Hugo Lomax with the Allen Hall crest. Our motto, “Vivamus in Spe”, means “We Live in Hope”.
I was asked to offer a few words for this month’s newsletter about ‘being a seminarian’. That shouldn’t be too difficult as I’ve been a seminarian for almost three years now, and I ought to know a thing or two about it. I could say a bit about our routine here at Allen Hall Seminary in London; about our daily cycle of prayers and classes and our regular pastoral work. Given however that in this Jubilee Year we are all Pilgrims of Hope, and that this month I will be travelling to Rome with my confreres for the Jubilee of Seminarians, I thought it might be more apposite to say a little about hope in the life of a seminarian.
It is always a good policy to check what the Catechism of the Catholic Church has to say on any subject before you start to write about it. About hope we are told that it is, “the confident expectation of divine blessing and the beatific vision of God”. And that, “the virtue of hope responds to the aspiration of happiness which God has placed in the heart of every man.” Hope then is about looking forwards to future happiness, and while in the normal run of things we can have forlorn hopes, the kinds of hope that don’t really expect to be fulfilled, Christian Hope, because it goes hand in hand with Faith and Love, allows us to enjoy an overture of our future happiness in the present.
Being a seminarian of course involves a lot of looking forwards. The time from my arrival at Allen Hall to my eventually being ordained a priest will be about seven years. Seven years of looking forwards in eager anticipation to a life that I can’t wait to begin. Moreover, if the celibate priesthood can be properly understood as a special kind of marriage, with the Church as your bride, then seminary might be likened to a long engagement. Jacob had to labour for fourteen years in the sheepfolds of Laban before he could finally marry the love of his life Rachel, so Allen Hall is a cinch in comparison.
There is a tension that comes with hope. Obviously you look forward to ordination as your goal, but then priests will often say to me, “don’t wish this time away”, and there is clearly a wisdom to that. If I want to be a priest so badly that I don’t value this time of preparation, then am I really wanting the right thing? My calling, like everyone else’s, is a particular rendering of the imitation of Christ, but that doesn’t begin when a bishop (please God that we have a bishop by then), lays his hands on my head. I can be attending to the Father’s will this very day and hour and minute. So while we are all permitted a little angst now and then, the life of a seminarian should be as happy as it is hopeful. After all, Christ has already achieved all that needs to be achieved, and there are no ‘ifs and buts’ for us to fret over, there is only, “Follow me.”
A final word from the letter to the Hebrews: “We have this sure and steadfast anchor for the soul, a hope that enters into the inner shrine behind the curtain, where Jesus has gone as a forerunner on our behalf, having become a high priest for ever after the order of Melchizedek.”