Home is where the heart is. It is the place where you feel secured, comforted, loved, and cared for. It is a place where you feel important. It is the place where there is peace, love, harmony. When there is love, there is God. The seminary is my home, my second home that is.
How is life inside the seminary? Is it hard to live in the seminary? How many times do you pray in a day? Do you only study about God? Are you not bored that you can not go out? These are just some common questions ask to a seminarian.
What is a seminary anyway? Seminary is a formation house where young men are nurtured to be a better priest in the future. It is like a seed plot where seeds grow to have a better foundation before transferring to the wild. The seeds are the seminarians. They are being trained to have better foundation so that in the future, they will be sent out to become the messengers of the God.
It is quite disappointing that some have negative connotation about the seminary. Some people look at the seminary as a rehabilitation house. It is a good place but they do not train young men only to change to better men but to form them and nurture their vocation. It is only a place for those who answer the call of God to be his fishermen.
Many people are very much curious about the life of a seminarian. Some think that it is hard to be in the seminary while others think that seminarians only pray and do nothing else. Actually, life in the seminary is not hard and boring. It is easier in a sense that seminarians follow a schedule that will help them manage well their time unlike those students outside the seminary. Every second is allotted to an activity – from rising to resting, from sunrise to sundown. Every activity is signalled by the ringing of the bell. Seminarians do study like students in the universities. They are taught basically all what a person has to know – from latest issues to faith.
People always attach the word religious to seminarians. They are not taught to become perfect but to be an example of faith to the lays. I actually can not count how many times seminarians pray. It is not actually the times but the sincerity of praying that counts. Seminarians are taught to love praying and above all the celebration of the Eucharist wherein it is the first activity that they do in a day.
Life in the seminary is not boring. I do not agree to those people who say it is boring. Is it only because we cannot go out anytime we want to? Or is it because we cannot watch and play all the time? Remember that as long as a person is happy of what he is doing, he is not bored. Those people, I think, who are saying that they are bored are those who are not really earnest of their answer to their calling. Seminarians answer the calling of God not because they are obliged but they are happy of answering their vocation.
God has given us the vocation of priesthood but He also gave us the freedom to answer it or not. If we answered it let it be the reason that we are happy of doing so and not because of being forced to do so.
For me, there is no place like my second home. The seminary - it is my home sweet home.
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