December, 2007

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year, vocation bloggers! The Advent Season is long past and we are in the middle of the celebration of our Lord’s Nativity. What great joy can be had during this time, when family and friends gather together to remember our Lord and all the blessings we have received from Him. During this season we can all come to appreciate the phrase: “God bless us, every one!”

The semester at Our Lady of Providence Seminary has ended. At the end of the semester we, as customary, had a wonderful Christmas dinner and “Secret Santa” gifts to finish off the year. How quickly Advent goes by! I find that it has been hard over the past three years to reflect on how each semester went, due to the fact that we were at the time preparing for final examinations. Nonetheless, the fraternity is always remembered fondly when one leaves at the end of the semester; truly seminary becomes a second home and a second family.

As seminarians, what we have learned begins to sink in; we are all one step closer to that goal of serving the Lord in the priesthood. It is exciting and scary, yet if it is God’s Will, we cannot but be confident and continue forward. We find this reality exemplified most perfectly in the saints of the Christmas Season. We see Saint Stephen, the first martyr of our Lord, who spoke the truth knowing that he would lose his life. We see Saint John the Evangelist, living in times of persecution, watching his brother apostles be martyred about him. However, he remained faithful to the end and converted many followers to Christ. Of course I cannot forget to mention our Blessed Mother. She accepted God’s Will most faithfully, giving birth to her Savior, and did not cease to care for Him even when He left her side to die. These, and many other saints, point to the reality that we are on a journey towards a new life in Christ. We are continuing forward as Christians to a life of joy, peace, thanksgiving, and love of God and neighbor. Though it may be intimidating, the Lord will see us through times of trouble and bring us back to Himself in the end. The priesthood is a life of struggle and a life of service, but if He is calling us to the priesthood, He will faithfully guard us on our way there. A seminarian therefore cannot be confident in himself alone, because all the gifts he has received are gifts the Lord has given. We are waiting in His Advent and rejoicing in His Birth, and in both seasons we have faith that in the end God will save us. God-is-with-us, and if His people truly want holy priests, He will give them their laborers. We must trust Gabriel when he says, “Do not be afraid.” This New Year is a year of hope, as Pope Benedict writes about in his new encyclical Spe Salvi:

We need the greater and lesser hopes that keep us going day by day. But these are not enough without the great hope, which must surpass everything else. This great hope can only be God, who encompasses the whole of reality and who can bestow upon us what we, by ourselves, cannot attain. The fact that it comes to us as a gift is actually part of hope. God is the foundation of hope: not any god, but the God who has a human face and who has loved us to the end, each one of us and humanity in its entirety.

Thus in the end, no matter what our past may have been, the New Year is waiting for us to begin again, and this time to begin again with more confidence in our Lord who has loved each one of us. “God bless us, every one!” So whether you are called to be a priest or religious, all Christians are called to walk forward in hopeful pursuit of living the life of Christ: the new life of faith, hope, and love. Every day is a New Year’s Day because Christ is makes all things new, especially we who are ever in need of beginning again. Have a blessed Christmas and a New Year filled with hope.