Seminarian Reflections: Encountering God in the Wilderness

This past summer I was given the opportunity to attend COR Expedition’s St. Jogues Seminarian Project. When I began the formation program, as excited as I was to go adventuring through the back country of Wyoming, I was even more excited to see what Our Heavenly Father was going to do in this new environment. While hiking with groups in the remote and desolate landscape, our team focused on leadership, service, and communion with Our Loving Father. The Lord was able to do profound things in my life through the simplicity and constant challenge of living in the wilderness. The practical grace I received was exercising and increasing my capacity for self-gift. During the summer I was repeatedly put in situations where I was challenged physically: climbing a peak, cold, hungry, or sore, and mentally, frustrated by maps, tired, or unable to find camp. 

During these experiences the Lord made it clear that I could either rely on my own strengths or I could trust in him, focus, and seek to help someone else. In the face of whatever pain, frustration, or suffering I was undergoing, the answer was almost always to make a gift of myself to someone through my actions; like Jesus did on the cross, when he gave himself totally as a gift to us, the pain and suffering he underwent was transformed into new life. This was my experience every time I chose to surrender to God by making a gift of myself to another. The difficulties we were going through diminished, and I found that I had the strength and the desire to keep going and serve someone else. It was a life-giving, difficult, and blessed time. 

Through this experience, the Father not only reinforced my calling for priesthood, but He showed me a new way of living that gives me confidence in my capacity for leadership and great life-giving joy when I seek to be a self-gift of love to others. This summer has left me with a desire to continue to have amazing adventures in God’s creation, but more importantly, it has strengthened a desire in me to always be attentive to moments when the Lord is inviting me to be a self-gift. As I develop this habit, one day, God willing, I may be a priest radically conformed to Christ as a self-gift of love and so lead others to encounter the love of Our Heavenly Father.