During my visit to the US, I also visited with a high school classmate as well as cousins, one of whom turns 75 at the end of July. One joy was seeing the grandkids of one cousin – seven of them, five under three years of age. I also stayed with a friend, now a priest, whom I met in Don Bosco summer camp, probably between fifth and sixth grades. Sad to say, I didn’t connect with anyone from grad school, since I have lost track of most of them. (One of my classmates at Boston College was elected abbot of St. Benedict’s Abbey in Newark, NJ, but I didn’t get to see him.)
My life has been quite a journey – growing up in a blue-collar suburb of Philadelphia, spending six years in a Franciscan seminary and nine months in their novitiate, studying at the Jesuit University of Scranton and later at the Grad Faculty of the New School of Social Work in New York City.
I taught in a Catholic high school in Indiana and worked in a home for kids with problems in Scranton, while occasionally teaching at the University.
After doing disarmament work with the Vermont Ecumenical Council for 13 months, I returned to grad school, this time at Boston College.
Before I finished the dissertation (which I eventually did finish), I went to spend almost 24 years doing campus ministry and social ministry at St. Thomas Aquinas Church and Catholic Student Center in Ames, Iowa. I also had a chance to teach philosophy and religious studies at Iowa State University about once a year after 1990.
Then, in 2007, I came to Honduras.
In 2016, at the urging of the bishop, I was ordained a permanent deacon, the first in our diocese and the third in Honduras. (There have been two more ordained after me,) All the other permanent deacons are in the archdiocese of Tegucigalpa, including a Salvadoran, ordained in San Francisco, who works in a poor and somewhat dangerous area on the outskirts of Tegucigalpa.
What’s the meaning of all this?
A few months ago, I read an extraordinary book, Being Claimed by the Eucharist We Celebrate: a spiritual narrative for priests and deacons, that helps me understand where I am, how I got here, and also opens a way to the future.
Fr. Scott Detisch, a priest and seminary professor in western Pennsylvania, wrote a book for deacons and priests on the Eucharist that I believe might serve all the faithful in the effort to understand who we are as followers of Jesus, the Christ, who took, blessed, broke, and shared His Body in the Eucharist.
His reflections on brokenness are particularly poignant, but what struck me was a paragraph which helps me sum up my vocation;
When we look at ourselves, what allows a man, with an already established personality and ego-identity, to step forward to be ordained a deacon or priest, when all along he has been a broken human being, fraught with faults and failings? Has another story been writing his life? In a way, yes. It is nothing less than the narrative grace of the story of Jesus Christ. which is the transforming power of the Holy Spirit at work deep inside each person who professes faith in Jesus Christ and desires to serve him in the mission of the church. That narrative grace of the 3Holy Spirit, who so powerfully transformed the apostles, seeks to powerfully transform, through holy orders and the Eucharist, all ordained servant-leaders in the church. (p. 34)Put aside for the moment the important questions of the role of women in the church. You may want to rephrase the quote to reflect your calling.
But note the central question:
What story has been writing my life?
As I look back, Christ Jesus, the Word become flesh in the poor man from Nazareth, servant of God and servant of the poor, who initiated the Church of the Poor People of God, who has given himself completely, has been writing my life.
May I let Christ the Servant continue to write my life – for as many years as God gives me.
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