the challenge of formation work

Today we end the Literary Musical Contests and tomorrow we will begin the sporting events to complete this week of intramural contests. Shamcey Supsup was lauded for her so called brains, talent and beauty, which are characteristics imposed by culture to what it considers women of substance. In the seminary however our vision simply describes these as integral persons, a person who possesses developed and acquired skills, virtue and the love for service. Note what I have said - developed and acquired. It may not even be a given, it may be just an iota of skills. But these became things of consequence because of the work of formation.


I am a gardener at heart and I took up the challenge of gardening because I like to see things grow - a dying plant who one day, through care and sacrifice, grow a leaf or begin to flower is an achievement that leaves me ecstatic, one that gives me a reason to rise from my bed in the morning. That for me is formation, the impact of formation in an individual bereft of visible talent - a breakthrough that deserves more than a lunch at Breakthrough. I envisioned the seminary with a somewhat similar outlook to that that which we can find carved beneath the statue of Liberty penned by Emma Lazarus
"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!"” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
We are formators, formators in what I would like to call a school of opportunity, and I will be titillated to the extreme if one day Seth Macaseib enters the extemporaneous speech and actually wins it. I will always take personally every seminarian we remake, and also, and painfully at that, every seminarian we lose. I am, we are after all formators and we take that title seriously. You have to realize that as an institution of learning we are a losing venture subsidized at the tune of 2.4 million just to keep us going. And to renege in this duty by simply giving up on somebody too hard to teach is a double whammy indeed.
But please do not take this plea as something of a free for all performance wherein I will permit myself to be tortured for an hour or two by shabby and ill-prepared performances. Self esteem and self-confidence is never developed this way. Esteem is not something one can give by simply affirming and awarding even the undeserving just because he is first among a bunch of lousy performers. Self-esteem is developed when we give them something, something they have never thought they can achieve, something they have to really work hard on, until they discover that it is something they can do - that is self-esteem. If there is a criteria then for who gets to be summa cum laude, and a criteria for who gets to be honored a magna cum laude, then probably in performances such as these it would help our aim of creating a culture of excellence if we call a spade a spade. Early in life it shall already be inculcated so that in the priesthood later they would have already realized that if there were performances which did not merit a stage, there are sermons which do not merit a pulpit.
This is intramurals, a contest within and among those who live within the walls. This is primarily to test not only the achievement of our students but our achievement and our effectiveness as formators. We formators are on stage as much as the contestants are and the verdict that we see in the judges’ scorecard is a verdict deserving of us. I take it seriously.
These past two days I would be accused of being unfair if I would not recognize several breakthroughs in the performances - people who were branded from the start as dull and stupid, people who thought they are no better in this world, destined forever to become props men and errands for real artists. Now they have finally come out, I mean, they have finally dared themselves to leave where they and the community have boxed them in for a long time. Now that is an achievement for a formator - when we can dare people to leave behind a mindset and become the best they never thought they can achieve. These are the real winners and in them and through them we the formators become real winners too. For this I would like to congratulate the teachers especially Joseph and Fr. Bong who never tire, it seems, to inculcate the drive for excellence. The results have been encouraging at most and I believe we can achieve further in the coming years.