I always thought that seminary meant hallowed corridors where one’s footsteps were followed by deep echoes from almost the other world; where seminarians prayed and sacrificed endlessly eating indigestible food and poring over books in strange and dead languages. I thought it was an institution peopled by serious priests who were properly denizens of heaven but opted to stay on earth to instill discipline and the fear of hell to their wards.
When I entered the seminary way back in 1970 (It’s ok to laugh at my age!) I already made up my mind to live a life of misery and psyched myself up to accept all the discomforts a candidate to the priesthood would have to face. Oh, but that was before I was welcomed by Fr. Alfred Cogliandro into the seminary. “My, it’s the great Molina family!,” was how he greeted us with his patent gravel voice as we got off my dad’s car. Obviously prompted by an assistant beside him, he broke the ice by vigorously shaking the hand of my father. Dad and Mom were rather serious people and they were bowled over by a priest who was brimming with so much laughter and joy, and who was great at cracking one-liners. They chuckled at the puns and the punch lines. I could see how amazed they were at this priest who talked to them like they were his friends for ages – when they have just met then!
Fr. Cogliandro had this mischievous twinkling in his eyes that told me I wouldn’t be a good seminarian unless I too, like him, could see millions of possibilities for humor in very mundane and commonplace situation. And so I began to find myself in a new home where laughter and fun were especially fairly common in classrooms (who wouldn’t laugh to see half of the class getting zapped by hundreds of volts in a physics lab experiment?), during lectures (a lay professor with so much confidence translating “homo sapiens” as “modern man” or one who came to class with an ill-fitted toupee), conferences (where the rector – yes it was Fr. Alfred Cogliandro – would climb on top of the assistant’s table to emphasize to all the loftiness of the religious vocation), games, meals and alas even during prayers (like seeing some of our assistants who were sleep-deprived dribbling their heads during meditation struggling to stay awake).
It was in one of my readings of a serious-looking volume in Salesian history that I read St. Dominic Savio’s now famous quotation: “here we make holiness consist in being cheerful!” Don Bosco was one saint who never took himself seriously. And he wanted his sons to do the same. He said that saints with long faces were no saints at all. Come to think of it, anyone who is loved by God will never have a reason to frown. Everything becomes a celebration. Fr. Cogliandro is one who believed that in his heart. His boundless enthusiasm for life, his keen sense of humor and his down to earth spirituality paved the way for many of us to become fully human and to believe in a God who enjoys a good belly laugh. Now if that isn’t a reason to have a lot of fun and to celebrate in the seminary, I don’t know what is!
So what’s a seminary for me now? It is a place, in my humble estimation, where one stays to discern and discover the call of God while celebrating life and having good, clean fun! If you don’t believe that, then come and see for yourself!
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