Another year down

The second semester of the 2012-2013 seminary year is almost at a close. Classes have concluded for the seminarians. Only finals week remains. Graduation for four of our seminarians will be held Saturday morning along with the other Marian University seniors. Tony Cecil has published his last electronic seminary newsletter and continues to harass and insult me.

 

We began the year with 35 seminarians from nine Midwestern dioceses. Two left by the end of the first semester. Three others – juniors – are spending the second semester in Rome. We are not sure they will not become entranced by European splendor and decide to remain in the old world. They may perhaps return with the arrogance of a character in U.S. author Don Delillo’s novel who said, “I’ve come to think of Europe as a hardcover book, America as the paperback version.”

 

I have been with the seminary three years now. About one-third of the young men I’ve seen join us have opted not to continue. That’s not a bad percentage.

 

We are well into our second year using the new Roman Missal and while the formality has added a touch of excellence to the overall liturgical sense, the clumsiness of some of the prayers – especially during Lent – has meant, as a celebrant, one has had to keep on one’s toes.

 

Seminarians are intrigued by the liturgy and by ritual when they first come here, but after a while they realize that human beings must enact the ritual and none of us is perfect. Some are truly taken by the more pious forms of ritual that most of us abandoned many years ago. Recently we sang “Bring Flowers of the Fairest” as the chosen Marian hymn on a Saturday in Easter time. I hadn’t heard that hymn since I was in grade school in the early 1950s. Our rector, who wasn’t born until the early 1960s had never heard of it. As we sang it, I could feel the sugary sweetness just pouring over us like a chocolate waterfall.

 

The Catholic American author Flannery O'Connor once reviewed a book of short stories by a Catholic author for a diocesan newspaper and claimed to be struck "with how limited the range of experience was – all those baby stories and nun stories and young girl stories – a nice vapid-Catholic distrust of finding God in action of any range and depth. This is not the kind of Catholicism that has saved me so many years in learning to write, but then this is not Catholicism at all . . . "

 

What is most interesting and similarly challenging is watching college-age seminarians grow in their experience of their faith and life itself, of finding God in action in their own lives. Though I was not in a seminary when I attended college, it seemed to me that those years were spent in doing something similar. I had only been exposed to a single family – my own. My grade school and high school classmates and I were fairly homogeneous. It was only in college that I met and mixed with people who came from other states. There were also classmates of other races and religions. It wasn’t the greatest experience of the United Nations but it made me realize there was a lot more to the world than what I had known as a child.

 

I also began to realize there was much more to my religious faith. Father Al Ajamie taught us a course in liturgy that included some historical development. What an insight to find out the Mass hadn’t always been as I experienced it in 1960. Father Pat Smith taught Scripture and I discovered that the Gospels frequently contradict one another. Those are miniscule things to remember now.

 

Still I am reminded of such things as our seminarians continue to grow and to learn. It is a joy and delight to witness this – as a well as their own personal growth – as I look back on the year. It makes me think it is still possible for me to change – and grow.