Travis Gunther, 19, not only attends St. Thomas Aquinas University Parish in Fayetteville, he lives there. The University of Arkansas sophomore is one of three students in the parish’s resident minister program. The Conway native performs 10 weekly service hours at the parish in exchange for reduced rent and the chance to step into the church each morning for quiet prayer before going to class.
“It helps both St. Thomas and I in providing a service to each other,” he said.
Currently he is an architecture major, but isn’t sure that is where he is called. Since fourth grade, Gunther has thought about a religious vocation. “Like anything, it has come and gone, but it’s coming back, and it’s coming back pretty strong,” he said.
The call began to return his senior year at St. Joseph High School about the same time he attended a Search retreat. Gunther said he is discerning diocesan priesthood, religious priesthood or brotherhood and single life, but “I don’t feel a call to married life.”
He said his parents, Raymond and Mary Beth Gunther, are supportive of his discernment and believe he will not be happy until he discovers God’s plan for him. “I think it applies to everybody,” he added.
He has a younger brother, Tyler, who is a junior at St. Joseph High School.
For Gunther, Search was a powerful experience that “put my faith into perspective realizing that it was more than just doing or listening, it was a relationship with Christ.”
He said there was no college equivalent to Search in the state and noticed many of his friends were struggling in their faith and needed an encounter like Search.
Gunther said he talked with his campus ministers and other students and got approval to investigate the college program called Awakening. He attended an Awakening retreat last spring at Missouri State University in Springfield, Mo.
In August he attended a Together Encounter Christ retreat in the Diocese of Tulsa, Okla. This, he said, is a combination of Search and Cursillo.
Gunther made the leadership team for the next Awakening retreat in November and plans to take UA students to Springfield to experience it for themselves.
He said he hopes UA will hold its first Awakening retreat next spring, as a combination of the TECH and Awakening experiences he has had.
Gunther is also deputy grand knight for St. Thomas’ Knights of Columbus council and co-chair for Catholic Campus Ministry’s Student Ministry Advisory Committee. Recently he also helped St. Mary Church in Altus organize a fire rosary on Respect Life Sunday, Oct. 7.
In addition, on UA game days and holidays, Gunther said he works at University Bookstore “just because that’s all my schedule will allow.”
Gunther said if he were at the end of his life, he would want people to say that through him “they saw Christ. Not necessarily that they remembered my name, but that at some point in their life that Christ was able to work through me and they knew that they had met Christ.”
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