I was given the opportunity recently to write a letter to my Provincial asking to be sent on to Theology, the final phase of formation before ordination.  When I decided to write “the letter” it was not because I felt certain that I am called to be a priest.  What led to my decision was not a sense of clarity with regard to my vocation or a sure and unwavering desire burning within me.  Rather, the reasons I felt called to continue on in formation were much more simple.

First, when I review my last eight years, there is not a single thing that I would have rather been doing with my time.  Saying this, it helps to recognize that I have had more pain, heartbreak and anguish in the last eight years of my life than I did in all the years leading up to my entrance into the Society.  I have come to understand that constantly being pushed to one’s limits intellectually and emotionally is a difficult thing.  Likewise, being thrown into other cultures with people I may or may not enjoy, and then being challenged to remain charitable even when it seems impossible to give any more, is really, really hard.  I have felt the prick of a million and one barbed words shot from the mouths of people making claims that I might be too liberal, or too conservative, or too critical or too lax in my ethical and moral interpretations.  I have been made fun of for being too stupid to realize that God does not exist, and derided again for saying that the first ten chapters of Genesis are not based in fact.  I have spent hours listening to people explain to me what is wrong with the Church and its sexist patriarchy (and then trying to help me understand how little I know because I am a man).  I have had people tell me that to follow Christ by living as a priest is actually a perversion of my true nature (again, this was because I am a man, but the rationale was rooted in the ideas that, first, it is impossible for men to live without “sowing their seeds,” and second, it is nearly impossible to live well and to know love unless one is married with children).  In a similar vein, I also know what it is like to move every few years, to let go of family and friends, to let go of relationships that I spent a lifetime building, and then be told that I do not really know what love is.  To be clear, these occurrences were neither isolated nor rare.  Eight years is a long time, though, and I am grateful to acknowledge that this is not all I experienced.

In all of the struggles, I was becoming a better follower of Christ.  I do not say this out of piety or because I am trying to please.  I say it because I have come to realize that learning to love with the love of God is the only thing that sustains, or will ever sustain me.  I have been lucky enough to be loved by the people I have met along the way.  Jesuits and lay people alike have offered care at every stage of formation, and for every difficult situation or conversation, I can think of at least one revelation of God’s grace.  For every struggle to learn patience and kindness there was also a triumph of the Spirit, if not in the actual outcome of an event, then the lesson learned from it.  I was challenged, but I came to understand something about my limitations and strengths.  I failed, but I learned how to forgive, be forgiven, and make amends.  I learned something of who I was and what I could do to care a little better for the people in my life.  I have become kinder, stronger, more loving, more giving, more capable of receiving, and ultimately, more fully aware of humanity.

This brings me to my second reason for writing “the letter.”  It is not so much that I am certain I have the aptitude to be a great priest, or that I am truly called to life as a minister of the Sacraments.  It is that, all things being equal, I still desire to follow Christ and to learn more about what it means to follow Jesus in this way.  I still want to be formed by these vows.  It is not that there is nothing else I would rather be doing, but that there is nothing else that really holds my attention in the same way.  Of all the struggles I could have, I have come to desire this one.  It is not that I want to be a public representative of the faith, but that I am becoming willing to accept the sometimes hurtful scrutiny and also the anonymous, undeserved kindness that comes with taking on a public role.  To be sure, there are things in living as a companion of Jesus, allowing myself to be formed by the vows of poverty, obedience and chastity that continue to frighten me.  Fortunately, the grace of being asked to share in the lives of so many faithful, caring families, friends, and strangers, continues to reveal how the Spirit of God lives in and loves through Christ’s people here on Earth.

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