Desire-less

               It is interesting getting out of the seminary because I do not know what to do with myself. I have been a student for as long as I remember. With the suddenness of this situation, I found myself unable to get into another school for the spring semester.
               I do not know what I want out of life. Becoming a seminarian required that I relinquished many of my desires. For example, a priest is told where to live, his pay is set, and he can’t have a wife. It was my experience that growing up, one should desire a nice home, a good paying job, and a loving family. It isn’t that seminary knocked these desires out of me, but I ceased cultivating them. I stopped daydreaming about the future and what I would like from it.

               I have an idealic notion that one should have a gnawing hunger for life. This is not only a hunger for the future, but also for the present. I wonder how such a hunger comes about. I wonder what kind of growth passion comes from, and is such a thing immediate or slow growing? Are such passions natural? Must they be cultivated, tended, or kept in check?

               Not only do I not have a great ‘life passion’, but I seem to lack ordinary wants. It seems that I can walk all the isles of all the stores and not find anything that I really want. I wonder how people generate desires to go to certain colleges, other countries, or specific jobs. I seem content to drift through life until I find something that I enjoy.

               I believe my ‘desire-less’ state is quite a natural result of my peculiar position in life. I would be worried if the second I got out of seminary I had a great desire to move to France and attend culinary school –or something of the sort-.

               I would not mention any of this, except that I think that a great number of other people are equally lost. In the end, I find that my lack of desires boils down to one desire: to have a great desire. It is rather ironic, but I think it is a wonderful place to start. 

Worst Part of Getting Old

               My grandfather suffers from dementia. I don’t know if suffers is the correct term though. Sometimes I think that he is much better off not knowing reality. There is a lot that could be said about that, but I will save that for another time.

               Although, not altogether in his right mind, he maintains a hold upon rational thought and sense faculties, and this makes it possible to hold pretty coherent conversation with him. One day I asked him what the worst part of getting old was. His answer made a profound impact on me.

               He said the one thing he didn’t mind was getting up each day and seeing that your spouse was another day older. He said that age was a thing that snuck up on you. One day you are 60. The next day you are 65. He said that he forgets how old he is. He thinks he can do things that he can’t anymore. The worst thing was not that he didn’t know where he was, who he was with, or that he couldn’t remember things. My grandfather said that the worst part of getting old for him was losing his coordination.

               It is a lack of ability that is so troubling. I realized that I value being able to do things. I think society values ‘doing’ much more than it should. The very old and very young are liabilities. They are useless wastes of resources because they can’t do much of anything.

               There more and more I talk with my grandpa, the more I realize that this is utterly false. His personhood is not tied to what he can and cannot do. By extension, my value does not come from what I achieve. I can be loved for no other reason than because I exist. I do not need a ‘reason’ to love other people. I hold people in high regard because they are intelligent, beautiful, rich, or talented.

               Yet sometimes I realize that none of this matters in the least bit.

All the Single Ladies...

               My 6 year old niece recently shared with me that she had obtained a boyfriend. As an uncle, I find this incredibly irritating. It saddens me that society thinks if we are single, we are missing out. Being a seminarian made me realize that the single life, far from being lonely, was incredibly rewarding in its own peculiar way.

               Now that I am out of priestly formation, there is nothing keeping me from dating. Seminary made me realize that, at present, I do not want or need a girlfriend. What I really want are simply good friends. St. Paul’s exhortation to remain single in I Corinthians 7 comes to mind.

               There is a question in the Church of whether or not the single life is a valid life-long vocation. It is a great question, and one that I am not sure of the answer of. The vast majority of us expect to someday get married and settle down. My main point is that, although this may be the case, we don’t need to feel like we are missing out.

               I think that many of us desperately need to realize that life is going on right now. Regardless of circumstance, God is working. Although someday I may be meant to be a priest, or a spouse, I know that right now, I am just supposed to be me. I do not need to strive to become that future spouse, I need to strive to be the present me…. And that is a wonderfully liberating thought.

Past due

               This is a post that was written well over a month ago, and although it came from a different context, I think it is still applicable.

               I never felt I was called to the priesthood specifically. I know that I am called to some sort of ministry and, and the priesthood may be that ministry. Above all else, I discerned a call to the seminary. It was a call to grow, to discern, to climb out of love, and to fall back in love.

               I have long held this call to be a blessing. If God called me directly to the priesthood, I would freak out and reject him altogether. My call is a great reminder that God meets us where we are and not where we should be.

               I recently had a revelation. For a while, I have known that I dislike seminary formation. Many seminarians can endure such formation in order to obtain the prize of ordination. Somehow we think that being a priest will make our lives enjoyable. Since I do not know if I want to be a priest, and I do not have some great burning positive desire for ordination, I am in a pickle. Basically it reduces down to one simple fact: I dislike my vocation.

               This would cause me great distress,-and often does- except I have great hope for the future. I am learning and growing. I think I am like a child who is learning to eat solid food. I can’t enjoy it at first, but will learn to relish it infinitely more than what I had before. I take life with a dose of hope: Someday I will like it. I look forward to that day.

The End?

               To be short, -which I am- I must say that I am no longer a seminarian. If I want to sound important or be otherwise tactful, I would say that ‘At this time, the decision has been made to discontinue priestly formation’. Of course, this does not mean that I may never return to the seminary.

               Conception Seminary and the Archdiocese of Oklahoma city relieved me of having to make this decision on my own. Part of being a seminarian is doing what the authorities of the church tell you. I fully ascent to this course of action, and do not resent it in any way.

               My immediate reaction was shock. I had all my things packed in my car, gas money in my pocket, and had already driven 300 miles. A whole wave of other emotions flooded me: anger, disappointment, sadness, excitement. Above all these was a sense of relief. This relief provided me with the peace that this was God’s will which I had so eagerly been seeking.

               The reasons for me not returning to Seminary are very simple, yet difficult to adequately explain. For quite some time now, I have been struggling with a serious bout of depression. It is no secret that I found seminarian formation to be quite wearisome. The Seminarian formators concluded that a great deal of my depression, if not its entirety, was caused by activities that were integral to priestly formation. As a result, the formators concluded that it would not only be good for my general temperament, but my spirituality if I were to leave the seminary at this time. If it turns out that my depression is not caused by the rigors of discernment and formation, they offered to be of whatever assistance they can be to get me to a place of greater peace.

               The fact that I so abruptly changed the direction of life, both creates and dispels a myriad of problems, emotions, and discussions, but all that will have to wait for later.

Grinch

               I have recently been concerned about what I should post in my blog. Being a seminarian, one may expect that I would have something about Christmas. For good reason, I feel obliged to blog about Christmas.

               Yet, the more and more I think about it, the more I realize that I have very little to say about Christmas. It is a big deal of course. When you honestly sit down and think about God taking on human form, it can give you chills. But, when I think of Christmas, I tend to imagine the smell of fresh gingerbread, lights, and presents, and in some sense, that is Christmas.

               The celebration of Christ’s birth, for me at least, has been divorced from the idea of ‘Christmas’. I think that the distinction between these two ideas is prevalent in our culture as well. Think of a Christmas movie. Most movies have the main character getting mixed up about what’s important in life. In the end, they come to a realization of what the spirit of Christmas is all about: Christmas is about loving other people. It is about family, and friends, and good cheer.

               Christmas is not about family, friends, or good cheer. Christmas is about Christ. That is it. Everything else is ‘Christmasy’ only in so far as it stems from and points back to Christ.

               It takes a conscious effort in order to remember that all of this is because of our loving Father sending his Son to us. I don’t really have much to say about Christmas because this fact is so hard for me to stamp into my heart. At the end of Dr. Seuss’s book How the Grinch Stole Christmas, the Grinch realizes that Christmas “doesn’t come from a store… maybe Christmas means a little bit more”.  Notice that no mention of Christ is made. The Grinch doesn’t get baptized. Perhaps this is because the Who’s could not find any water that wasn’t frozen into their snowflake.

               The reader is left with the idea that Christmas means something else

                without the explanation of what exactly that might be.

               And through all the Who’s and hububaloo, I realize that reader is me.

Committed to the Process

                              When people find out that I’m a seminarian, they are naturally curious. “Why did I choose this kind of life?” “Do I not want to have a family?’ The most common question I am asked is “what if you wake up 10 years from now and not want to do this anymore?”

               This question amuses me. The vocation of the priesthood is little different from any other vocation in this respect. People wake up all the time in marriages that they don’t want to be in. People go to jobs that they would rather not do. In marriages, one can get a divorce. In a job, one can quit, but the priesthood is not something that you can just abandon.

               Catholics don’t believe that one can simply abandon a marriage or any other God-given vocation. A marriage is a solemn vow, to man and God. In wedding vows, one doesn’t promise that “I will be happy with you until death do us part”. On the contrary, one promises to be with another person no matter what happens. Even if that person is sterile, even if that person gets cancer and dies a painful, expensive, and slow death, even if that person is total trash, one promises to be with them.  A marriage is special because even though a person may wake up and not want to do it, they do because of their promise.  If love were easy, it wouldn’t mean much.

               The priesthood is the same.

               The seminary is the same.

               I think you could say a meaningful life is the same: you must be committed to the process.

               When I entered the seminary, I gave my word to the archbishop that I would remain in the seminary for at least a year. I am now going on year 3. I know that tomorrow, I am going to wake up tomorrow and there will be things I don’t want to do. But I will do them anyway because of a commitment I have to formation, and while I may not enjoy it at the time, I think that someday I will reflect and know that it was all worth it.