Wash others’ feet

KEVIN ALDEN SEAY
 
Age: 29
Home parishes: St. Clement of Rome, St. Angela Merici, Metairie
Diaconate internship: St. Catherine of Siena, Metairie
 
By BETH DONZE
Clarion Herald

Although he was raised in a devoutly Catholic family that included three great uncles who were priests, Kevin Seay wasn’t involved in a single church-related ministry while growing up in Metairie.

Seay (pronounced “see”), a typical teen who enjoyed playing competitive baseball and basketball, said his vocational discernment unfolded gradually and undramatically, driven by his fundamental openness to “giving seminary a chance.”

“You don’t have to be positive about your vocation before seminary; you have to be positive by the end of seminary,” observed Seay, the younger of two brothers who spent his elementary school years at Stuart Hall and graduated from Jesuit High School in 2011.

In his senior year, Seay joined Jesuit’s discernment group, formed to expose young men to the possibility of a church-related vocation. The monthly meetings included group prayer and discussions on how members’ faith life was going.

“God was calling me at that time, (but) I didn't know what a call would feel like,” he said. “I did feel an interest, then kind of a desire, to check out the priesthood. But I wasn’t really ready.”

Seay assumed then that his calling would be to marriage and family life. He went on to double-major in theology and economics at the Catholic-founded University of Dallas.

But both as an undergraduate, and later, as a graduate student studying moral theology on scholarship at St. Louis University, Seay remained open to the idea of the priesthood. He met with the vocations director of the Diocese of Dallas, visited seminaries and a Carmelite monastery, and took part in “St. Andrew” discernment weekends, named in honor of St. Peter’s brother and fellow fisherman-apostle.

“Looking back, I don't know why exactly I felt the push, because there wasn't a particular person I wanted to be like,” Seay recalls. “Archbishop (Gregory) Aymond, in my first interview, even asked me: ‘Is there an image of the priesthood that draws you in or that you're looking forward to?’ I guess, for me, it was just the idea that God might be calling me and sending me out. So, it was just being faithful to God and seeing if he really was calling me to do this ministry.”

Having some extra downtime during his graduate studies, the opportunity to study in solitude and a yearning to return home to his family in Louisiana, Seay contacted Father Kurt Young, then director of vocations for the Archdiocese of New Orleans, about applying to Notre Dame Seminary and his potential interest in becoming a diocesan priest. Once enrolled,  Seay “felt that sense of peace” that he was in the right place.

“You’re living with a lot of priests, so you get to see what the priesthood and priestly spirituality are all about,” he said. “It really was a slow and gradual increase in interest, but one thing that did always interest me was (the priest’s role of) caring for one parish community, through the years – being there to baptize and do first Communions and weddings and funerals for the same community. You could baptize and marry one person in the family, and then bury that person’s grandmother.” 

Seay, who was asked by his class of transitional diaconate ordinands to design the prayer card for their May 21 Ordination Mass, chose a painted image of Jesus washing the feet of a seemingly unwilling St. Peter. He likes this moment in Jesus’ ministry because it shows Christ modeling “the idea of being a servant” and “pouring” his fatherhood into his apostles.

“It involves both Jesus washing the apostles’ feet – them receiving care and love from Jesus – and then Jesus asking them to do that also,” Seay explained.

“You have to receive the love of God before you can go out and share it,” he added. “Peter is kind of begrudgingly getting his feet washed, but then he’s going to be asked to wash other people’s feet!”

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