Vincent L. Strand, SJ, a native
of Dousman, WI, joined the Jesuits after graduating from Marquette University
in 2005. He spent two years at the novitiate in St. Paul and continued
his Jesuit formation at Fordham University in New York. During the next
stage of formation, Regency, he taught at Creighton Prep in Omaha. Currently,
he is living in Rome and studying theology at the Pontifical Gregorian
University.
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We always keep an open room here in Rome at the
Collegio Internazionale del Gesù. But lest any prospective
visitors—especially prospective Jesuit visitors, who always seem to be looking
for free places to stay—get the idea of lodging in it for a few nights, let me
apologize and say that we don’t use it as a guest room but rather as a
sanctuary. For its former resident was St. Ignatius of Loyola.
St. Ignatius spent almost the last twenty years of his life here in Rome, much
of it occupied with administrative work, governing the burgeoning Society of
Jesus which he and a handful of companions had recently founded. It was
an unexpectedly sedentary closing chapter for a man who had wandered far and
wide and who referred to himself in his autobiography as “the Pilgrim.”
My own path to Rome has had its fair share of wandering. It started in
Milwaukee at Marquette
University, where I felt the first stirrings of a vocation and
so, after graduation in 2005, moved on, not to medical school as was my
original plan, but rather to the Jesuit
novitiate in St. Paul. Then to Fordham University in
New York for philosophy study. Then back to the Midwest, to teach at Creighton Prep in
Omaha. Finally, here to Rome, for my last stage of Jesuit formation
before being ordained a priest.
Somehow, though, telling the story in that way misses the heart of the
matter. It sticks pins on a map of where I’ve been, but fails to capture
the flesh and blood moments in which formation really occurs. Like
sitting on the rooftop of your community in the Bronx looking out over the New
York skyline and chatting with your Jesuit buddies about baseball, metaphysics,
and what God has been doing in your prayer. Or sweeping a gym floor in
Omaha before your freshman basketball team comes into practice and having a
student on the cusp of tears come to you seeking some advice and consolation
amidst the most recent problem adolescent life has thrown at him. Or
chatting over insipid prison food with a different boy of the same age who is facing
a long sentence and sees no way out of the gang in which he’s become
inextricably enmeshed.
I bring myriad such moments to my current theological study at the Pontifical
Gregorian University. My fellow students all bring their own. Some
mornings, before entering the heady lecture halls of the Gregorian, I stand in
the piazza outside, chat with the beggars, and watch the students stream
in. James Joyce’s definition of “Catholic” is fitting: “Here comes
everybody.” Lay students and seminarians and religious, wearing Roman
collars and T-shirts and every type of religious habit imaginable. Their
faces tell of the more than 150 countries from which they come and to which
they will return to be leaven in their local churches. Combine this
diversity with the history lying all around us in the churches, relics, and
ruins of Rome and it creates a fecund milieu in which to prepare to be a Jesuit
priest.
Amidst it all, though, I keep coming back to that one, small, Basque pilgrim
who arrived here almost five-hundred years ago, St. Ignatius. Sometimes I
go into his room by myself and sit there and pray with him, thinking about the
varied experiences he brought to Rome as I try to understand my own.
A commentator once wrote of St. Ignatius, “A universal molder of men because he
himself remained universally pliable.” Maybe that’s what it’s all
about. Something about universality, pliability, moulding. We call
it “formation” after all. Maybe the pathways we walk are not so much
horizontal between city and city, but rather vertical, into the depths of the
human heart and upward to God, the God who forms us, massaging our stony hearts
into hearts of flesh.
As my pilgrim steps walk among the Roman cobblestones through this final stage
of formation, such is my daily prayer to the Lord: to give me a heart like His
own, a heart of the shepherd, a heart on fire with His love.