Seminarian

At age 17, I became a Franciscan monk at San Lorenzo Priory, a newly built monastery tucked back into the hills on the edge of the Santa Ynez Valley in the coastal mountains of Central California. I had just graduated from high school.  In August I became a postulant, the first step in becoming a Franciscan priest. 

Every morning we got up at 5, went to the chapel and chanted Prime and Matins. After breakfast we chanted Lauds, Terce and Sext. After dinner we would do Vespers and then Compline. All of this in Latin in 1964, psalms, New Testament readings, and lessons. In between the Hours of the Divine Office we did gardening, took care of chickens, rabbits, and cows. Our meals were eaten mostly in silence. We had a few classes and there was a little free time but not much. Sundays were free days, no work, but still prayers. Sometimes we got to go to Santa Ynez Mission in Solvang. 

I was at the monastery with my high school friend Joe Quattropane and three other postulants and a couple of novice brothers. The best part of it I remember was running free in the ranchland around us. We were up a hill from the Santa Ynez River, a dry arroyo with a small trickle in the center at the mouth of a canyon that climbed up Mount Figueroa. The oak grassland around us and the canyon teemed with deer, wild pigs and hawks.

Built the previous year, San Lorenzo smelled of concrete still drying. Each of us had a room, a cell, walls of concrete blocks, a desk, and a bed. Once a week we did discipline outside our cells, flagellating ourselves with a few short rosary chains without the beads, bound together; probably available in some monastery supply catalogue from Belgium or Italy. The first time we did it, it was a surprise, but reinforced our connection to very old traditions. The real penance of it was more the standing in doorways, bare asses exposed while we bent over swinging a handful of chains lightly behind ourselves. It did promote humility. It’s hard to be dignified with your underwear around your ankles and your robe pulled up over your backside.     

After three months of monastery life, we became novices and donned the full robe and hood of Capuchin Franciscans. The other monks were a couple of brothers, one was a cook and the other did maintenance work, older retired priests, one demented, one not. Another priest, a middle aged man seemed to be serving out some sort of exile at San Lorenzo away from whatever problems he had left. He didn’t seem a very happy man. And there was a novice master.

I really enjoyed the ritualized prayers of the Office, the sound and feel of the Latin. Often during meals the Rule of St. Francis was read. I enjoyed the hills and mountains around us.

At 5:30 a.m. one morning half awake in the chapel to the music of the Psalms I was daydreaming of Mary Ellen Connelly. I woke up during my daydream and thought it was time I reviewed my sacred calling. I realized I was more inspired by my wanderings around the mountain than I was by my spiritual practice. Between my daydreams and my love of the mountain I thought I probably didn’t have much of a calling to the priesthood. 

It still amazes me that I was at any time a seminarian. I grew up Catholic, attending Catholic grammar school. I was an altar boy. I went to a Catholic high school. The nuns and priests always pitched a vocation to the priesthood as the highest calling a person could have. I wasn’t a goody two shoes, but I was always trying and I appreciated any praise I got from adults. Answering the call to the religious life was encouraged. 

In high school when I had no clue what I was going to do after graduation and my best friend was grooming himself to enter the priesthood. I went along. It solved the problem of how to apply to college. My parents had not attended college themselves. My older sister had gone to the Sisters of Charity college in Iowa on a full scholarship and my eldest sister had become a nun. I didn’t know anything about applications, selecting a college or anything else about going on after high school and it seemed no one was helping me. 

As soon as I said I wanted to be a priest it was all taken care of. After the seminary I figured out on my own how to apply to Loyola University and eventually 8 years later I graduated from UCLA. 

I never put San Lorenzo on my resume or even told many people about it. I enjoyed it. I was always glad I did it; I just didn’t want to be categorized as an ex-seminarian. In my mind six months didn’t qualify me for that. It became a habit not to mention it. When I remembered, sometimes it was funny to surprise someone with the information.  My eldest son was particularly suprrised at the age of 24 to learn I had been a seminarian. As an adult no one thought of me as an ex-seminarian and in my own mind I wasn’t an ex-seminarian, an ex-monk maybe, but then for only six months. It was a short retreat from the material world. It did cost me a draft deferment. Two years later I was classified 1A because I had not been a student continuously since high school. 

It was something private that I kept to myself, but it was a good time in my life, time spent outdoors and time spent in prayer and contemplation, good preparation at the threshold of being an adult.