Divine Spark
Oblate seminarian Mr. Bill Grebe received a special blessing from Fr. Jack Kolodziej, OSFS, at Salesianum’s Feast Day Mass. Fr. Jack prayed that his discernment might lead him closer to God and God’s people.
When I came to Salesianum in 2014, I knew a little bit about St. Francis de Sales. I had, by pure coincidence, visited Annecy in 2012 while my friend and I were seeking out the best foods in France. I had also read some of his works in graduate school. That little bit of knowledge meant I could make pithy observations about how similar a lot of his ideas were to those of Ignatius of Loyola or how some of his ideas presaged Vatican II over 300 years in advance. It also gave me the courage to say yes to the job offer. But at that stage, my exposure to the Salesian way of proceeding was of the sort that lips speak to ears. I could never have imagined how much de Sales’ emphasis on gentleness and patience, spoken to my heart by the hearts of many Oblates and Sallies teachers, along with the countless Sallies students, would come to change the way I see and interact with the world.
To be honest, I never expected to teach high school until shortly before I started. Graduate schools hardly encourage their alumni to do so, and our society’s rhetoric about teenagers is far from kind. Mercifully, the Spirit was unconcerned with my plans and led me, rather insistently, to the classroom. In 11 years there, I have worked with over 1000 students. Every one of them – from the most decorated to the most difficult – has a divine spark and an indispensable role in building the Kingdom. Figuring out how to embrace that divine spark and find that indispensable role, though, is incredibly hard in a world that seeks increasingly to deny human dignity and reduce our worth to our economic output. Salesianum’s embrace of de Sales’s wisdom makes it a place where we show each other the gentleness and patience to kindle the spark into the fire the Master Craftsman intended it to be, truly giving glory both to Him and to His handiwork.
Seeing countless students discover the sheer scale of their talent and value has transformed my life, not least of all by helping me more clearly perceive my own. When I started, I might have said that Francis’s emphasis on patience and gentleness were “kind of like the Ignatian presupposition” or observed that they “reminded me of the Sermon on the Mount.” I would have been speaking as lips do to ears. I now know it is more than that. It is a message of love that can only be spoken from one heart to another by living the Salesian virtues, and it has, can, and will bring about the transformation our world so desperately needs.
Mr. Bill Grebe
Oblate seminarian
