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 I was a very withdrawn and introspective kid when I was in high school, so I imagined at the time God was calling me to be a monk.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.