Why I've Been So Silent Lately...

You may have noticed that I seemed to leave the Internet quite abruptly a few months ago. One minute I’m posting articles and reviews on everything from Sherlock to The Shining, and the next minute I seem to have vanished altogether, with only a review of The Rosary Murders and a parody Top Ten Mysteries list to break the silence. What has been going on? Allow me to explain.

I’ve mentioned several times on this blog that I am a Catholic — and my faith has factored into my reviews of such books as The Saint Maker, or my particularly scathing reviews of such material as the BBC’s blatantly anti-Catholic Father Brown or Louise Penny’s The Beautiful Mystery. And for the last few years, there’s been a persistent thought in my mind that I should enter the seminary and give it a chance, and see whether I had a vocation to the priesthood. Absolute nonsense, I thought to myself. I’ll meet the right girl any day now and these ideas will drop out of my head and someone better than me can go to the seminary instead.

But this thought has been extremely persistent. And about a year ago, for various reasons it became clear that I could no longer ignore it. Try as I might to drown it out, the thought kept coming back to me, refusing to go away. And several months ago, I decided to see whether there was anything to it – I approached my diocese’s vocations director and started applying to the seminary.

The application process has been long and tiring. I’ve had to fill out many pages for my application, and answered what felt like thousands of questions on my psychological evaluations alone. I had interviews and appointments of all sorts as I scrambled to fit them in between my work schedule. But on Wednesday of this past week, it all paid off – I found out that I have been accepted into the seminary!

I’m very excited by this news, and I eagerly look forward to September and all the challenges that lie ahead of me. For now, however, I can take a breath, relax, and enjoy the moment.

What does this news mean for the future of this blog? I haven’t the faintest idea at the moment, to be honest. I ask for your patience as I try to sort that out.