Anyone who has ever been in love knows that the joy that makes us complete is born out of the pain that fashions love which, if it is to have any meaning at all, is always growing, is always choosing, is always deciding. I love being a priest. I am grateful that God chose me to be a priest. I love and enjoy doing priestly things – celebrating the Eucharist, hearing confessions, doing spiritual direction, listening to people, even doing administrative work. I make these choices every day I live. No matter what one’s vocation is, God graces each of us with love and joy.
When we finally recognize that we are loved, we can only be grateful. But love and joy cannot be taken for granted. There is no love or joy that does not cost something. As a popular song once said, “Without a hurt, the heart is hollow.” A priest can love others so much that he loses sight of his own need to be loved. He gives and yet feels empty. A person who loves fully and who recognizes that he is loved in return knows his or her shortcomings. Such a person has acquired a very deep state of humility.
While still a teenager and considering a priestly vocation, Fr. Bill Cleary, the assistant pastor at my home parish, gave me a copy of Fulton Sheen’s book titled “The Priest Is Not His Own.” Whatever wisdom the book contained, I was most fascinated by the title. What did it mean to be “not his own”? Really good priests do not belong to themselves. At their deepest level, priests have no life that is their own. They belong to someone else – to God and to the people they serve.
Two people in a marriage do not belong to themselves. They belong to each other. This commitment is both a source of sadness and a cause for joy. Priests are indeed like everyone else. They need to love and they need love. The priestly vocation in loving is to help others find the God who loves them. Who helps the priest grow in his love for God?
Becoming king of England was certainly a prestigious thing for Arthur. But it was also an awesome duty, a lonely responsibility for a boy becoming a man. It separated him from those whom he loved dearly. It changed his life. He could no longer be the boy he was. He had to grow up. He was one of them, a human being, but now he was also somehow different. He had to become an adult. To be a good king Arthur had to love his people. And loving them now meant serving them in ways he had yet to learn.
The poet Tennyson wrote, “I am a part of all whom I have met.” We are also a part of each other. We are a part of all of us. Yet we try to protect ourselves by becoming rugged individualists wanting to face God by ourselves rather than recognizing our common humanity, our common priesthood.
When we commit ourselves to the priesthood, or similarly, when a couple commit themselves to each other in matrimony, none of us can project the future. We may have some slight notion about its possibilities. But we cannot see it clearly. The boy Arthur cried when he realized he was to be king of England. Though he could not see the future clearly, he knew that he was no longer his own man. He knew he belonged to England.
Arthur’s life was a life of conversion. All our lives we are continually undergoing conversion. We learn and re-learn. We confess our guilt. We accept God’s grace. Our life in God is a goal we reach not by an upward curve. We sometimes get lost and we need to find ourselves again. We can only rest in the certainty of God being with us on our journey.
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