Spiritual Summer

It seems somewhat appropriate that I culminate my "summer in review" posting, looking specifically at how July really helped my spiritual life, on the day that I finally go to Confession. All the old is wiped away, with today starts a fresh slate.

July was, moreso than anything else, a really important month for me spiritually. In July I not only managed to start praying again, something I could only manage as a plaintive plea in my loneliest, most despairing moments, earlier; but I also found the FLAME rekindled.

I've spoken, at least once in this blog, of my passion for becoming a priest, using the metaphor of an all-consuming flame. Burning with intense heat and shining with passion very much describes how badly I want to be ordained.

From when I broke my leg, for about all of May and June, I could barely muster a flicker of conviction that this was my vocation. It wasn't so much that I abandoned the idea, or intellectually lost hope, since my stated goal remained a return to the seminary this fall, and I never considered otherwise. No, what happened was a complete loss of passion. My relationship with God went from "I really want to be a priest" to "why me? why me?"

Not "why do you want me as a priest?", but "why did I break my leg?"

It was the most basic of plaintive cries. "Why me?"

I asked the same thing again, not even two weeks ago, when my car's transmission went and I had to replace the whole car. However, because I was able to work through the question the first time, when it REALLY hurt, it was hardly an issue at all the second time.

It's easy enough to believe, when you're not the one concerned, in the idea of Divine Providence, and all hardships and ailments working for one's own good, but it is HARD to believe that there is a point to having something bad happen to yourself. We are not an objective race where ourselves are concerned.

July not only saw me lose my crutches, it saw me regain my balance spiritually. Even before I got rid of the crutches in mid-July, and long after I was SO eager to lose them, I managed to start saying the Liturgy of the Hours again on a regular basis, something that I lost the ability to do as early as April 22nd. This coincided with wanting to go to daily Mass again, with wanting to talk to Jesus, with living in a mindframe that was more God-oriented.

And then things started sort of slipping into place, understanding-wise.

Just from a plot, "this is what happens to Michael" point of view, I could see as early as May what breaking my leg meant: working in the Archives, and all the wide array of effects that could have on my life. The stuff learned there provided lots of potential teaching for the day-to-day problems of being a priest and parish administrator, as well as possibly being the first step on a path towards a career in the Archdiocesan administration, for all that I am able to guess.

More importantly, though, I began to see the effect that it was having on me, as a person.

In breaking my leg and having to suffer through all the effects of surgery and healing, I went through my "valley of the shadow of death". It's one thing to just sit there and know something, intellectually; it's quite something else to experience it. Breaking my leg, being hospitalised, and having to go through the agony of recovery is likely to be, for me, an incredible experience for being able to relate to people. A large part of the ministry of a parish priest is ministry to the sick and dying. The healthy cannot relate nearly so well as the formerly-injured can. In one, very important, way I grew up that much more thanks to the broken leg.

I think it was also important for me to be forcibly knocked out of a feeling of optimism where the seminary was concerned. I needed to go through a period where I didn't want to think about the future, didn't want to do ANY work, and didn't want to really have anything to do with people, where all the good parts of seminary life were missing, and I was left in a grey, half-seminary which it was ultimately really good to get out of.

What this meant is that in the future, when a point comes in my seminary life where the academics finally become too much, where the busyness becomes too much, where I just don't want to be in those walls any longer-- I'll have somewhere to look back on and remember "this isn't nearly as bad as that was, and I got through that".

As of right now, I'm not quite out of the woods with my leg: I'm still limping somewhat. Spiritually, however, I'm well away. I've spent more than a month now with the flames not only regrown to their former height, but soaring higher: a wildfire raging out of control. I want to to be a priest so badly--the seven years to ordination hasn't looked so long since before I entered. I'm finally over the bad end to last year, and I'm looking forward eagerly to next year.