February at the Jesuit Novitiate (continuation from previous postings)

To all, Pax Christi,

The month of February flew by, and 10 days of that month were spent in the San Francisco Bay Area and Sacramento, as I mentioned that we would be doing in my last email. My brother novices and I stayed at Santa Clara University, one of the three Jesuit universities in California. From there, we were constantly on the move, visiting schools in San Jose, San Francisco, and Berkeley. The Jesuit School of Theology is located in Berkeley, otherwise known as JSTB, and is one of the two theologates located in the US, the other being in Boston. (A theologate, by the way, is where all Jesuit studying to be priests do their final studies prior to ordination.) We also stopped at the Sacred Heart Center in Los Gatos, a huge old building which used to house the novitiate for the California Province and is now used as the retirement center, visited various Jesuit parishes in San Francisco and San Jose, and the province retreat center in nearby Los Altos. Our tour ended in Sacramento, where we stayed and visited the Jesuit High School there. Of course, we did not head to Sacramento until I had given some of my brothers a tour of San Jose's Little Portugal, and enjoyed a little Portuguese cuisine...

The purpose of the tour was to get us new Jesuits to meet some of the other Jesuits in the province, and to perhaps get us to start thinking about where we might want to serve in the future. My trip led me to the conclusion that there will obviously be a lot of work to do in the future, due to the fact that many Jesuits are approaching retirement, and there are few young Jesuits around to replace them. I definitely felt attracted to the education apostolate. In the future, I may very well find myself working at one of those schools that I visited up north. But, as I may have shared with some of you, I still cannot see myself working in a parish in a regular basis.

We barely had time to catch our breath after our trip up north, when it was time to head to the Los Angeles Religious Education Congress, an annual gathering of over 20,000 people (maybe 40,000, I can't remember exactly) in nearby Anaheim, right across the street from Disneyland. It can perhaps best be described as the largest Catholic Trade show in the U.S., probably in the world, with exhibitions and workshops on a variety of different topics. Us novices helped man a booth for the Jesuits, and that in itself was a lot of work, with the set up and the take down. We all returned from the event completely exhausted and happy that it was over.

So now, we will be here in Culver City, with the exception of a weekend in Santa Barbara to visit a Jesuit parish there at the end of March, until after Easter. My weekly apostolate at the elementary school in East LA has been going well, and has mostly involved me tutoring elementary school students in reading and math. This week, we finished our class on the vow of poverty, the vow which I like to describe as a "vow of detachment and indifference that leads one to freedom." One must be detached from material goods and the like, and therefore indifferent towards them, so that he can freely serve others. It does not mean that one live in poverty, but rather that one "preach in poverty," as St. Ignatius wanted. Next, we will move on to our study of the other vows and the Constitutions, and will be discerning our pilgrimage destinations. At the end of April, us novices will head out for three weeks on our own, on a symbolic journey to help us understand poverty better and deepen our trust in God.

For those of you observing the season of Lent right now, enjoy it...

Until next time...