After two virtual years, SEEK23 marked a return to packed audience halls and outsized venues for many of the Catholic speakers who addressed the crowds during the week.
“One thing I think has been remarkable has been the freedom that I’ve seen in the students, when it comes to coming out of this fear that’s been hanging over people for a couple of years now,” Father Mike Schmitz, host of the popular “Catechism in a Year” podcast, told CNA.
“I just see a freedom. I see what life should be like, where we’re in contact with each other, we’re in proximity with each other, we’re in relationship. After two years of isolation… you’re made for contact with each other. And that’s one of the things I see [here at SEEK], which is awesome.”
Paul J. Kim, a Catholic speaker, musician, and comedian, told CNA that it is clear to see that the attendees have longed for the fellowship that a conference like this facilitates.
“I think everyone obviously has been hungry to be together. I think the great joy and excitement of SEEK is that you’re with so many people who share the same faith in Christ,” he told CNA.
“We’re meant to be together as human beings. We’re not meant to be isolated or on the metaverse, or all this junk. We’re meant to be with each other. We’re incarnational beings, just like Christ. It’s awesome.”
Chika Anyanwu, a keynote speaker at SEEK23, told CNA that she approached the event with a certain amount of trepidation, harboring some doubts as to whether such a large gathering was wise given the large numbers of the populace currently being sickened by the flu, COVID, and RSV.
“But we have to learn how to responsibly live within this new normal,” Anyanwu said.
“And I’m grateful for people who are able to come, but also there are people who are doing this online or with community groups, whether it’s their ministry, their school ministry or parish ministries, they’re coming together in a smaller way. And I think that’s just as great as being here. So however you feel comfortable, I’m just glad that people are coming,” she said.
This year marks nearly 20 SEEK conferences for Lisa Cotter, who served as a FOCUS missionary and who gave a talk at SEEK23 on discernment. Cotter said she is concerned about the “micro-generation” of students whose high school or college careers have mostly encompassed the pandemic, causing them to miss out on many in-person experiences, like SEEK.
“That power of when people gather, you cannot replicate that online. It’s good to have that experience if you can’t get here — something is better than nothing. But being together is just a massive difference in terms of … I mean, the Gospels even tell us, right? When two or three are gathered together, ‘There I am in the midst of you,’” Cotter told CNA.
“So, we know that there’s power in that. There’s a reason we gather as Catholics every Sunday, and we don’t say, ‘Go pray in your fishing boat by yourself.’ … We have to be the body of Christ, we have to be together. And so to see that lived out again is critical.”
For Father Josh Johnson, vocations director for the Diocese of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and a podcaster and author, this also marks the latest of many SEEK conferences he has attended. He led, along with Sister Miriam Heidland, the attendees in a massive adoration session on the Wednesday night of the conference.
“To be at adoration [Wednesday] with the students and to watch them gaze at the Eucharist, and to see the lines for confessions, that’s just beautiful, it’s just really beautiful. And I have a very profound feeling that I’m surrounded by future saints here at this conference. And I’m not just saying that. I really feel it,” he told CNA.
Johnson said although “the introvert in me is dying because it’s so many people, the priest in me is just filled with joy.”
“I’m filled with joy because I love Jesus and I love seeing people fall in love with Jesus. And I’m seeing that tangibly this week, so it’s been a gift,” Johnson said.
He also said that for him personally, he has received a lot of encouragement about his own ministry from people at the conference.
“It’s just a gift to reconnect with co-workers in the vineyard and to build each other up. But then, also, it is so beautiful just to see these young adults encounter Christ and share their testimony,” he said.
Sister Heidland — also a self-described introvert — nevertheless said being together again in person has been “wonderful.”
“There’s just an electrical, just a magnetic energy that flows through a crowd of that many people of all coming to encounter the Lord,” Heidland told CNA.
“It’s beautiful to see so many people coming together, and the fact that nobody HAS to be here. This is not some requirement for confirmation. People are coming because they want to. When you see young and old alike, it’s really inspiring, and I think we all need that. We all need the reminder, the physical reminder, that we are not alone.”
FOCUS missionaries moved, encouraged
FOCUS sends missionaries to college campuses across the United States and abroad to share the Catholic faith primarily through Bible studies and small groups, practicing what it calls “The Little Way of Evangelization” — winning people to the faith through authentic friendships and forming others to go out and do the same.
Srishti Gupta, a convert from atheism now in her fifth year as a FOCUS missionary, told CNA that she teared up at the conference’s opening Mass as she joined with thousands of voices singing and offering the responses during the liturgy.
“I was overwhelmed, in a good way. We needed this. My students needed this… most of them haven’t been to anything like this,” Gupta said.
Gupta’s teammate, second-year FOCUS missionary Kara Kelly, attended FOCUS conferences in 2019 and 2020 as a student. After those SEEK experiences, she started attending daily Mass and pined for the sacraments during the COVID lockdowns. She says the foundation of prayer she developed at FOCUS conferences helped to lead her to realize she should apply to become a missionary.
“I’m a whole other person because of it,” she said of her FOCUS experience.
“The Lord wanted me to see the beauty of the Church again, because I hadn’t seen it for so long, and I was losing my conviction, I was losing my drive … being back has just rekindled that, and brought it back.”
“This Catholic faith isn’t just Georgia College, where I’m placed — it’s universal. The need for community and the need for this walk with the Lord, together… seeing this really inspires me to keep going.”
For Joy Dan, a second-year missionary at UCLA, this was her first in-person SEEK conference after joining exclusively online previously — despite a 16-hour time difference.
Dan moved to the U.S. for the first time in 2021 from Malaysia, a country that lacks the infrastructure to put on a major Catholic conference like SEEK, she said. She was moved to apply for FOCUS after encountering missionaries who came to her home country in 2017.
“For the first time in my life, I saw people with authentic joy,” Dan said.
The joyful and holy environment of SEEK is bearing spiritual fruit, she said. On the last night of the conference, one of the UCLA students she mentors as a missionary returned to the sacrament of confession for the first time in three years.
“There are so many people who are seeking God,” Dan said. “There’s this hole in you that only God can fill. And if there’s something about the Catholic Church that you want to ask, ask it — be bold.”
Credit: Source link