I NEVER WENT TO A PROM

Whenever I look back on my life, I find that there many things I never did that my peers did. I never went to a prom. I never joined a fraternity. I never got drunk with my buddies after our football team won the conference championship. I never went on a spring break. I also never worked a day in my life. All this is true because of the choices I made in my life and especially the one I made in 1957 when I went off to seminary as a high school freshman. As an aside and result, when what I do becomes work, I will retire for good.

When I do look back and reflect on what I missed, I do not do so with any regrets. The choices I made were the ones I made and not forced on me. Every choice we make has consequences. If we choose to do this, we will not be able to do that. For instance, there was no prom scheduled or even considered for those who were in training to become celibate priests. Why should there be?

Of course, most of those young men, my classmates, were never ordained. Do they rue the choice they made that denied them the opportunity to take a young lady to the prom? I doubt it; but even if they do, it’s all water over the dam. Besides, even if they missed all that I did, their lives were not irreparably scarred by the loss of such experiences. No one can experience it all nor should we want to. Life itself has its limitations and we are all subject to those limitations.

We know this to be true even though there are indeed times when we bemoan our fate because we never did something we think we would have liked to do back when we were willing and able to do it. Indeed there are those “For once in my life I would have liked to” moments. – going to a prom and the like. We all have them. But are we any worse or maybe even better because we did or did not experience them?

That may be a good question to ponder, but we will never really know. Sometimes we learn from our experiences and sometimes we do not. Of course the real issue when we are reminiscing about the past is that regretting the past, deeds done and left undone, experiences had and not had, often hinders us from living in the present and enjoying the present for exactly what it is: a present, a gift.

I have been blessed to be able to look back on my life, especially those formative years in seminary when all those “fun” and “normal” experiences my former grade school classmates were experiencing were forbidden to me, and know that I would not only not trade what I missed for what I learned and experienced and always be thankful. It was my choice as their life’s decisions were their choices.

The choices I have made, good and bad, have brought me to today. I rejoice in both, ruing neither the good experiences I missed not the mistakes I made. If I had made other choices, my life would not be what it is. I am thankful for what it is: no regrets.