The Next Step

The coolest thing about the internet is that it is like nothing so much as a near-infinite encyclopedia, where you hardly have to pull down another volume and flip through the pages to find something you're looking for. If as a kid you never got delightfully lost in an encyclopedia while trying to look up information, then this posting may not be for you. If you prefer what my dad used to call "The Columbus Method" (find it, and land on it), then my enthusiasm today is likely lost on you. I'm sorry, my friend; you may have grown up too soon. Me… I never will. Jesus says that's okay, too: check out Mark 10:14-16 and Matthew 18:2-5.

I can waste richly enjoy a lot of time surfing the 'net while trying to look something up. I don't click on links at random, and never at a site I don't know something about – but I just love how yet another whole new sheaf of information unrolls at a single, choice click. The term "hyperlink" is very apt – you basically step through an electronic space-warp, and come through in a whole new place: click on a reference on one webpage and poof! you're halfway across the galaxy! Whee!!

So with Portia (Daughter Two) soon due to start her last year of high school, and thence enter college, the hands-on phase of my role as her dad – which has generally been very peripheral at best (and thus always will be an ache in my heart) – wraps up. Already in my mid-forties, I need to really move it with getting into a monastery/seminary, nailing down my bachelor's degree (if necessary) first.

Thus this evening, after days pondering my next move in the career/professional world, I started e- space-warping around the internet universe to see which US monasteries/seminaries take late-life postulants. I'd heard one mentioned on EWTN a few months ago, but didn't note the name fast enough, and recall only that it was (probably) in New England… where I entered this world in first place. (Well, conceived overseas, but took my first earthly breath in Boston.)

Older men and women entering into a professed religious order (or clergy as well, for the men) are referred to as having a "late vocation" or "second vocation". So throwing that term into my search mix, I soon landed in a Catholic chatroom-thread where several participants (mostly women) were discussing their late vocations – some still pursuing them, and others since professed. A young seminarian contributed this [spellings are all his]:

A somewhat unrelated bit of intresting information. As far as later vocation to the diocesan priesthood (what are refered to as second vocations) there is a special national seminary just for them. It is up in new england it called Blessed John XVIII National Seminary.

Bingo!

I quickly found the Blessed JohnXXIII National Seminary in Weston, Massachusetts… and check this out: "A tested priestly formation program since 1964 for men 30 to 60 years of age". Yee-hah! I mean, Yeshua!

They're just up the road from my late grandparents' (and my mother's, and my babyhood's) home in Dedham, and just as far from another suburb where my sister Alicia (and baby-to-be) and husband Levi live (except I believe they're still in Italy). I am psyched!!

More than once when Shellie (Daughter One) would get extremely wound up as a pre-teen, she'd shriek, and run furious laps through the kitchen, dining-room, and living-room, over and over. Likely I indulged her too much on too many things (as with both daughters), but this was just too funny to see for me to quell it.

Well, I want to do that right now. Woo-hoo!

More as it develops; now, if you'll excuse me, I need to wear a smoking oval groove in the carpet.