I am off.

Optional Memorial of Saint Josemaria Escriva

If any of you are in Rome in the next five years, drop me a line and stop by for a visit. The best way to contact me is email at roman.seminarian.gbdioc@gmail.com

Saint Josemaria Escriva -- Ora Pro Nobis.

(Nervous as all heck -- so I am flying with Mary and Joseph in my prayers)

Summer Days (Daze?)

How do I start to describe my much abridged summer? For a while I had felt abandoned by God. But this is not really fair -- he is present everywhere, at all times. No the problem has been with me. Why have I spotted my "hour of power?" A daily commitment to prayer. It is odd going from the environment of seminary, in which the very structure of the day facilitates the interior life -- holy hour with adoration, communal Liturgy of the Hours, mandatory Mass, and plenty of solitude and quiet. Then there is home. Being home really is a blessing, especially considering how short my stay home is in comparison to two years in Rome. But now I have the challenge, and every challenge is really an opportunity, a graced moment that God wishes to use to teach us, yes a very "sacrament of the moment," to make the spiritual life a personal relationship with God, one Incorporated into the fabric of my life, not imposed from an external institution, even the most benevolent institution like a Roman Catholic Seminary.

How am I doing? Well to be honest horrible, but this just reflects my own weakness and my dependence on the regiment of the seminary. I have fallen -- into old habits of sinfulness in both thought and deed, and I have been half-hearted in my spiritual life ("my love is not for half-hearted men...").

So my prayer was a prayer of awaiting -- waiting for the presence of God to come to me. This was a false-prayer though. God is radically present -- at each moment. This has been my focus for the last week and a half -- the presence of God. God is not the God of the dead, but of the living -- living is present. God is of the present. He meets me now.