Brooms, Towels, the Tools of the Soul

Reflection on Spring Cleaning and the Interior Life of the Seminarian's

There is a moment near the end of every semester at Serra House of Formation that doesn't make it onto the academic calendar, no syllabus prepares the men for it, no rubric grades it, and yet in many ways it may be the most formative exercise of the year. On April 23, 2026, our seminarians set aside their notes and their textbooks and picked up something altogether different: brooms, cleaning solutions, microfiber towels, and a shared willingness to gettheir hands dirty for the sake of the community they call home.

What they were doing, on the surface, was Spring Cleaning. Every corner of the formation house was touched, the kitchen was degreased inch by inch, windows were wiped clean all around the property, floors were swept and power washed, and rooms were put back into order. But what was happening beneath the surface was something the Church has always known to be true: the exterior life and the interior life are not two separate worlds. They speak to one another constantly, and how a man tends to one reveals something profound about the other.

T H E B O D Y A N D T H E S O U L

St. John Chrysostom once wrote, "If you cannot find Christ in the beggar at the church door, neither will you find Him in the chalice." In the same spirit, we might say: if a future priest cannot tend to the house where he prays, he will struggle to tend to the souls entrusted to his care. Here is an undeniable connection between the order we cultivate around us and the order, or the longing for order, we cultivate within us.

"Have no anxiety about anything, but in everything by

prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requestsbe made known to God. And the peace of God, which passes

all understanding, will keep your hearts and your minds in

Christ Jesus."

— PHILIPPIANS 4:6–7

Formation at Serra is not merely an academic enterprise. It is an apprenticeship in the whole life of a priest. That whole life includes the sacraments, yes, the Eucharist, Confession, the Anointing of the Sick. But it also includes showing up on a Wednesday morning with an orange cleaning rag tucked into your belt and a smile that says you understand why this matters.

H U M I L I T Y I N T H E H A N D L E O F A B R O O M

Romano Guardini, in his landmark work "The Spirit of the Liturgy, reflects on how the entire person, body, soul, and the physical world around them, participates in the sacred. "The liturgy," he writes, "wishes to teach us how to live, how to be united with God." But liturgy does not end when the final blessing is given. It continues in the kitchen, in the corridor, in the quiet act of wiping down a surface no one else may notice.

There is a reason that monastic communities have always incorporated manual labor into the rhythm of their days. St. Benedict's “ora et labora,” pray and work, was never meant to separate the sacred from the secular. It was meant to sanctify the secular entirely. The monks who tilled the fields were not resting from prayer; they were praying with their bodies, their muscles, and their sweat. Our seminarians, whether they know it or not, are heirs to this great tradition.

Degreasing every inch of the kitchen, where the sacred and the mundane meet most literally.

T H E K I T C H E N A S A N E X T E N S I O N O F T H E C H A P E L

If you had walked into the Serra House kitchen on the morning of April 23rd, you would have found something that might look unremarkable to the casual observer: young men in hoodies and athletic pants scrubbing stainless steel, hauling trash bags, wearing rubber gloves. But watch a little longer and you begin to see it differently.

Here is a future priest learning that the people he will serve one day will not always be found in the pew. They will be found in hospital rooms, in the cramped kitchens of family homes, in the grief-stricken silence of living room after a loss. The priest who has learned to show up fully in the unglamorous spaces, who has hauled a garbage bag with joy, who

has mopped a floor without resentment, that priest will know instinctively how to be present in those rooms. He will not flinch at the mess. He will not wait for someone else to clean it up.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church reminds us that the human person is a unity of body and soul, that we are not spirits trapped in matter, but embodied souls for whom the physical world is charged with meaning. The places where we live and pray and eat and sleep are not neutral. They shape us. They form us, just as surely as the lectures in the

classroom or the hours spent in the chapel.

A B E A U T I F U L A N D H O P E F U L S I G H T

I will be honest: watching our men work on that morning filled me with something close to joy. Not because the kitchen was clean, though it was magnificently clean, but because of what I saw in the men themselves. I saw humility. I saw laughter and camaraderie. I saw a young seminarian in a red hoodie hauling a garbage bag with the same smile he wears when he receives Communion. I saw another in headphones and a brown t-shirt giving a thumbs-up over a microfiber cloth, finding delight in something that requires no audience, no applause.

These are future shepherds. And a shepherd, as we know, does not only preach from a pulpit. The shepherd searches for the lost sheep in the mud and the bramble. The shepherd smells like the flock. The Good Shepherd, Our Lord himself, knelt at the feet of His disciples with a basin and a towel, and that act was not a detour from His ministry. It was the heart of it.

What we are fostering here at Serra House is precisely this sensitivity, this accountability to the physical world that will one day be entrusted to these men. A parish is not just its sacraments. It is its grounds, its smell when you walk through the door, the state of the pews, the quality of the light through the windows. Every person who enters a church is making a subconscious determination: am I welcome here? Does someone care about this place? We want our future priests to be the kind of men who answer that question with every decision they make, even the seemingly small ones.