Multiple milestones.

Loyola House's four new primi - Richard Beebe and Chris Musiet from the Chicago Province and Tim McCabe and Chris Staab from Detroit - officially entered the novitiate yesterday. As far as I can tell, this Entrance Day went very well. (Yes, I noticed the rhyme in the preceding sentence, though it was purely unintentional.) Welcoming the new novices to Loyola House was a great experience, and from what I can tell the families of the new primi appreciated the hospitality and the program we put on. If you want to know what the primi themselves thought, see Richard's blog. It's great to have the new guys here; as a class, the secundi are doing all we can to make them feel at home.

At the same time we welcome a new class of novices, the LH Class of '04 mark the one-year anniversary of our own Entrance Day - August 21, 2004. As I remarked on my six-month anniversary as a novice, memory is a very strange thing. Looking back on my own Entrance Day, it's hard to say whether it feels like a recent or a distant event - somehow, it feels like both. I'm not sure I can explain what I mean by this, though I can say that my reflections from six months ago are still pretty accurate.

I would be remiss if I failed to mention one more milestone that occurs this weekend: my classmate Jim Shea's birthday, which is today. As one might expect, Jim reports that from now on his birthday and his entrance into the Society will forever be linked together in his mind. Jim wasn't necessarily thrilled with the notoriety that this coincidence of dates provided him, and I hope he doesn't mind me telling the story on this blog. Happy birthday, Jim - ad multos annos! AMDG.