Have a bit of free time, so I guess I should put a post up here. A few observations about seminary life so far:
- It’s a busy life. Between communal prayer, classes, eating, and meetings, there isn’t a lot of free time left. It feels like there should be, but somehow there isn’t.
- You change clothes often. For the new guys, we have to wear a jacket and tie to most functions, and for the most formal of occasions we wear a black suit with a white shirt and a black necktie. If you didn’t know any better and you saw us coming down the hall, you’d assume either (a) we were a bunch of funeral directors, (b) we were Mormons on a mission, or (c) we work for a secret agency that monitors and controls alien activity around the world and you’re about to have a portion of your memory modified. For everyone else (and us after Cassock Day), we would wear clerical shirts or cassocks to class, chapel, and dining room and a cassock and surplice to Mass. But immediately after such things, the guys tend to change into casual civilian attire. And if they go to the gym, there’s another change. Over the course of a day, you can change your outfit half a dozen times. I should mention that the resident priests often do the same. You can tell when they wear a different collar to dinner than they wore to breakfast. Makes me wonder if all priests do this in real life.
- I really need to learn how to absorb when I read. I can pick up a paperback novel and read through it and remember most everything. I pick up a textbook and read a page and I can’t tell you a darn thing that I just read. If anyone has any ideas on how to improve this area, I’d be appreciative.
- The seminarians are generally pretty nice.
- It can be really hard to tell the difference between some of the older seminarians and the younger priests. As a rule, only clergy are allowed to wear a suit jacket with their collars, so that’s usually a sign to say “hello Father.” But if the priest is just wearing a clerical shirt, it’s not so easy.
- Receiving postal mail is fun!
- They already gave us a session on the upcoming Seminary Appeal. We’ll be sent out to different parishes to speak after Mass some Sunday, and we went over the guidelines of what to say. We have to write out our talk and have it approved by the Dean. Not even here a week, and they’re already showing us how to ask for money. I suppose if this were a Protestant seminary, they would have done that the first day.
More observations and such later on.
