pray all day? Are we formed by primitive irrational thinking and told to just “pray away” our problems? What do y’all do all day? Why is the process so long? These are some questions people ask, which is why I am convinced that we need to proclaim the good news of seminary formation. Amazing work is being done, and it’s worth knowing about. It’s worth my sharing with y’all. It’s worth getting excited about.
This “good news” of seminary formation is in my opinion due in large part to John Paul II. In his 1992 Post Synodal Exhortation Pastores Dabo Vobis, he set the course for priestly formation for the Universal Church in the 21st century. Like most things he did, his vision was infused with his intimate love of Christ and deep understanding of the human person. In fact, John Paul’s insistence on forming the whole human person in priestly formation has been one of the lasting blessings of his pontificate.
Sometimes this notion of “forming the whole person” can be something of pretentious buzz-word thrown around by elite schools in an attempt to sound erudite, but in the unique environment of seminary this is actually done. I’ve experienced it. This is because John Paul’s vision is not just empty semantics- he outlines that Jesus Christ is the meaning of every human person, and that truly becoming yourself cannot happen except in encounter and relationship with Christ. You become who you are made to be when you encounter Christ’s love and then make a total gift of yourself in loving response. Christ gives us his heart; we give Him our hearts. That is the formula. Seminary teaches us to receive Christ’s love (which is extremely simple yet also surprisingly difficult). This is the mantle of love under which we grow to be the men God created us to be. John Paul’s words deserve a lengthy quotation:
Man cannot live without love. He remains a being that is incomprehensible for himself, his life is senseless, if love is not revealed to him, if he does not encounter love, if he does not experience it and make it his own, if he does not participate intimately in it. This, as has already been said, is why Christ the Redeemer "fully reveals man to himself". If we may use the expression, this is the human dimension of the mystery of the Redemption. In this dimension man finds again the greatness, dignity and value that belong to his humanity...The man who wishes to understand himself thoroughly-and not just in accordance with immediate, partial, often superficial, and even illusory standards and measures of his being-he must with his unrest, uncertainty and even his weakness and sinfulness, with his life and death, draw near to Christ. He must, so to speak, enter into him with all his own self, he must "appropriate" and assimilate the whole of the reality of the Incarnation and Redemption in order to find himself. If this profound process takes place within him, he then bears fruit not only of adoration of God but also of deep wonder at himself. How precious must man be in the eyes of the Creator, if he "gained so great a Redeemer", and if God "gave his only Son "in order that man "should not perish but have eternal life"
This redeeming embrace with the person of Christ is what seminary formation is all about. That is how the whole person is formed, by being configured to the Divine person that is the Son of God. Love and relationship is thus the beginning and the end of our formation. In fact, the rest of this article will be my expressing how my personal experience in the seminary is encapsulated in the above quotation…
Relationship with Christ is the heart of our formation. More practically, there are four pillars: Human, Spiritual, Intellectual, and Pastoral. It may surprise you that John Paul identifies human formation (perhaps the most nebulous of the four) as the foundation of the other three. Things like physical exercise, mental health, friendships and relationships, life-giving hobbies, diet, (all the things that make us human), fall under this human dimension which JPII identifies as the basis of all priestly formation.
I think this dispels many fears and misconceptions about priestly formation- All the spiritual growth and pastoral formation happens within the context of embracing our humanity, never over and against it. Everything we do at seminary is aimed at making us happy, healthy, and well-integrated men of love and service. Along with our extensive intellectual and spiritual training we have workshops and training in a wide breadth of things from the practical to the mystical and everything in between: things like time management, addictions, relationships in the workplace, healing from wounds, being in dysfunctional families, leadership, emotional intelligence, healthy expression of chastity, administrative skills, all this and much more is part of our formation.
In the seminary there is a whole team of priests whose job is to live with us and accompany us in different ways in this journey. We also get two priests assigned to work with us in a one-on-one basis. We get a spiritual director, a priest we meet with regularly in a confidential capacity to serve as our guide in our spiritual lives. We also get a formation advisor- another priest to be a father to us in every other facet of life.
I was talking with a buddy of mine who was recently ordained. He said: “you know, short of the tutelage the 12 apostles received from the Lord himself, this is probably the best that priestly formation has been in the church’s history” It’s a bold claim, but I think he’s right.
Seminary is an intense, demanding, and challenging environment. We live by a horarium. We have communal prayer each day, rigorous classwork with plenty of reading and papers to write, and we need to make time for personal prayer and holy hours as well as recreation. Our schedules and our lives are not our own, reinforcing the fact that our lives are not our own. We live in community and take that seriously. Presence at meals is required, we are not free to come and go as we please. As we discern this calling, the Church also closely discerns us, examining the gifts, strengths, weaknesses, personalities of each man that seminary formation brings out. Growth in virtue and configuration to Christ is not easy nor is it always fun. Like the vocation to marriage, many little deaths are involved daily.
Yet with this commitment to community and this atmosphere of formation comes some of the best benefits of seminary: the brotherhood and camaraderie. Pickup soccer games, fun around the bonfire, deep philosophical conversations in the hallways, brothers praying together in the chapel, brothers playing some hilarious practical jokes on each other, all these are common occurrences at the seminary.
I am often struck by this amazing fact: I can look down my hallway, and every single person in the dorm is a deeply devoted follower of Christ, someone I share a close camaraderie with, someone I can trust and share my heart with. I am surrounded by an elite team of priests who are all praying and walking with me in various ways to achieve this goal, and I have constant access to the Blessed Sacrament. Who else can say that? Where else in our society is there such a rich and holistic program of formation and development?
One particular grace of my journey has been understanding the order of the spiritual life as Relationship, Identity, Mission, (or RIM for short).
Jesus, being the high priest to whom we are configured, is one (literally consubstantial) with the Father. In-relationship-with-The-Father is the mode in which He exists. This relationship is so essential that His very nature is the Son. His mission of redemption flows from this relationship and identity. Recall that in the gospels, Jesus spends 30 years in quiet intimacy with The Father, is confirmed in His identity of beloved Son in His baptism, and only then follows his redemptive mission. Following this order in the seminary, a critical first step is our growing in relationship with God. Simply spending much “simmering” in prayer, in the many hours (and years) spent in the relational presence with Christ in the blessed sacrament, we gradually (sometimes despite our best efforts) learn to grow in this identity as beloved sons. Only then do we begin to focus on mission.
Identity comes from relationship. Identity does not come from what we do, what we are capable of, or even how holy and devout we are. The identity comes from another, it is received. And it is in learning to receive this unearned totally gratuitous love of the Father that we embrace our identity as beloved sons.
No sin or fault or shortcoming can change our identity as beloved sons. Fathers do not love their sons only when they are at their best- the opposite is true. This is the sort of epiphany that fundamentally changed the way I saw myself. When we learn and actually begin believing that we are most loved precisely in all our weaknesses and shortcomings and failures, everything changes. The things that I most like to hide and run from become the very instances that most elicit the Father’s love for me. When you experience love there- at your most broken- everything changes. You are ready for mission.
A holy priest once astutely pointed out:
We are called first to relationship, from which comes our identity, from which comes our mission, but so many do the opposite- so many live MIR. (Mission-identity- relationship) and with disastrous consequences! They take on their mission, and they don’t live up to the demands. Then, from a place of disappointment comes their identity; they experience failure and disappointment, so they begin to identify as a failure and a disappointment. Identifying as a failure, as damaged goods, they conclude that that too is how God must see them; they stray from prayer, get discouraged and grow hopeless, or altogether give up. They cease to be in relationship...
As this priest was explaining this, his words pierced me to the heart. It was like he was explaining my exact situation.
This then became a watershed moment in my journey. My biggest grace has been learning to put relationship first, and from that relationship, what The Father says about me, how the Father loves me- not from my own disappointment and condemnation- comes my new identity of God’s beloved one. In other words, healing. Take a look at that quote from JP II again- This is precisely the kind of transformation he envisioned.
Learning to accept God’s love for me precisely in the places in my life that I most want to hide-accepting God’s love for me as I am. My brokenness is not a hindrance that must be annihilated for this vocation to succeed. My brokenness can then be the landscape of God’s arrival. These revelations changed the trajectory of my relationship with Christ. They changed the trajectory of my life. They will set the course for my priesthood. This is the good news of how the Lord has blessed me in this journey.
So I don’t come to St Ann’s a super accomplished dazzlingly successful seminarian. I come to y’all weak- and that’s a good thing, because my weakness attracts God’s tender love and mercy. In my weakness I have received Christ’s healing. In my weakness I have become reliant on Jesus. In my weakness I have become strong. In my weakness, I will gladly and humbly serve you this year. It’s going to be so powerful.
