(Keegan is pictured second from right in the above photo.)
It was perhaps a strange assignment. “You’re going to spend six weeks at a convent in Germany this summer,” Father Michael Schuetz, the diocesan Vocations director, told me over breakfast last spring.
I was simultaneously excited and surprised. It is not exactly your typical seminarian summer assignment — four brother seminarians in a small German town south of Frankfurt called Breuberg. We went without knowing much of what we would be doing there, and even now looking back, it is not easy to say what exactly we did there. Nonetheless, and in large part because of how unassuming and simple it was, this summer was a surprisingly blessed and formative time for the four of us.
We were welcomed by the Religious Sisters of Mercy (of Alma, Michigan) and began a summer focused on the most foundational pillar of seminarian formation — human formation. Sankt Marienhaus, an old orphanage now converted into a quiet beautiful convent in the hills of the rural German countryside, became our home for the summer. “Home” is indeed a good way to describe it because what we did there was just … life. We simply lived a quite ordinary Christian life. We prayed, we cooked and ate together, we worked, we went on trips and took the dog for a walk.
What it is that consecrated brothers and sisters do is often nothing special, but the way they do it — living lives of fidelity, obedience and prayer — allows the holiness and reign of God to break into our world in a beautiful way. We were privileged to witness this life and the grace that clearly flowed from it. It was a great honor to not only see their life, but to enter into it and live a bit of that life for a summer alongside the sisters.
Although our future lives as priests of the Diocese of Raleigh will look quite different from life in the convent, it remains just another form of the simple Christian life. Though we will have more responsibilities and different tasks entrusted to us, the life of Sankt Marienhaus will remain for us a standard of a holy Christian life that we will always have to aspire toward and guide our lives as priests of the best diocese in the world.
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