A Seminary Story

[arfink]

I was kinda inspired by FutureCarmeliteClaire to tell my seminary story for the benefit of the VS crowd.

First of all, I will say this story doesn't have the kind of ending most beginning discerners hope for. That said, it does have a very [i]good[/i] ending, just not the one most people would think of as being very good.

My seminarian story began in high school, like most seminarian stories. I was being homeschooled because, to put it mildly, I'd had a very difficult time socially and emotionally in grade school and I wanted out of the school system very badly. The isolation and independence of homeschooling was extremely appealing to me. But as I went through high school I discovered I had a strange love for this thing called learning. I wasn't good at it in the way most teachers wanted me to be, but when I found something that I really wanted to learn it would be instantly absorbed and I'd go chasing after more. I would hunt for a new subject, sometimes at random, and the ones I enjoyed I happily and rapidly devoured. In this way I cultivated a strange and wonderful "jack of all trades" kind of style, learning this and that, here and there, but always in as much depth as I could manage before moving on to the next thing.

As examples, I would teach myself things like computer programming, digital logic circuits, soldering, stained glass, painting, drawing, website design, (some) woodworking, some contracting skills like household electrical wiring, any and all periods of history, architecture, and others. Certainly far more than I could ever simply list. This has of course continued to this day. Now, this is not to say I was a good student- far from it. I was a [i]horrible[/i] student, precisely because those mandatory subjects failed to hold my interest and precluded the kind of rapid-fire one-subject learning style I loved.

But in spite of all this, (or perhaps because of it) I was largely a loner, having convinced myself that human relationships were something I didn't want or really need. I had a passion for learning everything, and nothing seemed outside my reach, if I could keep people from hindering or interrupting me. Isolation was, I decided, enough for me. I would have been quite content to follow this path into college and was seriously considering programming or engineering.

I was also an altar server all through high school, and I took great pride in the precision, pacing, and practice of doing everything at mass exactly "just so." It fit with the kind of precision and harmony I chased in my love of electronics and later my love of philosophy. I loved that I could do something with the same level of precision I strove to achieve in my learning. This eventually caught the eye of the priest, and he invited me to visit the seminary with him one day. I was immediately struck by the real brotherhood of the place. I had convinced myself I didn't want any human interaction up til that point, partly because I hadn't ever had something quite like [i]that.[/i] And I knew I had to have it, I had to be there.

I started dreaming about the place and thinking about it all the time. I wanted to be there badly. I would serve mass and I'd feel a real burning desire to [i]be a priest[/i], whatever that meant. I didn't really know what it meant, but the desire just got stronger every day from my first visit there. I knew the Church needed good men to be priests, and I thought, [i]well, I could do that. Maybe. Who knows? I sure don't. So I'm going to give it a try.[/i]

I entered college seminary in the fall of 2006, in my freshman year of college. Things quickly got insane.

[i]to be continued...[/i]

Edited September 29, 2012 by arfink

[Kylie Spinelli]

amesome story!!!

[arfink]

Part 2:

Thus it was that I began my first year in seminary, not having much clue about how things would really be. I found out quickly that things would indeed be very crazy.

I came into seminary quite completely unprepared for what I would encounter there. Homeschooling was a huge asset to me, but in a way it was also a major problem to be overcome moving to college and seminary at the same time. The transition was very very hard. All the homeschool parents I had ever talked to about it said "Oh, little Jimmy didn't have any troubles in college, he was so self-motivated and graduated with a 4.0 GPA! We're so proud of Jimmy, he's going to make a great[i] [u]insert highly paid profession here[/u][/i]!" I assumed I'd be no different, after all I was smart enough and I liked learning, and I was only going to be studying philosophy, which I liked anyway. This would be a piece of cake, right? WRONG.[list]
[*]Rule #1 of college academics: You do not work at your own pace. You work at whatever pace your professors deem fit to give to you. This is nothing like homeschool, and was a really hard thing for me to overcome.
[*]Rule #2: You cannot afford to study a weeks worth of one subject in a day, and do a different subject every day of the week. This works great when your schedule is your own. It works really badly when you have the most insane schedule you've ever had in your life. (more on that in a bit)
[*]Rule #3: If you are homeschooled you have been immersed in a non-traditional learning style, period. This will trip you up in college unless you can immediately recognize it and conform to the usual way of doing things. I wasn't able to adapt very fast.
[*]Rule #4: You will have to deal with disruptive people in and outside of class who will make it impossible for you to get any work done. Good luck figuring that one out, you reclusive homeschooler!
[*]Rule #5: At least one of your professors every semester will have some axe to grind, and will either have a personal vendetta against you for being such a non-conformist weirdo, or will be your usual bat-croutons-crazy college professor, in which case the class as a whole is screwed. You can't do anything about this, yay!
[/list]
So yes, college was a real shocker, completely contrary to everything I had ever been told by all other homeschoolers I had met. I suspect some of them were trying to save face, but I digress.

Now, I could have probably had no trouble at all adjusting to something like that, but there was even more crazy piled on top of all that. Next on the list of insanity was the seminary horarium. We were basically expected to operate (and be academically, formationally, and spiritually successful, mind you) from 5AM until 10PM, 6 days out of the week. The typical day went like this:[list]
[*]5 AM or thereabouts you'd roll out of bed to get cleaned, dressed, and groomed before daily Holy Hour. You might be able to squeak by on less time, but not if you wanted access to the extremely limited number of showers, and certainly not if you wanted a drop of hot water or a cup of coffee.
[*]6 AM would begin mandatory morning Holy Hour. Morning prayer began immediately after the Angelus at 6, followed by a good 45 minutes of silent prayer. Which generally just meant a chapel jam-packed full of somnolent seminarians staring blankly at Our Lord in the monstrance and trying not to pass out and tip over on the guy in the next seat.
[*]7 AM we would have our daily Mass.
[*]7:40 AM would be breakfast time most mornings, unless the priest was being especially long-winded in his homily, in which case you might just have to skip breakfast because:
[*]8 AM was when classes began for most of us (depending on what kind of schedule you got assigned when you picked your classes)
[*]Class schedules varied pretty widely, but generally most of us had 2-3 classes a day which would generally run until 4 PM.
[*]4:45 PM would be mandatory Evening Prayer, usually followed by a reflection from one of the upperclassmen.
[*]5:15 PM Dinner time
[*]6:15 PM began study hours, which would run until 9 PM
[*]9 PM evening fraternity time, running until usually 9:45 PM
[*]10 PM you could officially go to bed, but generally speaking [i]none[/i] of us could realistically do this because we'd still have a ton of school work to be getting done. My senior year I was known to be up until midnight most evenings just getting the daily junk done.
[/list]
The weekends had a slightly different schedule, but were equally packed in order to give us a good idea of what it was like to be a priest and never have Sunday off. As a result, most of us spent a good deal of time teetering on the brink of complete burnout, having to flee from the seminary's walls any time we could to places like the campus library or a coffee shop just to get work done and take time to breathe.

Other bits of insanity my first year included:[list]
[*]Being made to share a room with possibly the single most extroverted, noisy, and trouble-loving seminarian in the entire freshman class. I am very much the introvert still, but in the beginning of my time at seminary I was downright reclusive. We did not mix well, and the staff knew it and wanted me to deal with it.
[*]Finding out I had ADD and having no idea how to cope with it
[*]Coming within an inch of failing Calculus
[*]Actually failing out of Latin class and having to take Spanish instead.
[*]Having a priest from India be my spiritual director, and I couldn't understand a word he said when he was speaking English
[*]Badly injuring my ankle and right knee in a freak racquetball accident
[/list]
However, despite all the insanity of my first year I was told that discernment always takes longer than that. If I could even survive my first year, I was told, it stood to reason I should do a second, because in my second year I'd be more stable and would definitely be able to make more progress in discernment. OK, sounds good, because in my first year I did basically [i]zilch [/i] in the discernment department, instead opting to just keep my head above water. I did manage to survive my first year, somehow. I just gritted my teeth and made my peace with the craziness. I made new friends and discovered a certain joy in overcoming impossible situations. My prayer life was largely mechanical, but for the first time I had one. It felt amazing. So I went back for a second year.

[i]stay tuned for part 3, my second year of discernment.[/i]

Edited October 1, 2012 by arfink

[arfink]

OK, on to part 3. I mentioned in my last post that this would be about my second year of discernment, but I think it would be more proper to call it my first year. My second year in seminary is where things actually began to get interesting from a discernment standpoint. Everybody has the usual dose of college crazy and my story really isn't all that remarkable up to this point. Not that my story is actually remarkable at any point, but at least here it diverges from the normal college experience.

My second year in seminary was a dramatic change from my first. In some ways it was harder and more challenging, but in a few key ways it was much less so. This turned out to be very important for me in my spiritual life. The hectic daily schedule was largely unchanged, but as I had left the freshman class a large number of the artificial constraints on my time were removed. I was free to have the space I needed for study on a more regular basis, as opposed to having to study in a mandatory group setting.

My life at seminary during my second year was, by comparison to my first year, downright tranquil. There were plenty of rough spots, like watching a close friend of mine suffer very much during his first semester and the difficulties that came with our unusual living circumstances. The seminary had too many men to fit in the main building, and I and 9 other men were sent to live at a nearby rectory and would commute to campus every morning. That certainly had its share of headaches. But on the flip side I had the amazing privilege to get myself away from the tumult and noise of the main building on a daily basis. With over a hundred young college-aged men it was every bit as noisy as a regular men's dorm, but perhaps slightly less rowdy. I could flee back to the rectory from whence I had come and have peace and solitude. Some of the deepest and closest friendships of my entire time at seminary were first formed in my second year. In many ways it was happier than my first year there.

I also had the grace to begin working with an amazing spiritual director. I actually began with him later in my second semester of my first year, but didn't really begin to dig in deeply until my second year. We began doing the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatious of Loyola. If you're a beginning discerner and haven't had the opportunity to be exposed to the Exercises yet, I would highly recommend it. It completely changed my spiritual life in countless good ways. It didn't make it exactly easy to discern though. If anything it may have made it harder to actually do the discerning, but that was because I had so much more self-knowledge and clarity about what desires I had and where they were coming from. Instead of being completely clueless I was actually now more aware than ever, and it made the decision even more difficult because I knew what weight and importance it had.

My second year of discernment was thus tumultuous in a new way, in very different way from my first year. I had, for the first time, seriously begun to consider my own character, my past life, and my present situation in my spiritual life. I did not like what I was finding, and was very seriously considering leaving the seminary on the supposition that it was quite definitely impossible for me to ever amount to anything, as a priest or even as a human being. But my spiritual director, let's call him Fr. X, was incredibly patient with me, and together with the Holy Spirit we wandered in the desert for a while. Miraculously I began to feel the strength to make a change. I knew my reclusive habits and the way in which I continually pushed away anyone and everyone who approached me was not only a very bad thing to carry into priesthood but it was actually causing me to push God away too.

I could tell a thousand other stories about my second year, but that's kinda where I was when I went home for the summer at the end of it all. I knew I needed to start letting other people in, and I began to genuinely want that to happen. I wanted to come back for a third year and really see what I could do when I stopped pushing everyone away and spent less time hiding inside myself.

Edited October 1, 2012 by arfink

[AuthorOfMyLife]

God bless you, Arfink!

I have a brother in the seminary (first year of theology), and he also was home-schooled and has a learning pattern very similar to yours--in addition to suffering form PTSD because of a hurricane emergency my family was involved in. I'm sure he would sympathize deeply with what you had to go through.

I'm looking forward to hearing your continuing thoughts on your past and future.

[arfink]

Thanks AuthorOfMyLife, I'm looking forward to sharing, and I'm glad this is helpful to some people.

[TheresaThoma]

Fink this is a really amesome thread. I look forward to reading more.

[arfink]

Time for part 4. This part is about my 3rd year in seminary.

I'll begin by saying that, of all the years I spent in the seminary, my 3rd year was far and away the best. If I could relive one year of my time there, the 3rd year would be the one I would choose, no doubt about it. Looking back today on what happened 3 years ago, I can see that I was enormously blessed in my time at seminary during my junior year.

To begin with, my living situation changed once again. Now instead of living at the rectory and having to commute in every day, I was living in an on campus apartment. The seminary had received a very generous grant to lease an entire apartment complex across campus from the main seminary building, and our housing capacity was doubled. The apartments, or "Grand House" as we called it, were quite modest by the standards of apartments, but positively luxuriant compared to our previous arrangements. I shared an apartment with 3 other men, and we had our own kitchen. I love cooking, and the kitchen became a remarkably critical piece in the puzzle of my discernment. (more on that in a moment)

Furthermore, the apartments were remarkably quiet during the day. Despite being located on campus, very few of the men were interested in returning there during the day, instead opting to be present at the main building where they could interact with the other men all day long. As an introvert I needed a space that was apart from other people and which I could call my own in order to effectively get my work done. Previously I hadn't been able to have that. The library was of course quiet, but nothing like an ideal place to work. The rectory was nice, but was too long of a drive from campus to return there multiple times during the day in order to work between classes. The Grand House was, in this respect, superb. Finally I had a small piece of space which was distinctly separate. A space where I could work or pray or play in a completely independent way.

But I quickly realised that this space was not something I could hoard for myself. Far from it. This is where the real spiritual substance of my 3rd year began to work. In my last portion of the story I mentioned I was aware of a disordered desire to keep people out of my life. As an introvert I had plenty of largely legitimate excuses to do this, but I was clearly taking it to an extreme on a regular basis. Here is how the Lord and I began to work out a solution to the problem:

First, I began to become acquainted with the men around me at Grand House. By providence or coincidence I found that there were a few men on each floor of Grand House who were of like mind with me concerning their working spaces. These were the men who would quietly return to their little places of solitude to work between classes. I began to notice that a small handful of guys were remarkably similar to me in other ways too. I made friends with a certain man who I shall call J.E. and another man M.M. There was also my roomate A.R. My friendship with these 3 men changed me and healed me in a remarkable way.

J.E. was in many ways very much like myself, and so I found him to be easily approachable and found in him my most trusted confidant and friend in my entire time at seminary. He was into technology and video games. We liked the same kinds of music, the same kinds of foods. We both loved to cook, and to build things, and playing with fire. We both loved our faith, and had very similar backgrounds, having both come from large, home-schooling families. But J.E. was several years ahead of me in seminary. By the time I was in my 3rd year he was already beginning theology school. I didn't see him as often as I did my previous years, but this gave a certain intentionality to our time spent together, and he became not only my confidant but also my mentor. He taught me especially how to be kind to others and how to know my own limitations by knowing myself. It was by his encouraging words that I began to see myself for who I was instead of only seeing myself against the pattern of what the seminary staff wanted me to be.

Next was M.M. He was in my class, and of all my peers he was the most understanding, sympathetic, and wisest man of them all. I am actually older than M.M, but by the unfortunate circumstances of his hairline and the condition of his face he looked to be many years my senior, but he had the experience and knowledge to match that of a much older man. In all things he spoke with the simplest of words, in ways that were easy to understand. Yet, when I had the fun of talking with him about our Philosophy classwork or on the not-infrequent occasion of editing one of his many papers, I found his economy and simplicity in his words did not ever fail him. He often talked to me of having a hard time grasping complex ideas in metaphysics or epistemology class, but upon discussion with him I almost always found that he not only grasped the concepts as well as I could, he was able to explain them in far simpler language than I could as well. For all his giftedness with academics, M.M. had a hard time accepting my words when I told him he was very good at what he did, and to top that off he would have flat out denied that he was a humble man if I had dared to suggest it. I knew he was humble because he would deny any compliments, but if I ever was struggling with a concept myself he would not hesitate for an instant to help me with his superior knowledge and skill. When I was having a bad day, M.M. would notice at a glance and offer to cheer me up, but never once did I hear him make anything more than a joking half-complaint when he was in any kind of trouble. M.M. was in this way not merely a good friend, but also the model of the kind of humility and hospitality I wanted to achieve.

Finally there was A.R. one of my roomates during my 3rd year. A.R. was one class below me, in his second year at the seminary. He was like M.M, an extremely gifted academic mind and diligent to a fault, but he did not have the gift of a really humble character. He was not proud as one might suspect an un-humble person to be, but the exact opposite. He doubted himself and was always speaking of his faults, terrified at every moment of falling behind in his schoolwork (despite his excellent grades) or in his seminary formation (despite having the good will of every staff member and being one of the best model seminarians I ever saw) because of some imagined omission on his part. Despite this I deeply admired A.R. for his diligence and work ethic, two traits which I have always found myself lacking in. He looked up to me as an upperclassman, despite my status as the floor's strangest resident. Furthermore, A.R. was a gentle and eccentric man, and I loved spending time with him when he could spare it.

So how did all this play into my spiritual life and my discernment? Well, at this point I had begun to find that my desire for priesthood was cooling. My desire to be in seminary was clearly from God, I concluded, but had been less about wanting to be a priest and more about God wanting to smash off the hard calloused shell of reclusiveness that I had built before coming there. [i]HE[/i] wanted access to me, and His plan was in motion. I wasn't sure if my desire for priesthood would be rekindled once that task had been done, so I remained there to finish the work God had sent me to do in that place. The way I went about my work was remarkably simple:

It began with A.R, when one day he got sick. He was keeping himself awake with caffeine and sleeping very little, and a common cold that anyone would have gotten over in short order escalated into a protracted illness. As nobody was willing to intervene and help the poor guy, I took away his caffeine pills, told him to stay in his room, contacted his professors to tell them A.R. was sick, and made him some soup. It was a strange revelation. Later A.R. thanked me for doing that for him, and admitted that he had felt enormous pressure to never fail in his schoolwork and was grateful that I had basically given him the support he needed to take care of himself.

I knew what sorts of things a disoriented, stressed, and introverted young man would want to have in order to find peace and consolation in a place like the college seminary, because that basically exactly described me during my first two years. I knew such a man would want a space to be away, to be himself, and perhaps someone to listen to him for a while. The more I looked around me to the other men in the seminary, the more I found these kinds of men. I knew if I wanted to break my old habits I needed to bring people into my life and serve them, and I chose these men to be servant to. In my apartment's front room I had a simple arrangement with a large, low table surrounded by a couple old discarded couches and an old recliner chair: hardly the lap of luxury, but a welcoming space for anyone to come in, sit down, and put their feet up for a while. I had my own study area off to the side, situated such that I could see the open door from where I was working, and could welcome anyone who came immediately upon their arrival. I began by inviting men to my room on the weekends for a home-cooked dinner made in my own little kitchen and sharing a meal and some simple chatter. I was one of only a handful of men who knew how to cook and who readily shared that gift with others, and soon my room was a popular destination on every Saturday night for men who wanted a simple and intimate evening among friends.

From there things began to grow. My room was increasingly the sanctuary of Grand House. Men who wanted to escape for a while would come to visit me there almost every day. Some would come just to drop their book bag on the floor and have a homemade cookie and sleep on the couch. Others would want to talk about their daily struggles and joys with me, safe in the confidence that I was sympathetic, wouldn't try to give them advice they didn't want, and was always forgetful afterwards. Sometimes they would even come for advice, though I was generally loathe to give it for fear of guiding them astray.

This was not beneficial for me from a merely human standpoint though. The Lord wanted to open me to the realisation that outsiders could bring good things into my life, because He wanted to come in too. He sent His messengers in the form of my fellow man, and instead of having them break down my walls He made me want to welcome them in. An ingenious tactic, I might add, and one which He tried to seriously leverage in my fourth year of seminary.

Edited October 4, 2012 by arfink

[AuthorOfMyLife]

Again, beautiful. And again--thank you!

[BigJon16]

Arfink, this is amesome. I had always been curious about your time in Seminary, and was always tempted to ask. But because you had expressed before that you had "discerned out", I didn't want to push the question.

I guess I always figured you would tell us on your own time...and here you are!


Thank you, buddy!

[arfink]

[quote name='BigJon16' timestamp='1349488921' post='2490541']
Arfink, this is amesome. I had always been curious about your time in Seminary, and was always tempted to ask. But because you had expressed before that you had "discerned out", I didn't want to push the question.

I guess I always figured you would tell us on your own time...and here you are!


Thank you, buddy!
[/quote]


Oh, I'm not done yet bro.

[TheresaThoma]

That is a really beautiful Fink!

[AnneLine]

Seems to me that God has been... and is... very busy in your life, ARFink.... it will be interesting to see what you and God do next!!!!

[arfink]

Part 5:

Now it's time for things to get really tough. My senior year was very tumultuous and difficult and painful in the sense of discernment. However, the drama began before I even made it back to school for my fourth year, so this part will just be about the summer between years 3 and 4.

The discernment shakeup began in the summertime while I was away from seminary. The summers were always incredibly different from the school year. I was working a part time job at a Dairy Queen where I was immersed in an environment that was about as far removed from seminary life as anyone could imagine. The owner was at beast an unpleasant person to work for. My co-workers were typical American teenagers who spoke only of the most superficial of topics and only in the basest of language, replete with continual swearing. This was mental poison for a self-described academic like myself, and I stuck out like a nail waiting for the hammer. The job was boring, tedious, and anyone who has worked in a food service job knows exactly what I'm talking about. No surprises there. I had worked the same summer job every summer since I had started seminary, and it provided enough cash to cover buying books and other necessities when I went back to school each year. I went back because the job was always available and it was easier than trying to find something else in an economy that was really starting to hurt badly.

What did surprise me, however, was how working that particular job deeply cut into my spiritual life. Being in that environment made me testy and cynical and deeply sarcastic, and left me emotionally drained at the end of every day. It made we want to retreat again into the shell of seclusion I had so painstakingly attempted to dissect in my time at seminary. Coming off an amazing year at the seminary in my 3rd year, I was especially impressed by this. My newly awakened desire to be personable and to help others of course made me a great boon to my employer because the customers loved being around me, but it also made me extremely vulnerable to a cast of co-workers who did not seek my best interests as I was so accustomed to with the brothers at seminary. These people of course had no malicious intent in mind, but were so coarse and abrasive by their day to day conduct that I could not bear to be the person I had become in seminary and remain around them. Once again I was faced with the need to change my approach to people. I tried, and failed, to quickly find some kind of middle ground. Since I was unable to find a compromise solution for myself I was faced with the prospect of throwing away the progress I had made in seminary or fleeing that work environment. I chose the latter, as soon as I had a viable reason to do so.

That reason came in the form of summer classwork. Because my academic performance at seminary was mediocre at best, I was obliged to take a summer course that year in order to make up the credits I had lost by failing out of Latin class. I was taking a statistics course. I quit my job at DQ at the same time as I began this course, with the somewhat plausible reason that I absolutely had to dedicate my full energies to making sure I passed the course with the best grade possible so as to bolster my ailing transcript. In reality, I wanted to get away from the environment at work as much as possible and hoped that returning to coursework would provide a respite. Sadly though, the culture shock I had experienced at DQ followed me back to school. Taking classes outside the framework of seminary, I was shocked to find that it was incredibly easy for me to find a good working pace on my own. I was always told by the staff that my academic struggles were simply the result of my unwillingness to give my all to my studies. As I approached this course outside the confines of the seminary it was made painfully clear to me that it was [i]not my fault[/i] that I had been doing badly with my classes in seminary: the very structure of seminary itself had been holding me back.

I passed the class with flying colors. Left to my own devices and my own time table for studies I managed not only to pass the course easily, but did so without missing a single point on any assignment and to take every single extra credit point available. The seminary academic advisor, Mr. D. was of course unimpressed and unenlightened by this performance, instead quipping, "Isn't it nice what you can achieve when you work hard? I'm sure you'll be able to do just as well when we begin classes again in the fall." By that point I was beginning to get more than a little disillusioned with the seminary, and I was very concerned. It was clear some rule-bending was in order if I was to perform as expected academically, or that I was going to have to somehow explain how it was that I managed to get poor grades in seminary but fabulous ones outside. I was not looking forward to that explanation, as previous attempts to discuss such things with the staff had never gone particularly well.

There were lots of other little things scattered here and there which began to plant doubts in my mind. Why was I desiring to go back to the seminary? Was it just because I was comfortable with the people there? My illusions of what priesthood was like had long since been smashed, and I realised it held no particular allure for me any more. I knew I was at least capable of loving and serving God and others in ways besides priesthood, and so far had seen no indications that I was suited to the life of a priest. I saw nothing to recommend it to me over any other vocational calling. I still hoped that maybe some spark would be kindled in me in my next year at seminary, but my hope was waning.

I saw the deep disconnect between my life as a seminarian and the life the rest of the world chose to live. I was beginning to sense the seminary was not an ideal place for me to be. It had formed me in many wonderful and good ways, but it was making it increasingly difficult to do the things I had to do. My academic performance was, I now knew without any shadow of doubt, being stifled there. This of course promoted a sense that other good parts of myself were being suppressed there in an attempt to mold me into a model seminarian. I had been, prior to my time in seminary, an incredibly creative, inventive, and technically minded individual. Since joining seminary I had given up playing piano, nearly given up drawing, and the only geeky stuff I did was the occasional video game on the weekends. So many of my natural talents were un-needed, un-wanted, and intentionally suppressed by the structures of the seminary.

At last the summer of doubt came to an end. I had to make a decision: do I go back for one more year, desperately hoping the desire for priesthood would return, or leave now? I loved the men I had grown to call family too well to "jump ship" even after such a jarring summer as that, and so it was with reluctant steps that I returned for my fourth and final year in seminary.

Edited October 8, 2012 by arfink

[i<3franciscans]

Just read through the first five parts now. This. Is. Beautiful.

Thank you so much for sharing everything! I can't wait to read the rest.

God bless you abundantly,
fran

[arfink]

And now it's time for part 6, my evaluation. There is a lot of this part of the story that I'll wind up leaving out, but I'll try to keep as many of the relevant pieces in here as I can.

If you read the last part you know that it wasn't easy for me to go back to seminary for my fourth year. I was pretty sure it wasn't going to turn out very well. It was one thing to be having doubts of my own. But there was a bigger piece that was causing me even more concern. [b]Evaluations.[/b]

Has anyone here had the fun experience of a performance evaluation at work? Remember how [i]un[/i]-fun those always are? We had those every year at seminary. Our formational improvement as seminarians was supposed to be quantifiable and measurable. After all, we had truckloads of new seminarians coming in all the time. We were bursting at the seams with far more men than the system was capable of dealing with. Not to mention that selecting men to be priests is a daunting task: you got to have the very best, the very cream of the crop, if you will. The seminary staff understandably had to have very high standards.

Very high standards which I was terrified of not meeting.

The seniors were always the first to have their evaluations each year, and with such a huge number of seminarians the evaluations had to begin very early in the year. The schedule was posted on the second week of classes. My evaluation was scheduled for the first week of October, in the first week of evaluations. This was already a bad sign. Men were never evaluated in alphabetical order. They were evaluated by class, of course, and the seniors were always given the first spots on the list because, it was said, we needed to have the benefit of our evaluation early for the sake of our final year of discernment. There was always a dark, whispered rumor in my previous 3 years though, that the men at the top of the list were put there [i]for a reason.[/i] [i]The troublesome cases. The ones the staff wanted out of the way.[/i] I was the second man on the list, and I was terrified.

The weeks before my evaluation I had a formation meetings with the priest on my floor every so often. We talked about some things, and he handily dropped some comment about not wanting there to be any surprises at my evaluation. Yet more terror.

I had good reason to be concerned. My academic performance had been consistently miserable. The staff had some sense that I was a smart guy, but nobody could make sense of why I was performing badly. Some days not even I could make sense of it. Naturally, the consensus by all parties involved typically was that I didn't care enough to do the work I needed to get done, because otherwise I would clearly have much better grades. I was beginning to have some sense of why I did badly in school, but I didn't like the answer I was getting, and I knew the staff wouldn't like it either: the rigours of seminary were too much for me to balance with my schoolwork.

Besides that problem, the staff had identified other "formational issues." I was and still am overweight, in part from years of neglecting my health in high school out of sheer lack of concern, and in part because of a physical problem I have had since birth that makes it difficult to be active. My attempts to piece together a routine and regimen that would work for me and still fit into the seminary schedule were largely fruitless, and the staff were disappointed that I couldn't manage my time better. I still had great difficulty in large social situations, especially public speaking. They didn't like that I shrank from view in large crowds, and that the positions I would volunteer for were always behind the scenes. They believed I was still living a life far too reclusive for a seminarian. They were concerned that I had not dutifully abandoned my old hobbies completely, concerned that a "grown man, much less a seminarian" would still be interested in such things as computers and graphic design and programming and games.

Finally the day of my evaluation came. I remember what I wore that day: black p[color=#696969]ants[/color] and a grey/green plaid shirt with sleeves that were just a little bit too long. I remember what the weather was like: cool but not cold, overcast, breezy. The kind of autumn day I would have enjoyed any other day of the year. I waited in the lobby for my turn. The man to be evaluated before me went into the conference room, stony faced and silent. Some of the younger men were playing with a frisbee on the lawn, and I could hear their joyful shouts through the open window. I waited an eternity. The man who was evaluated before me came out, his face set like flint but white as paper. He weakly said "Hi," and quickly left the building. Then it was my turn to go in.

I couldn't recount to you everything that was said in that room if I wanted to. My memories about what was said, who said what, and the very inflections of each speakers' voices have been replayed so many times in my mind that it's like a record that's gotten worn out. There were of course some small formalities, and then the rector began very simply. "Let me get right to the point. At this time we cannot recommend you continue your formation with the seminary." There followed tokens of gratitude for the good work I had done for the seminary, acknowledgement of the general acclaim I had among the brothers. Then of course, the long list of complaints against my character. Their best wishes for my future endeavours. Did I wish to make any comments? I had spoken not once during the whole affair. No, I didn't have any comment to make at that time. I thanked them for their work with me, and exited the room.

I had already attended my classes for the day, thankfully, as by that point I was beyond being in any way useful or productive for the day. I went to the chapel and sat in the corner until I could breathe normally again. It took 2 hours. Then I locked myself in my room for the rest of the day, and spoke to no one.

[i]to be continued[/i]

Edited October 9, 2012 by arfink

[arfink]

This next part, part 7, is the final part of my seminary story.

So what happened after my evaluation? Well, things began to move very quickly, far faster than I could react to them, and the remainder of my time at seminary flashed by in what seemed an instant, and then began the long march of trying to make it on my own in the outside world.

After my evaluation my life at seminary began to slide and shift, like a house made on sand. I think it would be very apt to say I fell. My dreams and aspirations to that point had all been about being in seminary, being with the brothers I so dearly loved, and I hadn't taken the time to consider anything else. It was a serious mistake. Now I was suddenly faced with a very different reality. I would graduate with a bachelor's degree in Philosophy and Catholic Studies. I would have a large amount of debt. I knew my education was worth something, but I also knew it was most certainly not worth what I had paid for it. I was grateful for the amount of aid I had managed to get while I was in seminary, but even with less college debt than the national average, I knew a degree in Philosophy was essentially worthless where getting a job was concerned. This anxiety was immediate and nearly all-consuming. In every waking hour, and sometimes even in my sleep, I was reminded by my perfidious mind that I had failed.[i][b] "Philosophy![/b] How could I have been such an idiot! They make horrible jokes about Philosophy majors. Nobody wants to hire someone like me. I should have made a better plan. I've wasted four years at this place, for what? The good feeling that I tried to follow God's supposed will? To be with people I like? How stupid. And now the economy is tanked out besides. I'm really quite royally #$%@-ed.[/i]"

When your own mind rebels against you like that, it makes it awfully hard to cope with difficult situations or do anything correctly on a day to day basis. I had been stripped of my illusions, of my dreams, of my hope. I was very nearly stripped of my faith. I didn't have a desire for prayer any more. My amazing spiritual director who had been my guide for 3 years was assigned to a parish far away from the seminary, and I was given a new one. I never made a meaningful connection with him. I barely managed to go through the motions of a spiritual life, the bare minimum to at least look like a seminarian, when inside I felt more like a burnt shell of what I was.

I told my brothers of my plight. Most of my classmates would be continuing on in seminary though, and their words of consolation rang strangely hollow in my ears as I was consumed with envy and self-hatred that they had been allowed to stay and I was not. I tried to fight it back, but even when my mind was convinced they meant well, the words still burned in my emotions. Other of my friends were also being sent away, or leaving of their own volition. I tried to get advice on where to go, what I could do, how I would be able to find my way in life after leaving that place, but nobody had any ideas. I envied and admired the men who had the foresight to leave before their senior year. I wished I was like the guys who clearly had their own plan in mind, instead of blindly trusting. Little by little I also stopped trusting. I didn't trust the staff any more. I was sure I trusted God, but I didn't feel I could trust that I was hearing him correctly in prayer. I doubted that coming to seminary had ever been anything more than just a whim I managed to convince myself of while I was in high school. I still trusted the brothers who had been closest to me, and clung to them as the only thing I really felt I had left. I knew I would lose them before long, and I had no idea what I was going to do. I increasingly did my own thing, and by the very end I was wilfully avoiding mandatory events at the seminary, trying to avoid the pain.

A few of the men there knew how deep I'd been cut by the whole experience, and they tried to help me out. M.M. was one of them. His attempts to make me see the bright side were unfaltering and constant. Another man who lived across the hall, J.S, was leaving seminary at the same time as me, and he tried to be helpful and cheerful too. If not for those two men and a handful of others I think I would have been completely and utterly destroyed by myself during my final year at seminary. They helped me keep my sanity, and I thank God they were there for me when I was systematically shutting down every access to my person I had taken so long to open. But, despite all the good things the men tried to do, I was seldom happy for long. I was so busy destroying myself with my own grief and anger that nothing any human being could do would keep the damage at bay for long.

Eventually the harrowing experience of dealing with grief and trying to graduate was over. I did in fact manage to graduate. I walked down the aisle in my black gown and tasselled hat. People smiled and patted me on the back and said I had a bright future ahead of me. But when I packed my things and went back home, it felt like the future could hold no brightness for me. Stuck at home with no job, no daily routine of classes, and away from my dearest friends, I felt like I had nothing left. In the past, before I had gone to the seminary, it was easy to bury myself in my pet projects and forget about the world, and I would no longer feel the pain. But time doesn't run backwards, and that way was shut to me. I realised I had actually managed to, in a way, fall in love with a place I had called home, a brotherhood I had learned to call family, and I couldn't ever replace it or have it back.

So I began to look for work. For months I looked and looked for something I could do. I was rejected time and time again. I tried to get jobs teaching, doing youth ministry, or things where my degree might be useful, but never got more than a couple of interviews. I even had the humiliating experience of showing up for an interview for a teaching position, only to see the familiar faces of some of my seminary classmates who were interviewing for the exact same job. After a while I tried for anything I could find, because it was coming time to start paying on my college debts and I still had no job at all. Eventually I wound up getting a job at a grocery store with help from a friend who worked there, but my pride was sorely injured to have to work such a job. Anyway, all of that just winds up leading into a different story.

Despite all the pain, darkness, and hopelessness, there was one thread of goodness running through the weave of my life. It was bright and strong as steel, and I think it was only by Divine Providence that this one thread stayed in place. And that was going to Confession every single week. When prayer and discernment and all of that stuff basically collapsed, I still always had the sacraments to go back to, and in a particular way Confession was the best thing I had during all that time. Eventually enough time passed that I was able to look back on the whole thing with clarity again, and begin to put it back together. That's really what it took to get it all put back in place, just a lot of time where it seemed like nothing was happening in my life. Kinda like healing a bone, where you just sit around for a very long time wondering "Is it done yet?" I still thank God as often as I recall it that I had the sacraments at my disposal all through that time, because otherwise I wouldn't have made it through.

Ultimately I did come away from seminary a much stronger person, and with a much better knowledge of myself. Painful experiences are often like that. Upon prayer and reflection I am once again fairly sure God did call me to seminary, but it wasn't because he wanted me to be a priest. He wanted to me to be there to be healed in a special way that could only really happen in that environment, and I thank Him for that. So what's next for me? No clue. More discernment and patience and trust.

And that's my seminary story.

[arfink]

BTW, if any of you want to ask questions, that's totally cool. I imagine I left a good bit out, so if something doesn't seem to make sense let me know.

[LittleWaySoul]

Whoa. That was incredible. Thank you so much for sharing that.

[Mary's Margaret]

arfink, thank-you for sharing your experience with us. My son has a double degree in philosophy and english: not exactly 'job-friendly'. However, he is currently taking some post-grad courses and is going into editing and publishing.
You are a very good and engaging writer. Add to that your natural curiosity and thirst for learning, and I think you'd make a very good journalist. Have you thought of perhaps using that talent (and perhaps your techie interests) in a job with a Catholic publication?
Just a thought I had as I was reading your story.
May you continue to receive the fullness of God's blessing.