The Simplicity of Seminary

I’ve always wondered how life is lived in a monastery. I don’t mean the schedule so much as the feeling: how does it feel when one’s daily purpose is union with Jesus Christ? In that simple, wholesome life, the priority from wake-up to bedtime is prayer. While St. John Paul II Seminary is no monastery, life here stretches me toward a wholesome simplicity that I thought would remain a dream.

After thirteen years of public school and a semester at one of the most secular universities in the Northeast, moving to SJPII Seminary was one of the best decisions I’ve made. It didn’t sink in until the first night. As I stared out of a third-floor window at the Basilica dome piercing the night sky, it struck me: “I am here to stay.”  

From my morning alarm to the time I collapse into bed, there’s an excitement in my heart—a feeling I never felt outside the seminary. Everyone here has the same goal: to grow in relationship with Our Lord and Our Lady. At SJPII Seminary, we come from six dioceses: Washington, D.C., Baltimore, Richmond, Arlington, Wheeling-Charleston, and Bismarck. But love for God unites us all. It’s a unity difficult to articulate. I’ve only been here for ten days, but I already feel it in conversation, in laughter echoing through the halls, in smiles at the dinner table, and while playing Ultimate Frisbee. I never feel alone. In secular schools, people feared isolation. Here, fears of loneliness give way to deep fraternity. And the solitude that once led to loneliness now becomes the silence where we meet our Father.

Future challenges are inevitable; nobody said life at seminary would be easy. In many ways, life here is harder than before. Between early wake-ups, morning room checks, and a hundred pages of class reading per week, our days require discipline and diligence.

But there is a reason life is harder. Every man here is striving toward something outside himself. Every man here knows that he cannot succeed alone. Through God’s grace, every man here is working in unison for the greatest of all goods—God Himself. After arriving only ten days ago, I feel I’m standing on a bridge, my old life behind me, and the beginning of my new life ahead. All I must do each day is take a simple step forward.

Mr. O'Donnell is a College II seminarian for the Archdiocese of Washington.