A Homecoming Memory from Msgr. John Griesbach

It was homecoming night at SJM in 1968 and I was a seminarian at our diocesan minor seminary, Ryan Preparatory College (now the Fresno Diocesan Pastoral Center). Although we had a separate campus, we seminarians always enjoyed attending SJM’s home football games. But this game was special to me. I was a high school senior that year and I was looking forward to the game and to seeing friends who were SJM students from my hometown of Tulare. So imagine my surprise when the seminary rector announced at dinner that the priest who was giving the next day´s spiritual conferences had arrived early and wanted to begin that evening, so instead of going to the game we would all be gathering in the chapel. I thought to myself, “This has to be a joke,” but it was no joke. So we all filed into the chapel which was close enough to the football field that, throughout the conference, I could hear the horns and the cheering of the crowd at the game, and I found myself growing angrier and angrier. Afterward, when the game was over and the conference had ended, and everyone had gone off to their dorms in silence, I sat in the chapel, fuming. The sacristan tapped me on the shoulder and told me he had to lock up, and I responded with some words you normally don´t use in a chapel. So he shut the lights out and left me sitting there in the dark with only the flickering light of the tabernacle. I was in a rage inside, and as it boiled over inside me, I asked myself, “What am I doing in this place?” And suddenly, as clear as day, I KNEW what I was doing in that place. I came face to face with my heart’s deepest desire: to become a priest, and I knew deep down that it was the right choice. That evening turned out to be a crossroads in my life, when for the first time I consciously opted for a different way in life, a road less traveled, a path very different from my SJM classmates and friends who would go on to college, get married and have a family and a fruitful career. My path would lead me to the major seminary and to ordination to the priesthood in 1976. Interestingly enough, in my first assignment to Sacred Heart in Fresno, I would become a part-time religion instructor at SJM in 1977-78 before becoming a full-time faculty member, campus chaplain and Chair of the Religion Dept. at Garces High School in Bakersfield the following year. The rest has been quite an adventuresome story, and one that I can trace back to that 1968 homecoming game that I never got to attend, but that turned out to be a real “homecoming” for me.