April 6, 2018 at 1:53 p.m.
YOUNG ADULTS
College student debates future: music? marriage? priesthood?
Sam attended the former St. Catherine of Siena School in Albany and LaSalle Institute in Troy, where he says he first focused on the military program rather than his vocation. But when LaSalle introduced weekly eucharistic adoration, Sam "started to learn what praying was. It made me realize that I couldn't escape my desire to learn about the priesthood."
In his junior year of high school, Sam started meeting with the diocesan vocations director and in a school group. Today, he's weighing a range of options - music ministry, marriage, priesthood or another form of religious life - as he finishes his third year at the University of Notre Dame.
A philosophy and vocal performance major, Sam originally planned to enter the seminary after earning his degree - but the more he experiences, the more vocations he considers.
"God very slowly at different points would tell me, 'No, you have to look at this, too," the 20-year-old said.
One possible path is music, which Notre Dame faculty encouraged him to study. Sam sings in operas and classical recitals, with a liturgical choir that performs at Masses and vespers and with a choir that uses Gregorian chant at liturgies.
Last spring, he won a grant from his school to study chant - a type of monophonic, unaccompanied sacred song - in an abbey in Solesmes, France, that's famous for restoring Benedictine monastic life after the French Revolution.
The choirmaster with whom he met during that week of living and praying with monks "talked a lot about chant having the characteristics of humility," Sam said. "Praying the psalms is for the Church as a whole and for the poor, the sick or the afflicted." The monks "pray for a world they don't see."
When he'd first been exposed to chant at Notre Dame, he said, it "totally captivated me. It was so different from everything else I'd ever experienced. I was so used to being important in choirs because I had a really loud voice," but the goal of chant is to blend voices perfectly.
Sam's time abroad gave him "a lot to think about and to consider when I'm rehearsing and singing. It showed me even more how rich and how beautiful this kind of prayer can be. [Chant] is a further connection to the universal Church."
Last summer, Sam volunteered for eight weeks with L'Arche USA, an ecumenical organization that allows people without developmental disabilities to live in community with people who have such disabilities. His duties included cleaning, cooking, running errands and helping residents with disabilities evaluate their days.
"It was just a different experience than what I was used to at Notre Dame, where everything was really fast," he said. One woman's traumatic brain injury often delayed her responses by 10 seconds: "She taught [that] just being is an OK thing, that the goal of life isn't accomplishment or being successful at particular tasks.
"The whole community was just filled with love," he continued. "It was a place where God was important. People are there to be tender with each other, to be open to weakness, to encounter vulnerability. There's a lot of frailty there that we don't have to experience in our daily lives if we don't want to. It reminds me that this is who God is."
When Sam is home on school breaks, he sings in the choir at the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception in Albany and attends daily Mass at St. Thomas the Apostle parish in Delmar and Mater Christi in Albany. He hopes to work with the cathedral's music director this summer.
"I'm going to keep going to school and keep trying to find out what God wants for me," he said.[[In-content Ad]]
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