An Open Letter Part 2: Vocation as a Great Adventure

A Spiritual Adventure

Let’s say you’ve come to the point where you’ve said, “Okay, Lord, I’ve fallen in love with you and want to abandon everything to follow you. Now what?” Now what indeed…There are so many ways to devote yourself to God, whether in the monastery, in a parish, or on the streets. I’ve told you not to bother yourself with vocational astrology, so is that to say God doesn’t care whether you become a monk or a missionary? Not exactly…In fact, this is where the real adventure begins.

Although it’s true that you’re not locked into any particular destiny, God probably does have a plan for you. By saying yes to following Him wherever He should lead, you’ve given Him permission to use you however He in His infinite wisdom should see fit. He knows your greatest gifts and now you’ve given Him a free hand to use them to their utmost potential. He knows where you’ll thrive, where you’ll find deep peace and joy, where you’ll be able to work best for His greater glory. He wants you there. The tricky part is, it’s probably not where you’d first expect it to be.

Monks at prayer in St. Joseph's Abbey

Want evidence of that? Those who know me know that I’m naturally inclined to the contemplative life. I find my strength and peace in quiet prayer with Our Lord and when I was in high school, I used to dream about becoming a monk in St. Joseph’s Abbey in Spencer, Massachusetts. Fast forward six years and I was entering a missionary order. Go figure.

So why does God work this way? I can only speak from my own experience, but I’ve found that just as God knew my strengths, He also knew my weaknesses. In saying yes to Him, not only had I given Him permission to use my strengths, but I also gave Him permission to strengthen my weaknesses. My vision of what God was calling me to was limited by my own current weaknesses and limitations. I was a very withdrawn and introspective kid when I was in high school, so I imagined at the time God was calling me to be a monk.

But God’s vision isn’t limited the way mine is: He sees beyond what I am to what I could become. Once I gave Him permission, He began shaping and forming me to be the person He made me to be. He challenged my weaknesses, brought me to places where I would be stretched, and helped me grow in ways I never imagined I could. In short, He brought me on a series of adventures. With each new adventure, there was a new lesson to be learned and a little bit more clarity as to what my particular mission in life would be. At any given time, I only had a snapshot of what was going on. God told me what I needed to hear at the time, but never gave away the ending. Still, the more time went on, the more I followed Him into strange places and experiences, the more my vocation came into focus.I suspect it will be the same with you.

These adventures have occupied the majority of my discernment process, so I would be remiss not to share. For now, I'll tell you about the spiritual adventure that was in store for me. There are more to come.

The First Adventure

A Spiritual Adventure

The first adventure was a primarily spiritual one: it was a process of me getting to know God and in the doing so entering a mysterious world the depths of which I had never before fathomed.

Notre Dame Chapel in Alfred, ME where I first
encountered Christ in the Eucharist.

Most of you know the beginning of this story so I’ll recap it briefly. It was the Feast of Corpus Christi, but to 8th grade me, it was like any ordinary Sunday. But as I sat quietly while Fr. Ted gave his sermon, something out of the ordinary happened: I listened. He was talking about the Eucharist. He said that it wasn’t bread at all: it was Christ Himself. The same Christ who walked the earth 2000 years ago was standing right in front of me.

I was shocked. He couldn’t be serious, and yet he was. I looked over at the tabernacle, where the Blessed Sacrament that I had received so many times before was reserved. I let my doubts go, my insistence on the absurdity of it all and for the first time looked with the eyes of faith: I saw Him. The tabernacle seemed to almost glow. Waves of joy radiated from the tabernacle and burned in my heart. I was overwhelmed by the sheer awesomeness of what was before me and brought to tears. He was here, He was greater than anything I’d ever known and He filled me with a joy that had no comparison in this world. My life took a sharp turn at that point.

It was clear to me that the universe I lived in was a very different place than I had first thought. I thought I knew the way world worked, but it was clear to me now that the world held mysteries the likes of which I had never dreamed of. Stranger still was the fact that I wasn’t the first to discover them…I remember at one point turning to my dad and asking him, “Why didn’t you tell me Christ was present in the Eucharist?” His response was very casual: “Oh, you didn’t know that?” (To his credit, he had told me and I just hadn’t gotten it.) Ordinary Catholics like my dad knew about these things; the Church had held this treasured knowledge for over 2000 years, and I knew none of it. I had to learn more.

Truth be told, I felt a little like Indiana Jones those first few years. I knew there were mysteries and secrets about the world that had yet to be unlocked and I had the strange feeling that bygone ages were more aware of them than our current one. There were more to those old legends about mystics and miracles than met the eye and while most of those beliefs had fallen by the wayside, vestiges of them still remained. Who were those saints in the stained glass window? Why did my grandmother start sprinkling Holy Water every time it started thundering out? And where did that secret staircase in the back of the school chapel lead?

Snooping around the back of the chapel only got me so far. I discovered a reliquary and a bunch of old altars, but none of that told me what they were for. I needed to do some reading up on these things, but where to look? My theology textbook was no help. I mean, pictures of smiling children are great and all, but generically stating over and over again that Jesus loves me wasn’t helping me unlock these mysteries any faster. But the old books took a different approach. What I was looking for couldn't be found in the new glossy paged textbooks but in the old dusty books that no one touched anymore. At Cheverus, those old dusty books were kept in the Jesuit residence...

The Vatican Library: the reason I studied Latin...

The Jesuit residence had been converted to classrooms about fifteen years before I got to Cheverus, but the library remained fully stocked with religious books of all sorts. There was just one problem: students weren’t allowed to take books out of there and the vast majority of the time the door was locked. All except for Key Club meetings…Key Club meetings were held in the Jesuit library. From the time when Mr. Westley finished the meeting to the time when I had to be out (lest I look conspicuous), I had about ten minutes to scan titles and peruse books as fast as I could. While I opened to a lot of random pages in the Summa, and looked at a lot of Latin texts, it didn’t solve my problem. Catholic Encyclopedia, Mother Teresa and the Catechism of the Catholic Church soon became my spiritual and theological staples.

A word to the wise: the Catechism is a great tool. Refer to it often. But I learned by trial and error that it is best not to cross reference it while your theology teacher is lecturing...

It was an intense year. I was constantly peppering my teachers with questions and objections about the faith. I began taking Latin not even knowing where the language came from but only knowing the Church wrote a lot of stuff in it. The more I learned about the Church, the more fascinated I became. It was true: all the mysteries I was bumping into by accident, the Church had known about long ago. She knew Christ was truly present in the Eucharist and even had an ancient practice of adoring Jesus exposed in a thing called a monstrance. She knew that God spoke through prayer (although I had never heard much about it) and could guide me on how to discern the voice of God from my own. She knew that by abandoning myself in faith, the obstacles would be removed and I could see and hear Our Lord. All of her teachings came not from her, but from Christ Himself; I knew that because she was confirming everything I had just seen for myself.

The Cheverus High School chapel where I spent
so many free periods.

Spiritually, I kept digging deeper. You couldn’t keep me away from the Cheverus chapel if you tried. Every morning I would go in there before school and pray the rosary. The rosary was another one of those mysteries I wanted to unlock. I didn't understand it, but I knew Our Lady had appeared at Fatima and asked us to say the rosary every day. Why I still wasn't sure, but I thought maybe I'd understand better if I learned it in Latin. Once I was done with the rosary, I would simply kneel there and talk to Christ present in the Eucharist about my day, my life, His will for me. With all those questions, He was giving me a lot of answers.

Over the years my prayer life evolved. I knew Christ better than I used to and I'd found there was much more to Him than I first thought. By the time I entered college, I had experienced His love and consolation, yes, but also His challenge and rebuke. I knew that He loved me too much to leave me as I was. The rosary, which had begun as rote prayer, had become richer. I’d begun to delve into the mysteries of Christ’s life and they became alive to me. I was drawn particularly by the Sorrowful Mysteries. I came to understand why Christ suffered on the cross, how it was in reparation for each one of my sins that He suffered, and how the depth of His suffering reflected the amazing depths of His love. It taught me something about the horror of sin, but also about what it means to love until it hurts.

St. Joseph, patron of the dying

The mystery kept growing. I was a freshman in college and a lot happened. I stood by my 90 year old distant cousin as she died. I believed in Heaven, I believed in the intercession of the saints, but they were always abstract thoughts for me. No longer. I saw what a change came over her in her last days. Suddenly she could hear me and she was practically deaf before. Suddenly she seemed to know things about me that I didn’t know about myself. Just as I was about to ask out the girl of my dreams, she grabbed my hand, ask me to pray for her, and told me, “You’ll make a good priest.” She passed away with me by her side just as the relationship drama was beginning. I learned through the mess that followed that the devil was real (he so cleverly set me up so as to have to choose between God and the feelings of a person I cared for), but I also discovered that when I asked my cousin for prayers in Heaven, they were very directly answered. Heaven was no joke and the intercession of saints was real.

More things have followed since. Retreats and pilgrimages have brought me to encounters with God and His saints that ten years ago I would never have thought possible. With each new mystery, comes a new problem to be unraveled. Some of this I did by reading the lives of the saints. Others I did through philosophy, trying to learn how to rebuild my worldview (which prior to had been so secular) so that God and the miracles I had come to see were so real were integrated in it. Still others I delved into by talking with spiritual directors, vocations directors, and good friends. What’s important is that through this great adventure, I came to know God better and to fall in love with Him more deeply. And that's the defining feature of a religious vocation: an all consuming love of God.

Thus concludes one chapter of this grand adventure. Tomorrow I’ll take you to inner city schools and Calcutta streets. The adventure continues...

A Worldly Adventure

While the first adventure occurred primarily in study and prayer, this second adventure happened out on the streets. God brought me to people and places that would stretch me and teach me how to better live as His servant. The places He would bring me, the things He would ask me to do were things I never would have guessed when this discernment began. It was a great adventure; in fact, it turned out to be an adventure across the world.

Believe it or not, I used to
whittle on this very stoop...

Believe it or not, I am by nature a homebody. I was one of those strange kids who grew up in Maine and never talked about leaving. I liked the cold, the lakes, the coast, the simple culture, just the fact it was home. When I first started discerning, I assumed I would eventually become a priest in the diocese of Portland. I could think of nothing better than bringing Christ’s love, mercy and presence to a humble parish in Maine, to my home. The idea of exploring strange and new places, having opportunities to do and see things normal Mainers don’t was simply off my radar. It wouldn’t happen. I was happy where I was at, I needed nothing more. I would live liked a Mainer and die like a Mainer.

So when God dropped me in the Bronx, it was a bit of shock to everybody.

My mother and I exploring Fordham
during the college visit

Don’t think that I exaggerate when I say that Providence brought me to Fordham. On my own free will I never would have given the school a second thought. My family was travelling down the coast to Washington, D.C. where I was hoping to visit the Catholic University of America. We stopped in New York City on the way and my dad suggested I visit Fordham. I did it, but I did it to humor him. I wasn’t interested in going to another Jesuit school. Four years of raising objections in theology had made me a little leery of the Catholic identity of Jesuit schools. But it made my dad happy, so we visited.

My parents and I outside Duane Library
at Fordham. Notice how pleased
with himself my dad looks.

By chance, we got a private tour of the school from a philosophy major. By chance, I heard about their Honors Program (it was everything I'd ever dreamed of.) By chance I bumped into the Italian parish down the street and knew I had a spiritual home. I applied. I got in. By chance I got a full ride. By chance I got into the Honors Program. But God knows that none of this was by chance. 

A Mainer in the Hood

So there I was. It was my sophomore year and the kid from Maine who didn’t know how to pronounce the letter “r” was living off campus in the Service Learning House. I would be living in a house with other kids from Fordham who were committed to doing service and getting to know our neighbors in the Bronx. Unlike most of the university,we'd be living outside campus walls and we were supposed to be ambassadors of sorts between the community and the school. My first night there, I met one of my neighbors, but it was an encounter neither of us intended.

We never learned his name. None of us ever spoke with him. Around the house we called him "Dennis" after our Resident Director. Dennis was a homeless man who used to store his shopping cart underneath my bedroom window. At about 7:00 or so in the evening, I’d hear a cart crashing across the threshold of my backyard. He never did anything, but it was a little weird sitting at my desk with only a screen separating me from Dennis' face.

One night we actually staked out for him from the 2nd floor. "Joe, quick! Get the flashlight! I hear something." We got the flashlight alright. We were going to speak to Dennis about storing his shopping cart somewhere else. We beamed the flashlight down. There was a man there, but it wasn't Dennis: we'd caught our security guard taking a whiz on the side of the house. I wasn’t in Kansas anymore…

Beyond the Metal Detector

Part of living the house meant doing service, so for my service project that year, I would be volunteering as a swim coach at the Theodore Roosevelt Educational Campus. Roosevelt was the public high school right across the street from Fordham and it had a rough reputation. When Roosevelt closed in 2006 to reopen as a bunch of smaller schools, their graduation rate was at 3%. I discovered that reputation was earned when I had to go through a metal detector on my way to practice the first day.

God had a lot to teach me through that experience. My swimmers referred to the fence that surrounds Fordham as “the force field.” According to them, by some strange magic, the force field let white people in but all the black people outside the gates seemed to bounce off. Inside the force field it was green and gothic. Outside people got shot. Ordinarily, the Bronx would have intimidated me and I would have stayed safe on campus, behind the fence. But that wasn't enough for God.

It’s true, coming from Maine there was a huge cultural adjustment to coaching at a Bronx public school. Just speaking their language took me long enough. “Mister this is type hard!” “Mister, I’m so brolic!” And then translating all the many strange acronyms that popped up on their Facebook posts…A lot of them were from immigrant families (actually, I think almost all were), whether from Puerto Rico, Kosovo, Nigeria, or the Dominican Republic. And they came from backgrounds that were sometimes tough for me to understand.

Their neighborhoods were often rough. I remember one of my swimmers coming into practice late and describing how he’d spent his morning running away from muggers. “Yo, mister, like, sorry I’m late. I was going to Enes’ house when I saw these two guys coming towards me…I didn’t like the looks of it, so I just booked it…you should have seen me, I was like woosh!...they followed me, but yeah, sorry I’m late.” It was a different world.

God’s love has no boundaries and He wanted me to understand and live that. It didn’t matter that these kids lived in often rough neighborhoods. God brought me there to serve them, to bring His love and joy there, even if all I was doing was teaching them how to swim. My time there was unbelievably rewarding. I saw my swimmers grow as athletes and as people, becoming more disciplined and more responsible as the years went on. I volunteered to coach there for three years. I saw a lot of them graduate and go on to things that I’m proud of them for. Some of them continued to swim when they went to college, others buckled down on their studies. My lesson was learned: even beyond the metal detector, those were people worth serving. God's love had no boundaries. It didn't matter where they were, if there were souls to be served He wanted me there.

Praying for Women and Children

At the March for Life in DC, January 2010

The Bronx held even more adventures for me. By chance (although I knew by then that God doesn’t usually play with chance), I got involved with the Respect for Life club at Fordham. During a club fair, someone called out to me, "Hey! Are you pro-life?" I thought a moment, said yes and put my email on their list. Within two weeks, I went from being a nominal but lukewarm pro-lifer to standing on the sidewalk outside a South Bronx abortion clinic praying for the broken women walking past who felt they had no choice but to end the life of their child.

Praying outside Dr. Emily's abortion clinic
in the South Bronx

Was I intimidated? Oh yeah…It’s amazing how much ire a quiet lap around the rosary can raise, and not from the women we were praying for either. Counter protestors and abortion clinic escorts would taunt us, swear at us and at one point I even got spit at….(he missed.) Again, God’s lesson for me was the same: His love has no boundaries. No matter how dark the situation, God’s love penetrated even there.

Outside that clinic, I saw miracles. I’ll never forget seeing a woman practically turn in midair when she heard one of the sidewalk counselors say, “Mommy, I have help for you.” She ran into Heather’s arms crying, telling her how she didn’t want to abort her baby, how her parents had threatened to kick her out of the house if she didn’t do it, how she felt like she didn't have a choice. The fact that someone was willing to help her changed everything.

Another time, as I prayed the rosary one morning, I saw a young guy my age coming out of the clinic. By some grace of God, I could tell he wasn’t doing well. I didn’t know why, but I felt like I needed to run across the street, give him a hug and tell him it was going to be okay. I couldn’t, so I just started praying intensely for him, asking Mary to be a mother to him since he needed one so much right then. I thought maybe I was imagining things, but prayers couldn't hurt. I later found out I wasn't. A sidewalk counselor said he’d talked to the young man: his girlfriend was in that clinic and he wanted to keep the baby. His baby was about to die and there was nothing he could do about it. I can only trust that Our Lady was there for him because in a dark time like that, it seemed that no one else was.

Fordham Respect for Life praying for women and children!

God brought me to dark and messy situations, places that ordinarily I would have been afraid to be in. But He called me there to show me that His love has no bounds, that my love should have no bounds, that wherever He was suffering in the poor and unwanted, there He was calling me.

If the Bronx was outside my comfort zone, you can imagine what Calcutta was like.

To Calcutta with Mother Teresa

I had had a deep devotion to Mother Teresa for years. In my desperate search as a freshman in high school to understand who Christ was, I picked a book by Mother Teresa called No Greater Love. It challenged me deeply, made me rethink what it meant to live as a Catholic, and inspired me to want to love Christ and His poor with the depth of love Mother Teresa did. For a moment, I wanted nothing more than to join the Missionaries of Charity, to be radically poor like they were and to serve the poorest of the poor. But I couldn’t do that. I was a kid from Maine. People from Maine didn’t do great things like that.

So when I found out that Fordham had a Global Outreach trip to Calcutta to work with the Missionaries of Charity for two weeks, at first I thought it was too good to be true. For a moment I spun my wheels saying it was too expensive for me, but next to what I had considered spending on a semester abroad, it was a drop in the bucket. I applied. I got in. On New Year’s Day that January I was in New York City getting ready to fly out to Calcutta, India.

A cow in the Calcutta streets: after
a week without meat I could have eaten
this thing raw.

Once again, God had a lot of lessons and a lot of adventure in store for me. I thought having lived in the Bronx I knew what a rough city looked like. Calcutta was rough on a whole other level. People literally almost dragged me to the ground, hanging on my arm calling, “Uncle! Money!” Not only did you have to watch your pocket, you also had to watch where you stepped because you were liable to trip over someone sleeping on the sidewalk. And if you thought NYC traffic was bad, Calcutta traffic had no rules. My life flashed before my eyes just getting into one of those Tuk-Tuks.

God had lessons waiting for me here, but this time the lesson went a little deeper. God was still teaching me that His love had no bounds, that His light would shine in even the darkest places and that He was calling me to carry it there. But this time it became more personal: my response to His love should have no bounds. There should be no limits on what I was willing to give out of love.

Fordham volunteers lining up to serve lunch at Prem Dan

My limits were stretched. I may not have been fluent in Bronx, but I could get by. I knew nothing of Bengali. I didn’t know how to care for the people in front of me and my only means of finding out what they needed was sign language. Even that was tough, because since Indians eat with their hands, their signal for “Food!” looked to me like they needed to take their medicine...

Often caring for them meant looking past things that would normally turn my stomach. Rubbing lotion on residents doesn't sound like a big deal, but amputated limbs could get dry too. And helping the handicapped get to the bathroom was not a skill of mine, but when Sister was too busy they’d take anybody. They weren’t all comfortable situations, but with each failure I had to pick myself up, learn from it and keep giving.

Me and my friend Steve during chai break

I wasn’t a particularly capable volunteer when got there, all plump, healthy and happy from a restful Christmas break. When my health took a turn at the end of the two weeks, I really wasn’t capable. Jesus called me to work anyhow and asked me to offer it all up for the poor I worked with. As I hung up laundry, I worked through the pain and offered it up. As I rubbed lotion on patients, I offered my pain in solidarity with theirs. I worked until I couldn’t stay warm anymore. I waited until lunch and then I left to go back to the school where my cot was waiting for me.

Prem Dan

As the sickness grew worse, so too did Christ’s insistence that I offer up all that pain out of love. He asked me to offer it in exchange for the sufferings of the poor of Calcutta, in exchange for the spiritual struggles of the people I volunteered with, in order to alleviate the burden of people who needed it by voluntarily taking some of it onto myself. Through this I came to realize that giving all out of love meant accepting physical suffering no matter where it would lead. If it meant giving my life for love, then so be it: if it was out of love, the benefits it would gain for other people were all that mattered. It meant accepting spiritual desolation because at the time, Christ’s joy seemed absent: if it was out of love, I could live the rest of my life in that virtual hell, if only that pain were accepted in exchange for another person.

I let go of two things that I thought were fundamentally important to me and came to understand a depth of Christ’s love and His call for me that I had never before imagined. Not only was He calling me to go anywhere no matter how dark or desolate, He was calling me to give literally everything out of love for the souls in those places. I had to go to the other side of the world to learn that lesson, but God in His Providence made sure I did.

Thus ends my worldly adventure. More would follow. In fact I would circumnavigate the globe on pilgrimage before I entered the Jesuits, but that's a story for another time.

Talking with Jesus 101

When I was starting high school, the idea of knowing Jesus personally would have sounded strange to me. People follow Jesus, talk about Jesus, worship Jesus, but to know Jesus personally? That’s reserved for mystics and the twelve apostles. But every once in a while you meet someone who does seem to know Jesus personally. You can tell just by the way they talk about Him that Jesus isn’t an idea, or a historical figure they’ve heard about, He’s someone they’ve met and know very well. Most of the time you blow them off as just being Jesus freaks, but part of you wants to know how it is they developed such a deep relationship with Christ. Such was my attitude when I was starting high school. Jesus was important to me, He was God and I loved and respected Him for that. I had heard of Him, I admired Him and that was where my relationship with Him ended. That’s where I thought everyone’s relationship with Him ended.

This changed just as I was entering high school. I remember sitting at Mass in that chapel, listening to Fr. Ted give a sermon on the real presence of Jesus in the Eucharist. He told us a story about an elderly brother who I used to see at Mass before he passed away. Every day this brother could be found talking to Jesus, but not in the way people usually think of. This brother realized it was Jesus physically present behind those brass doors of the tabernacle. So every day he would a pull up a chair on the altar and could be found whispering to Jesus through the doors of the tabernacle. This wasn’t the only time I would hear about this sort of relationship with Christ. I was on a retreat a few years later and a priest was teaching me about prayer. He told me, “When you come into the chapel, you meet Christ. Say hello and speak to Him freely. Before you leave, always say goodbye. Just tell Him, ‘Jesus, I have to go now, but I love you. Don’t go anywhere, I’ll be back.’” Something about the way they spoke about Christ made me realize that they knew Him.

I decided to give a try. After all, Br. Henry seemed to have such a close relationship with Christ. Something about what he was doing worked, so why not just see what happens? I started taking time to make visits to Jesus hidden away in the tabernacle. Rather than kneel down and recite prepackaged prayers, I just talked to Him. I told Him about what was going on in my life, I asked Him questions, and talked things over with Him. To my amazement Br. Henry was on to something; I could have a conversation with Christ and I was getting know Him better every day.

Like getting to know anyone, you learn certain things about them over time. You learn the do’s and don’ts of the friendship. So today, I wanted to tell you about the four things I learned about my friendship with Christ.

Lesson One: Christ knows everything, so fudging the truth doesn’t work so well. It’s not that I was intentionally lying to Jesus, but the thing was, I was used to telling Jesus what I thought He wanted to hear, whether I meant it or not. I would kneel before Him and say things like this: “O Lord, Thou art so very good! Do thou vouchsafe to grant me on this my upcoming test an A. I promise O Lord, that in the future I will study with utmost diligence and do it all for thy greater glory. Amen.” Jesus would then tell me to cut the crap. It’s not that He was against old English or stock prayers, but He knew I didn’t mean it. It was true, I needed help to pass my test, but I didn’t have any intention of improving my study habits and Jesus called me out on it.

I repeated this mistake over and over again. “I am sorry for having committed _______ sin and promise never to commit it again (subtext: at least not until tomorrow),” “I’m sorry for cursing at ______ (subtext: but who are we kidding, he deserved it),” “Lord, I promise to do whatever you ask (subtext: so long as it’s what I was going to do anyhow.)” Every time I said these prayers, Jesus would call me out on the subtext. I had to learn to be honest with Him. Rather than hiding behind pious phrases, I began to talk things over with Him. I talked with Him about why I was having a hard time with my geometry tests, about what was keeping me from studying and I asked for His help through it. I talked to Him about sins I was struggling with, about why I kept going back to them, and He offered to help me through it all. I learned that Jesus wants to help me and if I’m willing to talk it over with Him, He can do that. I just need to be honest.

Lesson 2: Jesus loves me. Not to state the obvious, but the more I spoke with Jesus, the more I appreciated how good He was to me and how much He cared me. In fact, it was one of the first things I noticed about Him. When I came into His presence, I felt this peace and joy unlike anything I’ve ever known before. It’s kind of like that feeling you get when you’re happy to see someone you love, except to the umpteenth degree. Jesus loved me and wanted nothing more than my happiness. As time went on, I found his love shone through particularly in times of struggle.

While I was in college, I spent one summer working at a soup kitchen in Washington DC. It was a good experience, but not an easy one. I wanted so much to give myself entirely to Christ through that work. I wanted to serve Him well in His most distressing disguise of the poor, I wanted to be loving and caring and hardworking. But it wasn’t easy and I didn’t always do well at it. I’m naturally shy and going out of my way to talk to the men in the kitchen was really tough. I tried, but I didn’t do well. I’m hesitant to jump into work I don’t understand, so as much as I tried to help out in the kitchen, I often made more work for the kitchen chef through all the questions I asked. And I was in a very different environment than what I was used to. I was a kid from Maine, a rural, white area. I was in a different culture, among different sorts of people, who were much more conscious of those differences than was comfortable for me.

Towards the end of my time working in DC, I made a visit to Jesus in the chapel. I was tired and extremely frustrated with the way things were going. I was trying to do what He asked of me, but it wasn’t going that well and I felt broken and useless. As I talked this over with Jesus, I felt this sense of consolation, He was telling me it was going to be alright. As I talked more with Him, I could hear Him say, “I know you’re weak, I know this is hard for you, but I called you to it anyhow. It’s going to be alright.” Jesus offered me strength, comfort and let me know that I was loved and cared for. It was exactly what I needed right then.

Lesson 3: Jesus loves me too much to let me continue like I am. When I was a freshman in high school, I was reading a book by Mother Teresa called No Greater Love. I’m embarrassed to say it now, but I wasn’t impressed. I was an ambitious kid with a lot of talents and a lot of hopes for the future. I was working hard in school and doing very well. I wanted to go to Harvard, work as a lawyer for a while, run for senate and finally retire to the life of luxury on my own private yacht. I worked hard, my hard work would be justly rewarded, and the reward would be mine to enjoy. Mother Teresa was not of the same opinion. Mother Teresa insisted that my talents were to be used out of love for the poor, that my riches belonged to the poor, that I had a moral obligation to give of myself to those who had less. She told me this was what Jesus taught. I didn’t buy it, so I appealed to Jesus. Turns out Jesus didn’t agree with me either.
I went to the chapel, knelt before the Blessed Sacrament and started my rant about Mother Teresa. I told Him about how hard I worked for everything I had and everything I’d achieved. I looked at my classmates and saw them slacking off. It wasn’t my problem if they wound up working at McDonalds. They’d squandered what God had given them, they got what they justly earned. I deserved to keep everything I earned for myself. The more I talked, the more I realized Jesus would not affirm what I said. So I started to argue more, and He continued to push back. I tried to rationalize my possessiveness, but to no avail. Christ kept saying no to my greed, to my self –centeredness, to my pride. It was challenging for me to hear, but after six months of wrestling with this issue, I began to get the message. I started to let go of my possessions and instead began to give more of myself. I started doing things like shoveling snow for the elderly or tutoring kids at a local grammar school. And in this I found great joy. Jesus knew this, He saw me the way I was and loved me too much to let me stay there. He was stern, but that was part and parcel of love.

Lesson 4: He is always there. At every moment in my life, whether large or small, I’ve been able to come back to Jesus. Like that good friend you can always depend on in good times and bad, I know I can always find Jesus waiting for me in the tabernacle, ready to listen, to help, to guide me. He was the first person I came to when I got accepted to college, the first person I went to when one of my friends passed away, the first person I went to when I was struggling to keep afloat with my school work. No matter what was going on, He was someone who I could turn to, who would be there for me.

I encourage you to get to know this Jesus Christ. He’s there waiting for you, you just have to get to know Him and it can be as simple as just starting a conversation. There was a reason Br. Henry seemed to have such a great relationship with Christ: it was because He nurtured it. Some of you think this is nuts, but I encourage to give it a try. It’s a chance for you to meet the greatest friend you’ll ever know.

Hearing the Voice of God

We live in an age where faith is difficult. Those who believe in Christ are being constantly bombarded with arguments and evidence doubting the existence of anything supernatural. In this firestorm of agnosticism, people of Faith are looking for clear ways to hear God’s voice over the clamor of atheists trying to drown Him out. But in the clamor, many faithful begin to doubt that such direct communication from God is possible. They talk about feeling God’s presence or hearing the voice of God when they look up at the stars, or have a particularly moving conversation with a friend, when they fall in love, or when they feel especially inspired by something. Certainly God can speak through these more subtle means. But what about more direct means? What about calling out to Samuel in the night, or Jesus appearing to Saul, “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?” Most people excuse these as being uniquely Biblical or just another fairy tale. I would have thought so too, except for one day in June 2005. Through that experience, I discovered God was constantly speaking to me, and I simply had to learn to listen. If that’s true, it means He’s trying to speak to you and it’s just as possible for you to hear His voice.

An 8th Grade Awakening

I was in the 8th grade. I’d been a Catholic all of my life and went to Mass every Sunday with my family faithfully. It was the feast of Corpus Christi, when the Church celebrates Christ’s gift of Himself in the Blessed Sacrament, and I went into Mass that Sunday like I did every Sunday: believing God existed but believing the only place I’d ever really meet Him would be in Heaven. The Mass began like any ordinary Mass and continued as such right through the Gospel. Then the sermon began.

Because it was the Feast of Corpus Christi, the priest began to preach on the real presence of Christ in the Blessed Sacrament. “This is not a symbol. It is Jesus. The Jesus who is present to us in the Eucharist is the same Jesus who was born in Bethlehem and died in Jerusalem 2000 years ago. He’s right there.” Glancing over at the tabernacle, something hit me. It was Jesus! I had always thought the Eucharist was merely bread because it looked and behaved like bread. But now as I gazed at the tabernacle, whatever was inside there wasn’t behaving bread anymore. Wave after wave of amazing joy seemed to radiate out from the tabernacle and hit me deep in my soul. Nothing in the natural world that I could think of compared to this. The joy I felt wasn’t entirely natural, it overwhelmed me, drew tears from my eyes, and made me feel like I was practically floating off the pew. No, something more than bread was present here.

For the next few weeks I turned it over in my head. Could I have been imagining this? Could the sermon have stirred emotions in me that were strong enough for me to mistake for a supernatural experience? But something about this seemed to be much more than an emotion or a feeling. I knew what it was to have feelings and this didn’t compare to any of them. Further, if I was imagining this, I would have to draw off prior sense experiences. I can’t imagine what I don’t know. There was no doubt about it, I had never seen or in any way thought of anything like this before. Moreover, there was no other proximate cause I could think of for this. This experience correlated directly to my recognition that Christ was in the Blessed Sacrament: nothing else had changed. There was no way around it: what I experienced at Mass was caused by the Eucharist and made possible by the fact that the Eucharist was the divine Son of God.

I began to think: if the Eucharist is Christ Himself standing before me, then I should be able to kneel before the Blessed Sacrament and have a conversation with Christ. It seemed like a bold idea but it was worth trying out. So I did. When I was in His presence, I spoke to Him and to my amazement, He answered. After all, Christ was present before me, why wouldn’t He answer?

But now this poses a problem, or perhaps more accurately a question. I received my First Holy Communion in the 2nd grade. For six years of my life I received Jesus, body, blood, soul and divinity, into myself in the Eucharist every week. And yet for six years, I never guessed for a moment that I was receiving anything more than a piece of bread. How is it that one moment I could be completely ignorant of Christ’s presence right in front of and the next moment be overwhelmed by Him? Perhaps Christ simply chose to be silent for those six years. But that didn’t make any sense. The more I prayed before the Blessed Sacrament, the more I realized that Christ was constantly reaching out to me and trying to guide me. He loved me too much to remain silent all that time. Christ was constantly trying to reach me and speak to me, so it couldn’t be that something changed on His end. Instead, something changed on mine. So what was it that changed in me to allow me to see Christ in the Blessed Sacrament and hear His voice? On reflection, there were three factors that kept me from being able to hear God’s voice.

Factor #1: Faith

As I mentioned earlier on, in many ways this Sunday was no different from any other. My family was going to the same parish, with Mass said by the same priest, at the same time we went every other Sunday. The only thing different was the sermon. But it wasn’t just the fact that someone had told me that Jesus was present in the Eucharist. I had heard that before but had excused it as symbolic language. After all, bread turning into God Himself? It defied all logic, that simply wasn’t the way the world worked. It didn’t matter how many times I heard it said that the Eucharist was the Body of Christ, I had already dismissed the possibility that it could be really Him.

But the sermon at that Mass caught me off guard. Fr. Ted didn’t allow me the usual wiggle room to excuse the real presence of Christ as just another metaphor, and for a moment the full force of what he was saying hit me. Had it been at another time and place, I might have even found a way to excuse his very direct claims, but in that brief moment that I was able to let go of my preconceived notions about what was possible and impossible, Christ was able to enter into the picture and show me Himself. I was like a man who was trying to walk through the world with his eyes closed. I kept denying that Christ was in front of me in the Eucharist and it was true, I didn’t see Him, but it was because I refused to open my eyes and look. During Fr. Ted’s sermon, curiosity got the best of me and I opened my eyes just a crack and in opening my eyes just that little bit, I was able to catch a glimpse of Christ and chose to open my eyes all the way.

I’ve often thought that this was Christ’s meaning when he told Thomas, “You have believed because you have seen. Blessed are those who have not seen, but believe.” Christ doesn’t mean it’s impossible to see Him, or that He’s lauding perfectly blind and irrational faith. Instead He means that faith is a necessary prerequisite to seeing. To give an example from St. Augustine, I have never been to Carthage. The only evidence I have that it exists is on someone else’s authority. The map makers tell me that Carthage exists, travelers tell me that Carthage exists, photographers tell me that their pictures are from Carthage, but in all these cases, my belief in the existence of Carthage depends on their testimony. I don’t know that Carthage exists, but I do believe it. What if I didn’t believe them, though? Then I would never see Carthage, because I would never get on a boat to go to a place that I refused to believe existed. Even if I got there and saw signs that said “Welcome to Carthage” I would believe it was all a ruse to make me believe in a place that in my mind might as well be northeast of Neverland. The same is true of God. My belief in God began with someone else’s testimony. But if I refuse to believe them, I will never know God or hear God’s voice. Faith, the ability to believe and open one’s soul to the workings of God, is a necessary step before God can be seen.

Factor #2: Silence

At this point in my story, four months have passed since first encountering Christ in the Eucharist. During these months, I continued to make visits to the Blessed Sacrament as often as I could and each time these visits were as powerful (or at least nearly as powerful) as that first encounter in June. But over time, this initial burst of spiritual consolation began to wane. There were days where I would kneel before Jesus and have trouble hearing His voice. At first, I thought the problem might be with faith. Perhaps the problem was that although I was acknowledging Christ’s presence before me in my head, it wasn’t translating to my heart. Thus I would try to regroup and realize that Christ was present the Eucharist not as some abstract proposition, but from the very depth of my being. Sometimes this worked, but not always. There was something else at work.

At the time I was reading a book by Mother Teresa called No Greater Love. Her first chapter was on prayer. Her major theme was silence. “Even God cannot fill what is already full,” we have to empty ourselves to let God in, and that included emptying my mind during prayer. There were days when I was coming to pray before the Blessed Sacrament, to speak with Christ, but there was too much noise to have a conversation. Sometimes the problem was that I was trying to do all the talking. At other times, I simply had too much that I was turning over in my head and it drowned Christ out. If I was to learn to hear God’s voice, I had to learn to cultivate interior silence.

Factor #3: Sin

But even when I gazed on the Blessed Sacrament with the eyes of faith and cultivated interior silence before Him, there was one more block between me and Jesus: sin. I knew Christ was speaking to me, but there were things I didn’t want to hear from Him and wasn’t about to listen to. One of these cases involved the question of charity: I didn’t like the idea. In reading No Greater Love, Mother Teresa had moved on from the topic of prayer to the topic of giving to the poor. She insisted that as Christians we were obligated to care for those who were poor, unloved, unwanted. As the good American I was, I saw no reason why I should be giving to those who squandered their God given talents and opportunities. I had worked hard for what I had. While my classmates were goofing off, I was studying, working hard in swim practice, drilling pieces on the piano, and when all that work translated into a high paying job, there was no way in heck I was handing any of that wealth over to slackers. As I worked my way through the rest of Mother Teresa’s treatise on charity and the poor, I muttered to myself all the way. I told myself that Jesus would never be so unjust to demand from me what I worked so hard for. But I had to admit, it seemed strange to think that I should know more about God than Mother Teresa, so I brought my case before Jesus.

At this point I was a freshman at a Catholic high school. I went to the school chapel, knelt before the tabernacle and began telling Jesus all about my hopes and dreams for the future and how Mother Teresa wanted to ruin it all. I told Him how He’d given all these gifts and talents to me, how I’d used them well and how I intended to reap the fruits from them. I told Him about how I wanted to achieve success by going to a good school, getting a good job, and raising a family in the lap of luxury and being happy. But when I told Jesus these things, the usual joy I felt before the Blessed Sacrament faded and it was replaced by a feeling of emptiness. Christ’s disappeared and I could hear only my own. I couldn’t hear Christ’s voice in those moments because I wasn’t willing to.

And so the conversation went on for months. When I said things that were in accord with Christ’s will, that feeling of joy was there: I was on track, in sync with Christ. But when I went off track, that joy was gone. I had wandered away from Christ. Back and forth it went. First I recognized that Christ genuinely was calling me to be charitable to the poor. I recognized that but I told Him the best way for me to do that was to make boatloads of money as a lawyer first so I had money to give them. Christ wasn’t having that. Then I recognized that maybe charity needed to happen in my life before I retired, so I told Christ I would do lots of pro bono work. That wasn’t enough for Him either. I told Him I’d be a deacon and do pro bono work. No dice. Finally, after oscillating between consolation and desolation this whole time, I realized that the only thing that really made me happy was being with Christ in that chapel. At that point I offered everything to Him: I would give up a family, my property, my very will out of love for Him and for the poor. It was in moments of complete abandonment to Christ’s will that His voice came through the loudest.

The Moral of the Story

So why am I telling you all this? I’ve posted all these reflections and analysis of my spiritual life at age 14. Why should you care? Because this ability to speak with Christ, to hear His voice, to know Him as well and concretely as you know your mother or one of your best friends is open to you too. We know that Christ loves us and wants the best for us. That means constantly reaching out us and trying to help us. We know that He’s truly present in the Blessed Sacrament, so we know it’s possible to come into His presence and be guided by Him. On Christ’s side of the equation, everything is set. The onus is on you: do you choose to listen to Him? If you can abandon yourself in Faith, let go of external noise, and let go of your own will enough to let Christ in, prayer no longer has to be so indirect. He is there.

The Miracle of the Mildew

It was an ordinary Monday morning like any other. Hollis had been up since 4 AM and was eating oatmeal in her room, Lindsay’s slumber was impossible to disturb, and Megan and I sat sipping coffee at the kitchen table, discussing life’s most amusing problems.

But this particular Monday morning it was necessary to mix business with pleasure. Megan is the sacristan for the house; essentially, her job is to set up for Mass and then make sure Jesus doesn’t get flushed down the sewer afterwards. That sounds a little strange at first, (after all, who would ever want to throw Jesus in the sewer?) until you consider that every particle of the Eucharist is Jesus in the flesh and one has to be careful when purifying the sacred vessels. Some churches have sacrariums which are sinks that empty not into the sewer system but directly into the ground. Our chapel has no such thing. No, Megan’s sacrarium is an orange mixing bowl.

The ritual goes as follows: Mass at the Red House ends, we all file out of the chapel one by one (because there’s no room for anything else), and Megan stays back to purify the sacred vessels. The chalice is rinsed out and emptied into the orange bowl and the corporal and purificators are allowed to soak. They sit there for an indefinite period of time until all the particles from the Sacred Host are dissolved. At that point Megan removes the corporal from the mixing bowl, sets it on a towel to dry and dumps the rest of the water on the front lawn so any particles that are left return to the ground, not to the sewer…

This particular week, that indefinite period of time was a bit more indefinite than usual. It was cold out (it was February) and emptying the mixing bowl meant venturing out into the snow. And so the corporal incubated in that mixing bowl from Tuesday Mass, through Friday, through Saturday, well into Monday…On Monday Megan remembered that Jesus must have felt pretty cold too when He was dying naked for her on that cross, and so over coffee she started the process of removing the corporal from the holy orange mixing bowl.

As I sat sipping my coffee, musing on higher things like what I’d have for dinner, my thoughts were rudely interrupted: “JOE! What does this look like to you?!” Megan pushed the bowl over to me and pointed to the corporal. I looked. Blood red dots were scattered all over one side of the corporal. “I can’t be sure, but it looks like blood to me.” And it did. It looked like the particles from the sacred host had fallen on the corporal and turned to blood.

To be clear, we didn’t get this idea from nowhere. Eucharistic miracles, where the Eucharist not only is the body and blood of Christ but also looks like the body and blood of Christ, are not unheard of in the Catholic Church. Just a few years ago, a nun in Sokolka, Poland left a consecrated host which had fallen on the floor to dissolve in an ablution cup (a small cup of water.) When she returned later to empty it out, she found that a distinctive red spot had formed on the host. Scientists were later able to confirm that it was tissue from the heart muscle. It looked like we might be dealing with a similar phenomenon.

At this point Megan and I were running around excitedly thinking we had witnessed a miracle. “What do we do?! Can we take the corporal out of the bowl? Is that sacrilegious? How do we know it’s blood? What do we do?! What do we do?!” And so Megan set to looking up biological properties of blood while I went upstairs to the chapel to ask Jesus what He thought of this whole business.

An hour later we started to calm down and decided we needed an extra pair of eyes on this. So we took a picture and sent it to Fr. Marvin. “Hi…so I was soaking a corporal and this happened…What do you make of it? Joe and I were curious…” Of course this was the understatement of the century. We weren’t just curious; we were looking for ecclesiastical approbation to begin the veneration of the Holy Corporal of Beacon, New York. The two of us paced around the room wondering what our fearless leader would say. When Megan’s phone went off with a text message, I jumped a foot. The text read:

“Haha, it’s mildew. LOL.”
And so we learned our lesson well, that when one leaves a piece of cloth in a bowl of water for a week, mildew happens…

Admittedly, there was a period of time when I still held out hope that a miracle might have occurred in the Red House. As the corporal dried out, I kept an eye on the red spots to see what would happen. When they started disappearing as the corporal dried, I had to admit it probably was mildew. Nevertheless, a few spots still remain and to this day we hang the corporal proudly in our cubicles in memory of the ever famous, “Miracle of the Mildew.”

On Miracles

Think back to your earliest image of God, to the way you looked at and thought about God when you were a little kid. Think back to it; when you’re a little kid, the world looks different. Everything seems new and wonderful and mysterious. Walking down to the end of your street is by itself an adventure, filled with discovery of new trees, bushes, plants, people, houses containing new secretes, mysteries and stories. As a little kid, you’re Frodo Baggins and your very neighborhood is Middle Earth.

When I was a little kid, I had that sense of the mysterious. I knew the world held secrets that I didn’t fully understand. I knew there were things that my mind couldn’t rationalize or break into bite size pieces. Trees would continue to tower over me no matter how much I thought about why they were so tall. The ceiling light in the room would continue to go on when I hit the switch, even if I couldn’t fully grasp why. Buildings were built, trains ran, people bustled about and I could grasp none of it. No, I accepted (in part because I had to) that the world was a wondrous, mysterious place, which made it a perfect place for adventure. God was a central part of that.

If I had to give a name to it, I think I would say that my image of God at the time was the God of miracles. I firmly believed God was watching over me at every moment. I believed He heard me when I prayed and I trusted fully that He’d respond. I believed in angels and I talked a lot with my guardian angel who was always a comfort to have around. My Aunt Jen’s stories about the rosary and the scapular fascinated me; stories about Mary appearing to the three children at Fatima held me spellbound. Miracles weren’t strange things then; they were just part of the wondrous world I lived in. Jesus could speak whenever and however He wanted (in fact I’m pretty sure I saw a statue of Him wink at me one morning at Mass), and saints and angels might appear at any time if they have something to say. God was that great and there should be no surprise when these sorts of things happen.

Then I started at the local public school and it seemed like everyone was trying to demystify this world around me. “No, you can’t make a rainbow by planting gold in the ground.” “No, you can’t fly just by flapping your arms like a bird.” “No, even with super shoes with springs on the bottom, you can’t jump to Heaven to talk with the saints and the Holy Souls.” The first two admonitions were good advice. I did indeed try to plant fools gold thinking that a rainbow would pop out of the ground and it was good information to know that rainbows are the result of the sun passing through water droplets in the air. And it’s true that I practiced for hours flapping my arms trying to fly. It was good for me to know that physics were working against me and it wasn’t from lack of practice that I never took off. But the third point wasn't so helpful…You see, some of the people in my school thought that just because they could rationalize some pieces of the world, they could rationalize it all. They had never seen Heaven, so they figured there was no way to get there. No matter how powerful my super shoes, they wouldn't help me. That chasm between Heaven and earth could not be bridged.

It was right around then that I began to have what some people would call a distant image of God. Don’t get me wrong, there’s a sense in which there is a great distance between God and us. God is infinitely more wise, powerful and loving than we could ever be. His home is in Heaven, a place of joy that we can only imagine. But I lost track of God’s all loving, all powerful nature and began to think that He stayed in Heaven, never directly affecting the things here on earth. All the things I believed as a little kid that brought me such a sense of joy and adventure I now excused as mere childish superstition. Just as I had once believed that planting gold in the ground will produce a rainbow and learnt otherwise, so too I had once believed Christ might appear to me or speak at any moment and now I learnt otherwise. Miracles weren’t the way of the world. The world worked according to fixed laws, constant patterns, clear, brutal logic that human beings in their infinite capacity for reason had been able to pick apart and understand. I began to think that when adults talked of miracles, they were really talking symbolically not literally. They didn’t really mean that bread turned in to Jesus’ body; that was just a symbol of Christ’s presence in the community. All those stories about Mary appearing to people? They were just legends picked up by pious old ladies. And prayer? People addressed God in prayer but often they were talking to each other, not God. Prayer was just a way of people sharing each others burdens. In the end, the mysteries I saw as a little kid were all the results of ignorance.

I still believed in God, but it was a different God than the God of my early childhood. This God was not so familiar and not so close. He created the world or at least set the Big Bang in motion. He even heard prayers from His distant heavenly abode although He often chose not to answer them directly. Ultimately God was the gatekeeper of that place of life after death, but He was only of indirect concern to the living. I felt so proud of myself. I was smart, I had reasoned my way through the messiness of the world, I had let go of all those childish beliefs, I was mature!

I was wrong.

Right up until middle school, I took it for granted that my rationalistic way of thinking was just the mature, adult way of looking at the world. It never occurred to me that smart, intelligent people might think otherwise. They did. At first I noticed it gradually in some conversations I had with my grandfather (whom I respect immensely.) I realized he actually believed the devil was a real being. Then I noticed it in the way my Aunt Jen spoke of Jesus; when she said Jesus spoke to her, she didn’t mean in some sort of metaphorical way. She meant Jesus spoke to her. But they were old and maybe just stuck in their ways. But then I heard Fr. Ted preach a sermon on the Eucharist. All the time I’d been receiving Holy Communion, I thought I was receiving bread symbolic of Christ and every sermon I’d heard left me that wiggle room. Fr. Ted didn’t and this shook out of my rationalistic mindset. For the first time, I looked over at the tabernacle with the eyes of faith and I saw Him. Jesus Himself was in that tabernacle, body, blood, soul and divinity, standing right in front of me. I felt this deep joy hit me in the deepest recesses of my soul, I felt washed by this amazing divine love that I’d been missing before. The God I knew in my early childhood was right there all along, I had simply closed my eyes to Him.

For years I had believed what the rationalists told me about the world I lived: I believed them when they told me there was no mystery or wonder to it, that we had unlocked all of its secrets and that the only secrets left were about the life hereafter if it existed at all. But they were wrong. God wasn’t distant, He was here. Something wonderful and mysterious was standing right in front of me in the Blessed Sacrament and His name was Jesus. Certainly not all the beliefs of my childhood were right, since no matter how much I flap arms, I still haven’t managed to fly. But I was right to open my eyes to the mystery, because God is wonderful, He is mysterious, He is as near as my guardian angel, and He loves me deeply.

When I started this post, I asked you to think back to your earliest image of God. But now I challenge you to go deeper. Walk into any Catholic Church, down the aisle whether on or to the left or right of the altar in a little gold box, you will find Jesus in the flesh. Go, speak to Him, open your eyes to Him like when you were a child. You won’t need to ask, “How do I imagine God?” He’s standing there in front of you, just look and see. He’s not distant, He’s not an abstract concept, He is there. Go meet Him.

An Open Letter to All Those I’ve Poked, Prodded, Nudged or Otherwise Nagged about the Possibility of Having a Religious Vocation

Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ!

When I ask people if they’ve ever thought about religious life, I get a lot of questions. Some of them are more explicit than others. Probably the most common one is, “Why me?” This is usually meant in two senses: 1) “Why would God call me to religious life? 2) “WHY GOD?! WHY DID YOU SIC JOE ON ME?!”

I hope to answer these questions in the course of this blog post.

First, “Why you?” If you want to get to the root of that problem, take it up with God. But why would I suggest it to you? For a long time, I couldn’t put my finger on exactly what it was. I thought maybe just as Padre Pio gave off the odor of sanctity, maybe people with vocations gave off an odor too. I also wondered if maybe it was just a sixth spiritual sense that starting tingling in the presence of someone who was priest or nun material. (To my credit, I was usually fairly accurate.) But after years of taking my bets on the future seminarians of America, I think I’ve identified what it is and it's very simple: I sense that there’s a deeper than ordinary love of God stirring in your heart.

Now, the second question you’re probably wondering is, “Why is this vocational stalker writing to me?” Well, a few reasons. First, I know that more often than not, there’s more stirring in your heart than you’re willing to publicly admit. Congratulations, you don’t have to admit anything to anybody in the course of reading this blog post. No vocations director is going to pop out of your computer screen, a screen shot will not be published in your school newspaper for your girlfriend to see, nor will strange men dressed in pantaloons and armed with halberds be appearing at your door any time soon to escort you to the seminary. (If you’re thinking about becoming a nun, transpose that last sentence to match your gender.) Rest easy, the social pressures of discerning a vocation do not apply here.

Second, if you are thinking about the priesthood or religious life, I know it’s not an easy process. I know it can be confusing, isolating, intimidating, and also exciting, joy-filled and mysterious. I’ve been there for ten years (not all by choice either.)

So why am I writing? If you’re not discerning a vocation, I hope it will help shed some light on how ordinary people turn into priests and nuns. If you are discerning a vocation, I hope to let you know that you’re not crazy, you’re not alone, and that you’re embarking on a greater adventure than you’ve ever known, filled with joy the likes of which you can only imagine.

So if I’ve nagged you about a vocation (even if I haven’t, I’m praying for a lot more of you than I’ve nagged) and it’s crossed your mind at least once, here are some thoughts that I hope will help you discern.

Thought One:

It’s A Lot Simpler than You Think

When people say they’re discerning a religious vocation, it’s interesting to see what they mean by it. For a lot of people, discerning a vocation is like doing astrology. They think their destiny is written in the stars. If they carefully chart the alignment of patterns, events, and strange coincidences in their life, they will be able to unlock God’s great master plan for their life. If they're lucky, a voice will eventually boom down from Heaven and give them specific instructions, but if they do their job right now, they should be able to track the invisible hand of God well before then. Thus when the planets are clearly aligned, they will know for certain whether they are being called to the chaste single life, married life, or religious life. How do I know this goes on? I was one of them.

One thing I had right was that this call to religious life didn’t come from me. It wasn’t like any ordinary career where my choice to become say a lawyer was based purely on my likes and dislikes. (And a lawyer would be to my tastes: I'm naturally stubborn, inclined to argument, I like money, I like splitting hairs, etc.) But in discerning a vocation, God was drawing me towards things that instinctively I shrunk away from. It’s not natural for humans to desire poverty and it certainly wasn’t natural for me to want to submit my will to a religious superior. But that’s exactly what was happening. This was all clearly supernatural, none of it was coming from me, which meant that God was up to something. I figured that if God was at the wheel, all I had to do was unlock that great master plan of His and follow the instructions from there.

Ten years of discerning a vocation have made me think there’s a little more nuance to it than that. What I’ve come to realize is that the call for everyone (single, married or religious) is the same: they are all called to love God. No matter how your vocational planets align, the fundamental call doesn’t change. That call is lived out within the context of each vocation. A married couple, for instance, lives out the call to love God by working hard for their families, being examples of Christian virtue for their children, passing the joys of the faith onto their kids, and loving their spouse the way Christ loves His Church. A single person likewise lives out their vocation to love God by being Christ to the people they work with, giving of their time to volunteering, being examples of faith to their nieces and nephews, etc.

What distinguishes a religious vocation from single or married life is the way in which the religious falls in love with God. A person who desires religious life has fallen in love with God so deeply that it’s become all consuming. If they are to adequately the love which they have for God, it means giving everything. I’ll give you some examples from my own life. Every Catholic should have a deep love of the Eucharist; after all, the Eucharist is Christ Himself. What I discovered as a freshman in high school was that love of the Eucharist had so consumed me that if I was honest with myself (and I wasn’t always) I wanted nothing else. I felt Christ’s love and joy burning in my heart when I came into His presence. I wanted to return love for love but the only way I could do that was to give my life for Him present there, standing at the altar, bringing others to same love and joy that I had known.

Every Catholic is called to be generous, but Christ’s love had so taken me over that I wanted to be free to give everything. I wanted to be poor so that I could say I had given everything: nothing was my own, all was given out of love.

Every Catholic is called to spread the faith, but this joy I had come to know in Christ was so strong that passing the faith onto my immediate family wasn’t enough: I wanted to be free to go the far corners of the world to tell others about the joy I had found.

I realized this when I was a senior in high school. I had been discerning a vocation for three or four years at that point, depending on how you count it. I’d only had the nickname “Pope Joe” for two. Like a normal high school kid, I met a girl and fell head over heels for her. I was so happy being around her and I started to wonder if I couldn’t have my cake and eat it too. Sure, Christ meant a lot to me, but wasn’t that the call of every Christian? Couldn’t I live out my faith as a married man too? I decided to pursue the relationship and I quickly discovered something: my heart was divided. My every thought was about Christ, my free time was spent before the Blessed Sacrament, and when I tried to give my heart in a special way to this girl, I realized it was claimed. I couldn’t do it. Set aside the mystical calculus (we can talk about the spiritual events that went with this later), I had fallen in love with God enough that I wanted nothing more than to respond to that love by leaving everything and having only Him.

For those you who were wondering why, "I'm in a relationship" didn't convince me you weren't discerning, that's why.

A religious vocation is about falling in love with God in a singular way. That means a vocation is not static, your destiny is not written in the stars, your freely chosen actions are always a factor. God is stirring in your heart and it is your choice how to respond to it. If you choose to allow yourself to fall more deeply in love with Him, you may find yourself desiring to return that love in a deeper way, desiring to abandon everything and follow Him. You can choose not to of course and God will still work with you, but you would have missed a very beautiful way of life.

This means discerning a vocation is a lot simpler than the Catholic astrology I know many of you were attempting to do. You know what God’s call is for you right here and right now: to love Him with your whole heart. Live that out now. Find ways to respond to His love, to live out your faith. Pray more, dig in and learn about your faith, do service even when it stretches you, learn to love the people in your life with a more Christ-like love. Return love for love now and in time you just might find  that the only adequate expression of that love is in giving all to Him: to be poor, chaste and obedient for Him.

Does this mean you don’t have to discern? Not at all. But the question you have to discern is much simpler: 1) Will I allow myself to fall in love with God and respond to that love without holding back? 2) Is my desire for religious life truly grounded in love of God? Ideally the answer to both questions would be yes. If it's not, that doesn't mean that you don't have a vocation, just that you may not be going into it for the right reasons. Take a step back, do some internal housekeeping, and then you can see. But if your answer to both questions is yes, let nothing hold you back. God is waiting for you and all you have to do is run to Him.

You're Free to Say No, But Would You Want To?

So now we come to the question: what if you say no? If a vocation was a destiny, no doubt this would come with catastrophic results. You can see what happens to people in ancient Greek mythology when they try to rebel against fate: fate chews them up and spits them out.

Fortunately we’re not pagans.

A family at prayer

Recall that a vocation is fundamentally a process of falling in love and trying to express that all consuming, burning love as best you can. If it’s truly to be love, your free will is a major factor. That means at any time in this discernment process you can say no and God will still love you, still work with you, still give you the grace necessary to walk with Him throughout your life. I’ve known guys who I’m pretty sure had the makings of a religious vocation, but for whatever reason didn’t pursue it. God is still working through them. Many of them have beautiful families now and are raising their children to know and love God. His grace is still at work.

That being said, be careful of your reason for saying no. Just as you want to be sure you say yes to a vocation out of love for God, you want to be sure that saying no to a vocation isn’t your way of running away from God. God needs your permission to work in your life and if you choose to run from Him, He can offer you all the graces in the world and you’ll never receive them because you’ve chosen not to. Don’t do that. There’s no reason to be afraid of God like that. Yes, He may ask for you to let some things go, but He only does so to bring you to a deeper, more abiding joy with Him. No matter how you decide to respond to His call, be sure to stay close to Him.

Mother Teresa with Christ's
little ones

So it’s true, you are free to say no to a religious vocation. The question is, would you want to? What you’re being called to is a beautiful way of life. Yes, of course that means leaving behind some things, but it means gaining so much more. You’re looking at a way of life that frees you to love God with an utterly undivided heart, to be His instrument of grace in the world, to witness His work every day in miracles big and small, and to carry His light into dark places. In following Him in such a special way, you get to know His love and His joy in a way many people may never know. In saying yes to His call, you get a privileged place from which you can witness His grace at work in souls and even be His instrument of it. You can say no to that, but why would you want to?

"This is my body."

My last bit of advice: don’t discern alone. You don’t have to be ready to sign on the dotted line before you talk to someone about the possibility of vocation. Remember, if that thought's occurred to you, only God could have put it there. A desire for religious life isn't natural, it's supernatural and so if that's there, God’s knocking at your heart in some way. Consequently, you don't want to ignore or try to blow it off: talk to someone. Talk to someone you trust, whether that's a priest, a nun or just a close friend. You're more than welcome to talk to me if you'd like; I'm happy to listen. My email is joseph.moreshead@portlanddiocese.org. Shoot me an email and we can find a time to chat.

Don't keep it bottled up inside you. The discernment process should be one that's full of joy; after all, it's all about falling in love with Christ, the source of joy itself. But the devil loves silence. He can twist those thoughts of a religious vocation and take what should be a gift and turn it into to a burden. Keep it to yourself and the discerning a religious vocation can become lonely, confusing, and seemingly unanswerable. This is Jesus Christ we’re dealing with; it doesn’t have to be like that at all. Talk to someone.

Know of my prayers for all of you who are discerning, those who I’ve nagged about it, those who I quietly suspect might have a vocation, those whose vocation I’ve yet to know of. May God grant you peace, clarity, and the singular joy that is His.

God bless,

Joe