Restored to Health

Let me hear sounds of joy and gladness; let the bones you have crushed rejoice. - Ps. 51:10

As of last week, my last lingering physical reminder of SPS's glorious victory in the 2007 Rector's Bowl is gone. Towards the end of the first half of the game, I seriously injured my left knee and spent the next few weeks hobbling around on crutches. I sustained a strained ligament and a cracked bone, but surgery was not necessary, thank God. Now I am completely healed and looking forward to future athletic endeavors.

In other news, I have recently had the joy of reading the great Evelyn Waugh's biography of St. Edmund Campion. I was struck by the following passage describing Campion's joy during his seminary formation before his heroic return to Elizabethan England as a priest, and therefore eventually a martyr. It describes well what I would hope all of us seminarians experience here at SPS:

"...for the first time in his adult life, he found himself living in a completely Catholic community, and, perhaps, for the first time, began to have some sense of the size and power of the world he had entered, of the distance and glory of the aim he had set himself. The faith of the people among whom he was now placed was no fad or sentiment to be wistfully disclosed over the wine at high table, no dry, logical necessity to be expounded in the schools; it was what gave them daily life, their entire love and hope, for which they had abandoned all smaller loyalties and affections; all that most men found desirable, home, possessions, good fame, increase, security in the world, children to keep fresh their memory after they were dead."

Put that way, what a blessing to be here! Please pray for us.