Philosophy Students Fall Back into New Semester
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September 15, 2024Imagine getting through the first few nights in the Bronx: the ice cream truck blaring music, police sirens sounding every two minutes, and the restaurant across the street blasting cultural music throughout the evening.
Of course it’s a challenge, but that just means that the fall semester is finally here! Huy Pham and Sean Wu spent their summer ministry in Baltimore and Philadelphia, respectively, and are back in the Bronx. New community members include Peter Nguyen from North Carolina and me from Houston. We are both incredibly excited to start this journey with the Redemptorists and grow in our vocation of ministering to the poor and most abandoned. This year is a little unique because we are also welcoming to the Bronx community Benedikt Bartels from Germany, who is on a Redemptorist Volunteer Program. He will be helping around the parish doing various tasks from September 2024 until July 2025.
We kicked off our semester with a retreat at Notre Dame Retreat House in Canandaigua, NY. On our way from New York City, we stopped by The Marketplace at Steamtown in Scranton, PA. We posed with the “Scranton Welcomes You” sign featured in the opening credits of NBC’s The Office, and had pizza while being serenaded by Harry Chapin’s 30,000 Pounds of Bananas. We also explored a gorge valley trail at Watkins Glenn State Park and saw the beautiful results of a glacier. I am pleased to report that we all survived the mile-long hike.Our retreat master, Fr. Robert Kennedy of the Diocese of Rochester, gave a presentation on the theme of the Eucharist and shared how we can bring the Eucharist out into the world. He showed us that the Eucharist is not just confined to the Mass itself, but rather, we can bring the Eucharist out into the world everywhere we go.
He led us on a multi-day journey to show us that the Mass is meant for the community – a place where “all are welcome.” We can expand on this from more than just the parish community to society in general. Perhaps it’s sacrificing some part of us to be “welcoming” to those who may be different. That form of sacrifice is incredibly important in the Bronx. Considering the social diversity here, we must embrace the spirit of the Eucharist by reaching out to those who are different from us and showing kindness, understanding, and love in our daily interactions. In addition, we can apply this to living in community. These sacrifices can help us support each other in community life. Whether it’s something small like offering to take someone’s plate back to the washing machine or something big such as chipping in to help finish organizing a library, we are effectively living the Eucharist and sharing it with others.This theme is so fitting for us as Redemptorist seminarians because our mission of serving the poor and most abandoned challenges us to bring the Eucharist to them – to welcome them. We hope to grow in our knowledge and in the Redemptorist charism so that we may better serve as messengers of hope and good news to all.