Deacon reflection 1

To prepare to celebrate the feast of Saint Lawrence, deacon and martyr, on August 10, I will be writing a novena of reflections on the diaconate.

I never wanted to be a permanent deacon.

In my youth I wanted to be a Franciscan priest and in grad school I wanted to be a university professor, but I never became a professed Franciscan priest and I never taught in a university as a professor, only as an adjunct.

But I never wanted, or planned, to be ordained a deacon. Nevertheless,  now I am a deacon.

In October, 2014, at a dinner in Dulce Nombre with Padre German Navarro, the pastor, Monseñor Darwin Andino, our bishop, asked me to consider the permanent diaconate. Father German had asked me about this a few months before the dinner and I had explained to him why I did not think I was called to that vocation. I looked at him and his face told me that he had not mentioned this to the bishop.

I explained to the bishop some of the reasons why I did not feel called. After dinner was over, he urged me to consider this seriously. I told him I would and that night I began my discernment.

I read a lot; I write to friends, including a priest who had been director of the diaconate in his archdiocese; I spoke to friends here, asking them to help me discern whether this was God’s call; when I went on a visit to the US, I spoke to friends there.

I didn’t want to become a deacon and resisted it. But God kept calling through the months of discernment.

Resisting a call has been part of my life. If I had had my own way, I would never have left graduate school and served for almost 24 years in campus ministry and social ministry at St. Thomas Aquinas Church in Ames, Iowa. If I hadn’t spent a spring break in hurricane-devastated New Orleans in 2006, I never would have come to Honduras. If I hadn’t taken the bishop’s invitation seriously, I wouldn’t have been ordained a deacon.

Somehow God broke through my resistance. I think this happens to many of us.

But as I reflected on the diaconate in my process of discernment, I recognized that my life up to the day of my ordination was a preparation for the diaconate. God calls us from where we are and who we are.

When I was discerning if I should leave my work in Iowa and go as a lay missionary to Honduras, my spiritual director asked me why I would do this. Without a moment’s hesitation, I said, “To serve those most in need.”

I did not need to think through my response. Seeking to serve those most in need was who I am, or at least who I had been prepared to be – from my childhood, raised by two parents who had hearts open to those in need.

And so, as I think of my vocation, I realized that we are called to go beyond our self-imposed limits and respond from the very depths of who we are and who we had been prepared to be.

I did not want to be a deacon, but God – and family, teachers, friends, and others – had prepared me to respond. And so, by the grace of God, I was called to be an ordained deacon and I responded, weak and fragile as I am. 

Drawing of Ade Bethune

May God use this vulnerable man to serve.