Summer Travel

For me, Summer is normally a time when I enter into a simpler form of life. The past few summers, I have just worked a maintenance job for a parish and helped serve liturgies. For some reason, prayer this past year of formation led me away from getting a job like normal.

Initially, I thought that I wanted to spend extended time volunteering with the poor, but other opportunities presented themselves that I couldn't resist. For the last three weeks of May, I was able to live in my home parish's rectory for the first time and spend quality time with the two priests serving there. They are extremely busy, so I normally can only chat with them for a few minutes at a time. They left me with a lot of "the seminary doesn't teach you this" type lessons.

Also during this time, I was able to meet some of the more regular volunteers who help the parish. I have seen their faces and their cars in the parking lot for years at daily Mass, but I usually stay back for a bit after Mass to make a prayer of thanksgiving instead of chit-chatting immediately afterwards. Now when I come to my parish for Mass, it feels even more like my home community rather than just a bunch of people who happen to live in my zip code.

After I moved out of the rectory, I went on a pilgrimage to Rome with a deacon and two neophytes to the faith. They were both protestant missionaries in Mexico before converting/reverting to Catholicism, so it was cool to see their reactions to some of the "extra Catholic" stuff that Protestants normally don't like. For example, we visited the famous "bone chapel" owned by the Franciscans. They were a bit uneasy about friars making art out of the remains of others...

On a more spiritual level, it just felt great to be back in the Holy City. I have been there once before, but it felt like home in a weird way. Very little of the culture reminds me of home, but I was still able to go back to some of my favorite spots from the last time I came.

Likewise, we were able to stay at a monastery run by the Poor Clare Sisters. The two host sisters, who were allowed to interact with the outside world, were some of the holiest women that I have ever encountered. Our group was able to sit down with them for about an hour one evening, and I was just in awe of how profoundly they listened to me after they asked me about my vocation story.

Obviously, they kept eye contact with me, but they just had this holy gaze that almost made me want to look away. They reminded me of my spiritual director in that way. It took me a long time to be comfortable with him in an intense conversation because he knows how to pierce my soul. I look forward to future visits with these sisters.

As far as the standout highlights go, that is about all I can say about the trip. It was nice, and there were many more graced moments, but I feel like I didn't take full advantage of a privileged opportunity to be in union with God and the saints. I say this because every time that I have gone to Rome, I have encountered such beauty in the churches and basilicas. This beauty, however, is extremely fleeting whenever I attend Mass or adoration in these chapels. The contrast of the simple Eucharistic host with the baroque decoration leads me to understand how powerful the Eucharist truly is.

I know this sounds profound, but it is only profound if it leads me to offer my soul over to God. Unfortunately, on this trip, there just wasn't much time for quality mental prayer built into the schedule. I was visiting some of the most profound churches in the world, where many of my patron saints' bodies lay at rest, yet I would hardly make time for real prayer. We were able to make it to Mass most days, and I could pray the Liturgy of the Hours on public transit. However, I came on this pilgrimage to enhance my spiritual life, but I left with a bit of regret.

I know that it is a part of Italian culture to spend 1+ hours eating lunch and 2+ hours eating dinner, but this felt more like a vacation to serve my passions. I have talked on this blog for years about the necessity of having a non-negotiable, dedicated prayer life, yet I hypocritically didn't even ask our guide if I could spend 30 minutes before the Blessed Sacrament. Sometimes, we even had the time in the Churches we visited, but I just didn't take advantage of it.

I learned a lot from this trip, but I feel like I left something on the table. I repent of any selfishness that got in the way of what God may have had in store for me there...

Fortunately, God decided to throw a bit of a curveball into my heart the following week. I began to feel led to help with youth ministry at my home parish and another one nearby. I was able to be a chaperone and take teens to the LifeTeen Leadership Conference (LTLC). I first attended this conference in 2017 and thought it was decent, but I honestly didn't know what the heck I was doing with my faith at that point in my life.

I was a bit hesitant to help at first because the LifeTeen culture of praise and worship is a bit cringy to some, but I figured I might as well keep an open mind.

I was greatly surprised by how good the talks were. For context, teens had to receive and invite for this conference from their youth minister since they were determined to be future leaders in their youth group. Because of this, the speakers weren't as worried about shaking the faith of the teens since these teens could handle more challenges than the average youth group attendee.

As a seminarian, these talks were quite nourishing for my own life. The one part of the conference that stuck with me is the need to have an unwavering devotion to Scripture. At one point, a speaker spontaneously FaceTimed his son and asked him to name all the books of the New Testament. He struggled a tiny bit, but he named all 27 books in order. I knew that I had a problem at that very moment because a 12-year-old knew more about the New Testament than a future shepherd of souls.

That inspired me to put down any other books I was currently reading and just start reading through the Old Testament. Since that conference, I have read Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, Ruth, 1 Samuel, and I am working on 2 Samuel right now. Am I understanding all of what I am reading? Not really. But I am surprised by how relevant many of these texts are to the Liturgy of the Hours.

I think that I am comprehending more of the stories now than during my Old Testament survey course during my first semester of seminary because I am reading them at my own pace and leisure rather than out of obedience for a homework assignment with a deadline.

At the conference, I was also able to meet 3 other seminarians who were delightful in their own unique way. One was a really nice guy from Texas who is dealing with a lot of adversity with the culture of his diocese. Another was a fellow mechanical engineer from Florida who is a zealot for the Blessed Mother; he was able to teach me some good things. The final was a deacon from Missouri who had some good pastoral wisdom to share with me, and he was a good listener when I was expressing some of my joys and fears of ordained life/seminary life.

A couple of weeks after that conference, I flew to Poland to attend the Extraordinary Music Workshop hosted by the Dominican Friars of Krakow! I wasn't nervous about this trip, but I knew there was potential for it to be a disaster. I have talked before about how I am new to singing and music overall, so I wasn't sure how a 7-day immersion with a bunch of music nerds was going to go. It ended up being the highlight of my summer!

We had Mass, Lauds, and Vespers built into the schedule, and there are tons of Churches in Krakow, so finding time for prayer was not much of a burden. I usually prayed the Office of Readings in the morning, daytime prayer during lunch break, and night prayer before bed. I didn't complete a holy hour every single day, but I did skip out on some social events in order to prioritize my prayer; I had learned a bit from the Rome trip.

Honestly, the music wasn't even the best part of the trip. I was just able to befriend a bunch of holy, joyful young adults from various parts of the world. There were only about 45 of us in the English section of the workshops, so we would often go out for lunch, dinner, and drinks together. I was also able to socialize and network with some gifted music directors, composers, and chant scholars. I was surprised by how down-to-earth these people were; they weren't the type who try to flex all of their accolades as you see in other parts of academia.

I am still waiting on some recordings from a friend that I attended the conference with, but I was able to record a few clips of us (this is an iPhone mic not placed in a good spot, so the sound isn't reflective of how nice it was in person).

I honestly couldn't tell you much of what I learned from this trip because we spent most of our time rehearsing rather than listening to lectures. However, I had never sung from SATB music before, and I was able to hang with the fellow "intermediate" bass singers by the end of the week. I hope that I can dive deeper into choir music this year at the seminary and even work my way up to some compositions by Byrd or Palestrina.

I was able to enjoy our Gregorian chant lessons a lot. All of us were quite confused the first couple of days because our professor was trying to teach us semiology from the 9th century, not the typical square notation that we are used to reading. Apparently, square notation is a relatively modern innovation that struggles to do justice to the original melodies that were passed down through oral tradition. There is an "ad fontes" movement within the chant community to recover old manuscripts and figure out how our Gregorian tradition used to sound. This is being published in books such as the Graduale Triplex and Graduale Novum. Notice the notation that looks like chicken scratch at first:

We were able to cap the trip off with a trip to the Sanctuary of Divine Mercy. I wasn't expecting much from this religious site because of the modernist architecture, but it was a surprisingly holy and sacred place!

I was able to spend some quality time in prayer here and had the opportunity to go to confession. I bought some books about the Divine Mercy devotion and even bought a rosary to pray the chaplet with. This experience of a religious site felt much more proper compared to my experience in Rome. It helped that all of the visitors observed silence inside of the chapels, and an overall quiet when walking around the grounds.

I still have a month left of summer, but the majority of my travel has concluded. I still look forward to my little sister's wedding, my FOCUS missionary's wedding, and a seminarian conference with the St. Paul Center on the Psalms.