From Fantasy to Contemplation:Seminarians and Formation in a Paschal Imagination1 James Keating See, I am doing something new! Now it springs forth, do you not perceive it? In the wilderness I make a way, in the wasteland, rivers. —Isa 43:19 In Revelation, we read: "Behold, I make all things new (Rev 21:5). There is a distinction to be made between God making all things new and this generation's constant pursuit of novelty at the "click" of a computer key. The search for the "new" that God inspires is a human restlessness born of a transcendent destiny. This restlessness finally does come to rest at one point: union with God. But the pursuit of novelty in cyberspace actually unleashes an insatiable restlessness. This insatiable restlessness births a demand for more and more of what satisfies less and less. This restlessness is kept alive by a roving eye upon the screen and a [End Page 367] twitching hand upon the computer mouse. Seminarians, of course, are not immune to this restlessness. Human formation programs in the seminary do well to assume that candidates have the potential to move from self-preoccupation to embracing transcendent values and concern for the welfare of others. But for men for whom entertainment has been almost exclusively the fantasy of video gaming and other interactive computer activities, breaking through self-involvement may be harder to achieve. In such men, gaming delivers pleasure, a sense of achievement, social interaction, and an immersive experience that is so stimulating that the "ordinary" world appears flat and uninviting. Formation programs may struggle to influence those men who are so enculturated.2 Many vices gather around fantasy thus making it harder for a man to receive the truth about his condition before God. As an example, Reinhard Hütter3 has noted the connection between engaging the "wasteland" of cyberspace and the vice of acedia. Acedia communicates the futility of resting in transcendent and spiritual realities, thus creating a void within which the lies of cyberspace and gaming can speak: "Since God is not satisfying, these other things will give you pleasure." Even more powerfully, Hütter gives voice to the origins of a pervasive clerical vice, cynicism: "The flight from sadness that begins with avoiding and resisting spiritual goods ends up attacking [these same goods]." Many a "clergy day" presenter has run into the priest who embodies this attitude toward the supernatural: "You still believe in such things?" Of course, within a cynic is a former idealist who does not know how to relate his grief to God over inevitable human suffering and finitude. Hence, this cleric, who first avoided praying and then resisted praying, now ends up attacking or mocking the power of a personal spiritual life. In the void of rectory living that now engulfs this priest, he becomes unable to do the one thing necessary: suffer the ordinary until the Presence is revealed and received. "When confronting the suspension of time and the void of boredom, the most classic strategy is to try to 'kill time.'. … It is not insignificant that this idiomatic expression uses the verb 'to kill,' which relates boredom to hatred. Now time is [End Page 368] not killed; on the contrary, it is necessary to wed it, … to cling to the present moment and to live it in all its spiritual intensity."4 One way out of the vice of acedia, born of behaviors that coddle distraction as a good to pursue, is the choice to "go deep," "deep" meaning the choice to suffer the ordinariness of one's days until God moves within a man, "wedding" him to the Incarnation and shooing away fantasy from alighting upon him as temptation. "Many young people seem to live hours each day that are almost programmatically reduced to shallow, impulsive dependencies on visual stimulation and technological chatter. The search for meaning … has shifted to a compulsive quest for perpetual distraction."5 Instead of being locked into this quest for distraction, for fantasy, quite often the seminarian has entered seminary as a "remedy" for such. Needing a remedy does not necessarily mean that the man is pathologically attuned to cyberspace...