Between Love and Sacrifice

I am writing this post from the Manor, the retirement community where the elderly members of our religious community retire. I see what the arch of my life will bend toward if I am lucky enough to keep my place in the seminary. I am pleased, and hopeful. But then I also reflect. I try to think of alternate realities. What else could my life be? If I did not have a vocation to the priesthood and religious life, I could get married and have a couple kids. I could send them to school and make sure they were well placed in life. Then when I got old hopefully they could take care of me. They could have me live with them in their own houses just as they lived in mine when they were dependent. Or they could find me a retirement community and come to visit me often to see how I was doing. Either way would be fine. But now that I do have a religious vocation - I do think I have one - I get to retire in a religious retirement community like this manor, with brother religious and other people that attend and help and keep house. Alleluia!

 

But is that all? Is it after two years in the seminary that one immediately begins to think of retirement and the retirement situation that comes with it? Obviously not. Everyone here has put in at least 45 years in the ministry. Some have probably put in 60 or more. Which means that between coming to join the society and eventually returning to the manor, there must be very many years spent pouring the soul away "like a libation" on behalf of the people of God: as a pastor, or a teacher, or something. There are a number of ministries that our religious community is involved in, all in service to the people of God. I sometimes imagine myself as a pastor in one of the parishes down in the south, helping people to find Jesus in their daily lives. I imagine that people will be helped by all the healing and preaching activities I will do as a priest. I want to be a priest because I want to help people.

 

But what does that mean? What does it mean to say that I want to be a priest because I want to help people? Can I not help people as a non-priest, as say, a social worker? Well, being a priest means sacrificing everything to help people, and so it is not just one thing, but two. It is not just helping people, but sacrificing in order to help them. And so a priest does not get married. He does not have children. He does not seek after wealth, and he has to be obedient to his superiors in order to be successful in his ministry. And he does this to be an other Christ, to destroy in his own self, like Christ did, the concomitants of negative emotions due to sin. He does this so that he can allow the people of God to participate through him in the salvation history of the Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, who came and died for us that we all might join him in heaven with the saints and the angels and God in glory. We praise and glorify him.

 

Now, in addition to the sacrifice, and flowing from it, is the call to help people. This is the sense in which the ministry of priesthood is seen to be a helping profession. I can help people as a nurse, or a teacher, or a counselor, or a social worker, but only in a limited way. Take the job of a teacher for example. I can go to school in the morning and teach and then come back home to tend to my own family. But as a priest, I am on call 24/7. After teaching or preaching in the morning, I get to go visit the sick; give marriage counseling; organize for catechism, and do so many other things. I am in perpetual service mode. I live for others and not for myself. My life is always being poured out in service to others. Granted, this is an ideal situation and there is a possibility that the reality of living out the priestly vocation will fall short. But when we think, it is always a pleasure to contemplate the ideal. Good. Anyway.

 

What I am saying is that sacrifice makes the capacity of charity that the priest is capable of to be much more than is possible for most other helpers, those whose helping comes with a paycheck, which they use to take care of their own family. And a priest does not have his own family. His family is the church. So you see. Anyway. What is my own sacrifice? I gave up a relationship with the only girl I ever loved. I used to have a best friend, but I don't have one anymore - all this sounds commonplace. But sometimes in the dark night of the soul, when you hug your pillow and wish you were hugging your beloved; when you are sick and wish your beloved could lean over you and give you soup and words of consolation; when you just want to be held close to some one's breast to feel the rising and falling of their chest and stomach - then you know you really are sacrificing. And for what? God. But surprise! What if there were no God? Then you would have given up your girl friend and your best friend for nothing. You would have given up the life you could have had for a whim. How sad.

 

But the good news is that the sacrifice is worth it. There is in fact a God, and there is a heaven, and there is the potential of reward for good works, in such a fashion that there will be recompense for those that sacrificed relationships or material wealth for the Kingdom. And so I am glad. I bear my sacrifices well. I thank God for giving me the grace to be able to make them, and I hope I keep up the good work the Lord has begun in me. And may it bear fruit in redemption, not just for me, but for the whole world. Amen.