Articles on Vocation and the Priesthood
Continuing our series of articles written by priests about their priestly life
A Priest's Story - 13
I remember riding to school upstairs on the bus one day, when the question came into my head, “Did I want to be a priest?” I had no answer to this question at the time, and I successfully managed to put the question out of my head– I was probably about 14 years old. But the question kept recurring. I wasn’t sure about it, so I kept putting it aside. Putting it aside, however, did not seem to work for long, and the question kept coming back. Eventually I came to the conclusion that I needed to pursue this, to see whether I could find any answer to it.
I talked to a priest and a couple of teachers, and they all assured me that there was no rush – there was plenty of time for a decision. They suggested that I should stay on at school, and perhaps go to university. I was very happy to hear this, because I was still very unsure of my answer to the question. And so, off I went to university, where I studied mathematics. (Perhaps a bit of mathematical logic would succeed in making the question go away.) At the end of my three years at university, the question was still there.
Much prayer and thinking was going on all this time, and in the end it became clear that the only way to make the question go away was to pursue it. So off I went to the seminary. (Perhaps a bit of seminary discipline would succeed in causing the question to disappear.)
You are reading these words as one of a collection of pieces written by priests, so you will know that in due course I became a priest, and so the question must have been resolved somehow. After four years in the seminary (where the discipline had scarcely proven severe!) it was finally time to answer the question, because it was time to consider my suitability for ordination. The only answer that made sense was “yes”, because the persistence of the question must have meant something! God works in all sorts of different ways…
In none of this was there a clear sense of why God was calling me to be a priest, or of what special talents I possessed that made me suitable – there was just the question. In a very real sense, the question still remains, more than thirty years later. My life as a priest has been a response to the question, rather than an answer. I have done some studying, done some teaching, and am now engaged in parish ministry. I have been to a variety of places, and met all sorts of people, and learned all sorts of things. But most of all I have learnt what I always knew, that there is goodness in people. If there is anything I can do to help people know that God loves them, really loves them, and not just the people they wish they were, then maybe the question will have found an answer. Jesus is God’s resounding yes to us and to all our important questions.