A Seminarian Thanksgiving

You know what? It’s pretty darn nice to be a seminarian. 

I mean how could it not be? Lots of things are paid for by incredibly generous people, families will go to the ends of the earth to make the dinner you’re having at their home the occasion of the millennium, parish rosary groups pray for you like its a bad habit, and everywhere we go we are greeted with excitement and hugs and great to-do. 

But, I mean, we deserve it, right? After all, most of us have left previous plans which already in the process of becoming realities, giving up jobs and money and marriage and children to serve Christ and his great Church. Personally, I travelled over 400 miles away for seminary, to struggle everyday with being a philosophy major and reading Aquinas like it’s People Magazine and Aristotle like scripture. I’m up at the crack of dawn to pray before our Lord in the Eucharist for an hour and then I get to go to Mass everyday in our own seminary chapel before going out and sitting through a class that some good person somewhere, far away is helping me pay for. But I deserve all of that, right? Right? 

“Who the hell does this kid think he is?” you’re asking. 

My name is Ryan Adorjan, and I am seminarian for the Roman Catholic Church, the Diocese of Joliet, and St. John Vianney Seminary in St. Paul, Minnesota and I’m saying NO, I don’t deserve any of this. We, as a human race, didn’t deserve for Christ to do what he did for us; we didn’t deserve his salvation. BUT…right from the beginning, God started doing crazy things for his sinner children that they don’t deserve, but God continues to pour grace upon grace on us…and why? Because we deserve grace? It serves us right that God keeps blessing us so abundantly? I think it’s just the opposite. After all he’s done for us, God deserves us. He deserves our love and the least a person can do is set his life at the feet of Christ, our Savior and merciful King. 

So, back to me. Why are seminarians lathered, pampered, and catered to? Truthfully, I have no idea. It seems to me that the good people of God are keenly aware that, because of Christ’s sacrifice and the Church that he established, the people deserve the sacraments. They deserve to be baptized, be forgiven, and receive the Eucharist. The deserve to be confirmed in the spirit, be married in the Church, serve Christ through ordination, and receive the anointing of Almighty God when the time comes for them to meet Jesus face to face. And, from what I can tell about you good Catholic people, when you all want it, y’all want it and you want it be good. Is that why you invest so much into young guys from suburbia? 

Whatever your reason for supporting us the way that you do, please, from the bottom of my prideful heart, know of my “attitude of gratitude” and the spirit of thanksgiving with which I greet each of you this holiday season. The Church isn’t sustained just by priests and seminarians, but by all of God’s faithful children who have taken a keen interest and pressing concern in the future of the sacraments, of faith, and of the Truth.

I do not deserve this life; nobody does. I am so unworthy to live this life I have been chosen to live (John 15:16) but I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me (Phil. 4:13) to the point that it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me (Gal. 2:20). 

God be praised. 

Thank you.

In Christ, 
RA