Becoming a university president is not entirely like learning how to make authentic Italian food. But there are a couple of vibrations that resonate between them.

While the Rev. James Shea taught himself, from scratch, to prepare superb Italian food, he had one great advantage: He knew what the result should taste like, because he paid attention to the food while attending the North American College in Italy.

Light on the sauces, he said. Sauces should just delicately cling to the pasta, not overwhelm it.

In the same way Shea worked toward replicating the authentic cuisine of Italy - through discernment, focus and immersion - he has distilled the experiences of his growing up, education, faith and seven years in the priesthood into a vision of what a university should be like. What it should encompass for its students and its community.

The country's youngest university president, age 34, is what Shea will be in September when he is inaugurated as president of the University of Mary in Bismarck.

Those formative life experiences - what some people might call serendipity - Shea considers providence.

"The way things unfolded, the finger of God can be seen so clearly,"he said - that is, in how each piece of your life fits into a whole, prepares you for a future that you couldn't imagine at the time.

Shea believes this is what God has planned; on his own, he said, he would not have considered putting in his name for consideration for the position.

In fact, it's better that we don't know what's ahead, he said: "God is ingenious. God gives us just enough light to see the next step. And that's enough." Otherwise, he said, you wouldn't give the present, each moment, its proper due.

How does one become formed for leading a Catholic, Benedictine university on the prairie, set upon a bluff overlooking the communities of Bismarck and Mandan?

First, you become deeply familiar with rural North Dakota and the Benedictines as you grow up in the Hazelton area, shoveling grain, picking rocks, wearing flannel shirts to school that carry the aroma of cow. You even have a mother who grew up Lutheran in Richardton, and a grandfather who helped build the small Lutheran church there in the shadow of the enormous St. Mary's Church at Assumption Abbey.

Then you get your first taste of higher education as a revelation of what the world can hold. When Shea opened the course catalog at Jamestown College, he saw the intellectual riches of the world, the beauty of learning, open up before him. What Shea felt then as a student, he would like to be palpable in the air for students at Mary as well.

His studies for the priesthood also gave him the opportunity to see Rome, to experience the culture and the life of a world beyond the prairies, to add that experience to his understanding.

And when he returned here, he served parishes in Bismarck - Cathedral of the Holy Spirit - and Mandan - Christ the King. In the experience of teaching at St. Mary's Central High School and Dickinson Trinity, Shea discovered his love of learning translated to a love of teaching, of watching the particular spark of energy that ignites as the questions of students meet the questions of the teacher.

Shea also relishes the simple joys he experienced as a parish priest in Killdeer and rural North Dakota.

"I loved my life in Killdeer," he said. "I have been blessed beyond the telling, the way people let you into their lives, (to be) given the gift and grace to be there with people."

In the parish, you care for the whole family in all stages of life, the elderly, the sick, dying, lonely, young families struggling with choices and how to raise their children, he said.

"As a parish priest, I lived a very full life. I lived every day,"he said.

Those simple joys, giving comfort at a funeral, teaching marriage preparation, "I won't have now," he said. "I gave those up."

The work of development, fundraising and planning, developing relationships with faculty, staff and community - "It will be more complicated now,"he said, "but I made a bargain with God."

A president sits through a lot of meetings, and does a lot of things that are less than exciting, he said.

"But I'm willing to do that, I'm willing to sit through as many meetings as there are," he said, to be sure that students have the opportunity to experience the joy that he found in learning, in discovery.

"That's why I'm doing this."

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Shea has an ebullient personality, lots of laughter, lots of smiles.

He spent part of the summer in retreat at Creighton University in Omaha, and a week at Harvard with other new university presidents. He came back to Bismarck-Mandan knowing this was a good thing, he said.

The atmosphere in higher education elsewhere is filled with tremendous tension and anxiety, he said. And of about 45 people there, a third hadn't set foot on their campuses before their selection, he said.

Shea has felt enormous goodwill surround him since the announcement of his selection, he said.

"I know this place," he said. "I know these people. And I'm known, too."

Shea plans to spend his first year getting to know the culture of the university, he said.

"To care for a culture is tremendously important to me," Shea said. "Culture transmits to people the tools to be their best. It's an organic process," he said.

U-Mary's culture is rooted in 125 years of Benedictine values, since the first pioneering sisters came here to found institutions of learning and healing, modeling the kind of servant leadership that empowers others to be leaders, he said.

That's why North Dakotans stand up and cheer at the mention of (outgoing president) Sister Thomas Welder's name, he said.

The belief in providence, in the guiding hand of God means that in times of anxiety, means Benedictines learn to trust and pray, he said.

"There's a certain divine responsibility," he said, with the same wide smile, "that I'm going to hold God to."

At age 34, he said, "There's nothing on my horizon but this work.

"We build upon the past, upon the shoulders of others, but we don't linger there.

"We go forward."

(Reach reporter Karen Herzog at 250-8267 or karen.herzog@;bismarcktribune.com.)