Kelley and the Mystery of the Multiplying Coats

Nancy Drew in the act of sleuthing

CYFM regulars may not be aware of this, but kids who come on the day retreats figure it out pretty quickly: Kelley Borowy loves Nancy Drew. On every day-retreat we always answer a question of the day. “What’s your favorite Christmas present?” “My Nancy Drew computer game.” “What do you like doing on a rainy day?” “Playing my Nancy Drew computer game.” “What did you give up for Lent?” “My Nancy Drew computer game…”

For those of you not familiar with this particular character, Nancy Drew was a young teenage detective who had her own series of mystery books. She was kind of like the female version of the Hardy Boys and in fact, Frank and Joe Hardy make an appearance in her books. (Kelley has commented multiple times on the ironic fact that despite the name, I’m much more like Frank than Joe Hardy.) Sleuthing around, searching for clues, catching bad guys red-handed, all while living the life of an otherwise ordinary teenage girl: that is Nancy Drew.

Little did Kelley know that her Nancy Drew detective skills would soon be required as a real life mystery was about to unfold.

See? Kelley's always cold...

When Kelley moved into the Red House, she came well prepared. All the supplies necessary to complete her tasks for the year were on hand: candles that smelled like something delicious was baking the kitchen, extra lamps, a map of the US to track where she had traveled to, and of course her collection of coats. The coats were a big deal. Kelley gets cold very easily and besides, they looked pretty snazzy. But alas, there didn’t seem to be room in her closet for all the coats. Piling them unceremoniously in a corner of the room didn't seem like a great solution and hanging them over the stairwell would work, but was a little strange. What to do, what to do...With a little exploring Kelley found the solution: there was a closet out in the hall labeled “Strangers’ Coats” that nobody was using. The community wouldn’t mind if she took it over.

Days passed and nothing seemed particularly out of the ordinary. On the other hand, Hollis was looking especially dapper lately. Kelley couldn’t quite put her finger on it, but Hollis just seemed to have good tastes. In fact, it looked like Hollis had the same coat as her. What were the odds? They could be twins! But soon things started to get fishy…

The next day, Hollis again was looking pretty spiffy. She was wearing a nice coat again one just to Kelley’s to tastes. In fact, it looked like another coat Kelley had stashed back in the Red House. Two of the same coats? Something strange was going on. These weren’t coats you see everyday.

Now you never know what to expect in the Red House. The Lord works in mysterious ways. Perhaps it was coincidence or perhaps we were dealing with a miracle not unlike the multiplication of loaves: perhaps Christ was multiplying coats.

"Who would do such a thing?!"

Then again, maybe not... It was time to investigate.

Going up to the hallway closet, Kelley looked in where her coats were kept. All were accounted for, except one and it looked just like the one Hollis was wearing earlier in the day. This was a little too much of a coincidence.
The coats weren't multiplying at all: they were disappearing. It seemed the mystery was pretty much solved. The only thing that remained was the motive. Kelley decided to question the suspect.

“Ummmm, excuse me Hollis. Is that my coat?”

“No! I got it from the hallway closet.”

“Uhhhh, the one labeled “Strangers’ Coats?””

“Yeah! There were all these coats that people had left behind. I figured somebody should use them.”

"Oh yeah!!! Mystery solved!"

“Wait, those are my coats!”

Hollis turned a dark shade of red.

“Oh…”

The mystery was solved: the coats had been mislabeled. Whereas Kelley looked at the closet and saw extra storage, Hollis saw long forgotten clothes. There was a moment of panic when Kelley found out Hollis tried to wash the coats. (The tweed one wouldn’t have survived so well…) but all was well. Hollis was very apologetic and the coats were now accounted for.

Kelley retired to her room quite satisfied. All those skills she'd learned from Nancy Drew had paid off. Little did she know that those skills wouldn't be used again until she solved the mystery of the disappearing food...

THE END

Of Prayer Partners, Palanca and Padre Pio

Padre Pio OFM Cap

This afternoon I was in the office, by myself, busily cutting paper. The others had scattered to do everything from seeing people graduate to power tool shopping. I had no such excuses, so I was doing my duty for the Capuchin Outreach Program (COP) and cutting slips of paper for the prayer partner lottery.

For those of you not familiar with prayer partners, at the beginning of all of our outreach programs, each participant draws a name from a hat. Whoever’s name they draw, it is their job to pray for that person over the course of the week. At the end of the week, the prayer partners are revealed and each prayer partner prays over their person and gives them a letter they wrote to them. It’s a nice practice, but I’ve no idea why I was put in charge of this. It involves cutting up slips of paper and my housemates can tell you, I’m less than graceful when it comes to things like this.

Fortunately, cutting paper and keeping track of whose prayer partner is whose isn’t my only duty: I also have to give an explanation of what prayer partners are at the beginning of COP. Truth be told, I wasn't quite sure how to explain it. Prayer partners do more than just pray for each other; they offer little sacrifices for their person over the week as well. How to explain that? As I sliced tiny slips of paper one after the other, I mulled it over. Eventually my mind wandered to Padre Pio.

He went way down and his prayer
partner shot way up...

To be clear, me thinking of Padre Pio had nothing to do with an unfortunate slip of the paper guillotine. Instead it occurred to me that the great modern stigmatic and Capuchin extraordinaire was the master of what we at CYFM call "palanca." Palanca is the Spanish word for “lever.” If you’re looking at this post right now and wondering what in the world Spanish levers have to do with prayer partners and mystic saints, no worries, most people have that reaction the first time they hear the term. If you picture a lever for a moment (better a yet, a seesaw), think of how it works. Whatever is on one side of the lever only gets pushed up if the opposite end goes down. So too as Christians, by humbling ourselves, and making sacrifices for them, we are able to raise others up. This is what we ask of prayer partners, that they lower themselves in order to raise their prayer partner up. Hence palanca. 

Me pretending to be Padre Pio on Saints for Youth

Padre Pio gave his life to this. When you look at statues of Padre Pio, he’s always depicted with brown, fingerless gloves on. When I was a kid, I thought he was just cold. Alas, it doesn’t get that cold in San Giovanni Rotunda where he lived...No, Padre Pio wore gloves to cover the wounds he received from Christ: the same wounds Christ received during His crucifixion.

When people hear that, the typical reaction is, “COOL! A little creepy, but still cool.” Then they think a moment: “But why?...” The answer is palanca. For fifty years straight, Padre Pio suffered the pains of crucifixion as ransom for all the suffering that was going on in WWI. Through Christ, he chose to suffer so that others didn’t have to. His sacrifices bore a lot of fruit because amazing graces and miracles were wrought through his prayers. http://www.padrepio.catholicwebservices.com/ENGLISH/Miracles.htm

If this seems a little strange, it only take a moment of reflection to realize that this is an ordinary consequence of love, just brought to another level. If you truly love another person, you’re going to be thinking about their good without necessarily being concerned for your own. It’s about them, it’s not about you.

Imagine your mother calling across the house, "Joseph!!! The grass is getting long! Could you go out and mow the lawn?!" First you look at the thermometer. "Ugh, 90 degrees and getting hotter..." Then you think about all the things you'd rather be doing. "I could be sitting in a nice, air conditioned room, reading a book, maybe even taking a nap, all the while smelling dinner cook." Based on the evidence at hand, you conclude that the lawn can wait til tomorrow, or even next week. Heck, it can wait til the winter! But you love your mama, so you set aside your plans, ignore the heat, and go mow the lawn because it helps her and makes her happy. Love's not about you: it's about the other person.

Mother Teresa caring for the dying

Now let’s bring it to the next level: loving until it hurts. Imagine someone is in dire need and they ask you for money. You open your wallet and see you have a $20 bill and a couple of singles. $20 is half your weekly stipend; if you give them that, you won't be able to afford anything outside food for an entire week. It's not that you're a terrible person if you throw them the singles, but it speaks to a much deeper level of love if you give them the $20. Giving the $20 means giving until it hurts, making an even more intentional choice to forget yourself to care for another person.

When you choose to love another person, you're presented with all sorts of occasions when your love is tested and you have to choose to love until it hurts. The example that most inspired me was Mother Teresa. She gave to the poor until she was literally as poor as they were, yet she kept giving. She nursed people back to health and loved them even though their smell and their diseases would turn her stomach. She got down in the gutter and embraced the grossness, the heat, and even the heartbreak because all those hurts were necessary consequences of loving the poorest of the poor. Real love will drive a person to do even that.

Last we come to the highest level: when you so love a person that you even wish you could take their burden away from them and carry it yourself. Love drives us to that point all the time. We see someone who’s suffering terribly, we feel compassion for them and we wish we could take some of that burden away. I know I've felt this way at funerals before, when my friend's grief was so great that I would even suffer it instead of them just to alleviate their sadness a little bit. If you want a more concrete example, think of the Hunger Games. Katniss loves her sister so much that she would volunteer for the cruel slaughter that was the Hunger Games, so her sister didn't have to endure that. Love drives us to so forget ourselves that we would take the place of the people we love in their suffering.

The thing is, these are more than nice sentiments: we can take on some of the suffering of those we love. That’s what Christ did for us on the cross: He took the suffering and punishment due to our sins on His own body in the form of scourges and beatings and crucifixion itself so that we would not suffer them ourselves. That’s what Padre Pio did by accepting the stigmata: in those wounds he suffered for our sicknesses, our temptations, our brokenness and miracles came out of it for those who asked for his prayers. That’s what we can do by voluntarily offering up little penances and making sacrifices for people we love. We can offer those things spiritually for them and if Padre Pio is any lesson, those offerings will be received.

Padre Pio the morning
after he received the
stigmata

As COP and CAM both approach, it’s worth reflecting on this. These weeks of service are lessons in love. We are called to love those we serve, even when it hurts. Even when our patience has been tried by too many one sided conversations in a nursing home or when the sun is blazing hot and we don’t want to do manual labor anymore, that’s when love is tested and we prove that it’s real. We’re called to also love those in our own community, especially our prayer partners. All of you are going to need graces as you work to grow in the love of Christ and of your neighbor. All of you will need some help in the course of the week. Make a conscious effort to offer those little pains and sacrifices for your prayer partner: by lowering ourselves, we really can lift others up.

Padre Pio, pray for us!

The Voyage to Gilgo Beach

It was dark and stormy night…

Actually it was a dark and stormy afternoon and for once that’s relevant to the story. In fact, in this case it is the story. It was a cold Thursday in early December; early enough in December so that snow was still less likely than rain. The Cap Corps Volunteers were milling busily around the office preparing for a confirmation retreat in Patchogue the next day.

For those of you who have not extensively explored the strange and foreign hamlets of Long Island, Patchogue is not particularly close to Garrison, New York. Pull out a map. Find Queens. Go east, go further east, go out to the long end of Long Island and X marks the spot, there you’ll find Patchogue.

Fortunately for us, the Capuchins have a villa house on Gilgo Beach. Rather than leave for Long Island at 6 AM, we would leave on Thursday midday, drive to Gilgo Beach, spend the night there and have only a 30 minute drive in the morning to Patchogue. Brilliant!

But nothing is ever that simple…

We’d only been in the office an hour or two when Fr. Fred walked in with an announcement. “Ahoy, maties! There’s a storm a blowin'. The seas are rough and flooding the roads. We should be going soon. Get your stuff and we’ll leave after the third watch.” Thus our voyage began.

We had two ships in our fleet: Fr. Fred’s car and the CCV’s Impala. The men were quarantined for cooties and sent to Fr. Fred’s car while the ladies jumped into the Impala. Now by all standards, the Imapala drives like a boat. She doesn’t stop, she glides. She doesn’t turn unless you’ve first given the rudder time to respond to your command. Big and wide as she is, you feel like you’re sailing the Seven Seas as you ride down the Taconic Expressway. Yet though in outward appearance she seems to function like a boat, that doesn’t make her seaworthy.

Brave Captain Lindsay Gilbert piloted the Impala down the Long Island Expressway, dodging puddles the size of which could have hidden an angry sea serpent or a swamped Volkswagon. Her frightened crew said their prayers in the back seat. Then it hit: the Impala had run into a puddle and was hydroplaning at 70 miles per hour down the highway. Silence reigned but for the happy sound of a mariachi band playing over the radio as all stopped and all stared at the wall of water that engulfed the car. The ship was at the mercy of the water. Thank goodness St. Christopher loves them.

In the meantime, all was well in the mother ship. How do I know all was well? I was snoozing in the back. How could it be better? In my dreams there were no storms, no puddles to hydroplane on, no problems.

We stopped for provisions. We had enough supplies for lunch but we would have had to ration for dinner. So we hopped out of our cars and practically swam through the torrential downpour to get to the store. Fr. Fred and I went and got our Subway sandwiches while the rest got Chipotle. We were ready to go but the ladies insisted we get Dunkin’ Donuts. You’d almost think they were stressed or something. I couldn’t fathom why.

Our voyage resumed, as did the storm. Captain Gilbert resumed her place at the helm and continued to navigate treacherous waters. But trouble was brewing. This time, it did not come from the wind or the waves but from the ship herself. The captain looked down to see at what speed she was cruising. The dial told her she wasn’t. Indeed, the speedometer claimed she was going 0 miles per hour. Unless the world was turning backwards, there seemed to be a minor discrepancy.

The overpass to the beach at Gilgo Beach. I walked through
that in the dark. It was creepy.

I awoke in the other car to the sound of a ringing cell phone. The first mate answered. “Hi, this is James. Ummm, yeah, we’re going about 70 miles an hour right now. Why do you ask? Oh. What happened to your speedometer?” I shrugged my shoulders and went back to sleep.

The journey was almost complete. Only the last leg remained. In the Impala, there was much rejoicing. “We’re here!” the captain called. They could see the beach, they could see the road on which the beach house stood. She turned the ship left and stopped. “Are you kidding me?!” They beheld in front of them a puddle deep and wide, the likes of which would easily engulf their little ship. They would have turned back, but they could see their destination up ahead. With a brave cry, Captain Gilbert drove on into the sea. The Impala survived. They were finally safe at port.

Our ultimate destination: St. Joseph's Church, East Patchogue

That night the rain let up and I took a walk along the shore. Coming from Maine, the smell of the salt air, the crash of the waves made me feel at home. What a wonderful trip this was! I felt so refreshed by it all. The rest of the CCVs were grumbling about what a stressful trip this was, but I knew something they didn't: when mortal peril threatens and there's not a darn thing you can do about it, it's always best to take a siesta in the back seat. You'll be much happier for it.

Cooking with Katie

It was only our second day as Cap Corps Volunteers. All day long the rest of the CCVs had been very chatty and socialable, laughing and talking as they got to know each other. I on the other hand was my usual awkward self and had very little to say at this introductory phase of things. After a day of this, it was getting late. I was sitting at the kitchen table listening to the girls talk, and heard something rumble: it was my belly. It was dinner time. Without knowing what our weekly stipend would be and with the cupboards bare, I figured I’d have to go out and get something cheap and solid. I got up and said my first sentence of the day:

“I’m going to go buy a potato.”

The look on the girls’ faces quickly told me that that was the last thing they expected to hear.

Look at how happy potatoes make them!

Coming from an Irish family, my tastes in food are pretty simple: dinner is composed of something dead with potatoes sitting next to it. (The ladies of the house at one point tried to argue that broccoli had once been alive and hence counted as “something dead.” What a cruel sense of humor they have…) Strictly speaking, my mother isn’t Irish but she always had a good meal of meat and potatoes ready for her family. We had roasts and boiled dinners and steak and baked potatoes...It didn’t get any better than Mama Moreshead’s cooking.

When we finally had our weekly food stipend, the CCVs broke into pairs to cook the meals each week. For the rest of the year, Katie and I would be responsible for Tuesday dinners. We made an awesome team. Katie would take care of the vegetables (which are foreign entities to me) while I prepped the meat. Our dinners were hearty and so simple that I could go for a run and Katie fall asleep while it cooked. We made a great team, but there was no doubt about it: Ms. Cavazzini came from a different culture than I.

In the course of our first month in the Red House, it became evident that Katie had a unique but predictable diet. Every morning her day would begin with a glass of Tropicana pure squeezed orange juice (no pulp, calcium if you feel like it) and a Shaklee shake. The joy of the Shaklee shakes was that they were gluten free and since Katie lives a breadless life, that was quite convenient. However the baking industry need not fear: I more than made up for it with my half a loaf of bread a day.

I suspect this is what Mrs. Pinterest looks like before she
posts her recipes online.

Then there was Katie’s fascination with Pinterest. I don’t know who Mrs. Pinterest is, but I did notice that her recipes always seemed to be more complicated than my mama’s. To her credit, the one recipe we did use tasted delicious.

And of course, there was the Italian factor. When Katie first moved into the Red House, she brought with her four giant freezer bags of homemade sauce her mother had made. Mrs. Cavazzini’s sauce was delicious! Our first dinner at the Red House, we boiled up a pot of pasta (gluten-free and gluten-full), thawed out the sauce (which wasn't as simple as you'd think since the frozen sauce was bigger than the pot) and had spaghetti and meatballs. It was a good meal. Little did we realize that those bags of sauce were more than kind house warming gifts: they were rations. Just as in my world, there was no dinner without a dead animal, so too in Katie’s world sauce was not edible if it came from a jar.

Prego was anathema.

Just like Mama's

And so Tuesday after Tuesday came and went. We made meats and potatoes of all sorts and varieties. This particular Tuesday we were sitting in the office at 3:00 and realized we had no plans for dinner. I poked my head up out of the cubicle and said “What about meatloaf?” We hadn’t done meatloaf in the Red House before, so why not? Katie agreed and offered to look up a recipe for meatloaf on Pinterest but I asked if it would be okay if we used my mama’s recipe. Mrs. Pinterest’s food was good and all, but there was something homey about Mama’s meatloaf. In fact, she’d originally gotten it from my grandmother who instructed that the ingredients be mixed by “squeezing the *@!# out of it.” Talk about home. Katie agreed.

We got to the store and started looking for ingredients. Katie offered to get instant mashed potatoes so we didn’t have to take the time to boil potatoes. I cringed. Instant mashed potatoes? They're not potatoes. I explained to Katie that instant mashed were for me what jarred sauce was to her. I thought she'd understand and she did. Well, almost...right up until the point when I started pulling meatloaf ingredients off the shelf. “Eggs, check. Gluten free bread crumbs, check. Prego, ch –“

“Wait, what?”

Sauce. In a jar. Enemy
#1 in the Italian neighborhood.

“Prego! My mama’s recipe calls for Prego.”

“You just said not to get instant mashed potatoes because it was your version of jarred sauce and now you’re getting jarred sauce?!”

“But it’s not my mother’s meatloaf without Prego.”

“We’ll use tomato sauce. I’m pretty sure that’s how my mother does it.”

“I don’t trust it. I’m just going to stick with Prego.”

And so the great meatloaf contest began: Katie with her pan of Prego-less meatloaf and me with my mama’s meatloaf. We worked intensely that night, you could feel it in the air. Katie trying to thicken her meatloaf up with more gluten free bread crumbs (whatever those are made of) and me squeezing the *@%# out of mine according to my grandmother’s recipe.

6:30 came. Dinner went out. The two meatloaves were presented.

We don't actually know who won the contest. Both of us refused to eat the other’s meatloaf: Katie didn’t want to contaminate her stomach with sauce from a jar and I refused to countenance as meatloaf that which deviated from my mama’s recipe (I don't care what Mrs. Pinterest says...) And so we sat across the table, smiling smugly to ourselves as we ate our meatloaf. Oh the taste of home, how good it was…

Katie and I made a great team in the kitchen. To use a CYFM expression, our gifts filled each other’s gaps. Katie suggested things for dinner that would never have crossed my mind. When I was ready to have mashed potatoes for the fourth week in a row, Katie would suggest we roast them (and she was good at that.) When I was ready to skip vegetables entirely for the meal, Katie chimed in quickly and made sure something nutritious found its way on the table. The way the schedule falls, this week was probably the last meal we cooked together. It was a cultural exchange, but it was a great year. Thanks for everything Katie!

An Open Letter Part 5: You Are Free to Say No, But Would You Want To?

You’ve heard at this point that a religious vocation is rooted in a burning desire to give all for love of God. The particular expression of that varies. God will guide you through many twists and turns as He works to form you for His service. All you have to do is say yes to that, then brace yourself to go on an adventure because mark my words one is coming for you. Through those experiences (both trials and triumphs), He’ll point you in the direction He wants you to go. Just trust Him. It may look crazy, but He knows better than you do where you’ll thrive and be happy.

So now we come to the question: what if you say no? If a vocation was a destiny, no doubt this would come with catastrophic results. You can see what happens to people in ancient Greek mythology when they try to rebel against fate: fate chews them up and spits them out.

Fortunately we’re not pagans.

A family at prayer

Recall that a vocation is fundamentally a process of falling in love and trying to express that all consuming, burning love as best you can. If it’s truly to be love, your free will is a major factor. That means at any time in this discernment process you can say no and God will still love you, still work with you, still give you the grace necessary to walk with Him throughout your life. I’ve known guys who I’m pretty sure had the makings of a religious vocation, but for whatever reason didn’t pursue it. God is still working through them. Many of them have beautiful families now and are raising their children to know and love God. His grace is still at work.

That being said, be careful of your reason for saying no. Just as you want to be sure you say yes to a vocation out of love for God, you want to be sure that saying no to a vocation isn’t your way of running away from God. God needs your permission to work in your life and if you choose to run from Him, He can offer you all the graces in the world and you’ll never receive them because you’ve chosen not to. Don’t do that. There’s no reason to be afraid of God like that. Yes, He may ask for you to let some things go, but He only does so to bring you to a deeper, more abiding joy with Him. No matter how you decide to respond to His call, be sure to stay close to Him.

Mother Teresa with Christ's
little ones

So it’s true, you are free to say no to a religious vocation. The question is, would you want to? What you’re being called to is a beautiful way of life. Yes, of course that means leaving behind some things, but it means gaining so much more. You’re looking at a way of life that frees you to love God with an utterly undivided heart, to be His instrument of grace in the world, to witness His work every day in miracles big and small, and to carry His light into dark places. In following Him in such a special way, you get to know His love and His joy in a way many people may never know. In saying yes to His call, you get a privileged place from which you can witness His grace at work in souls and even be His instrument of it. You can say no to that, but why would you want to?

"This is my body."

My last bit of advice: don’t discern alone. You don’t have to be ready to sign on the dotted line before you talk to someone about the possibility of vocation. Remember, if that thought's occurred to you, only God could have put it there. A desire for religious life isn't natural, it's supernatural and so if that's there, God’s knocking at your heart in some way. Consequently, you don't want to ignore or try to blow it off: talk to someone. Talk to someone you trust, whether that's a priest, a nun or just a close friend. You're more than welcome to talk to me if you'd like; I'm happy to listen. For the next month my email is Joe@CYFM.org. Shoot me an email and we can find a time to chat.

Don't keep it bottled up inside you. The discernment process should be one that's full of joy; after all, it's all about falling in love with Christ, the source of joy itself. But the devil loves silence. He can twist those thoughts of a religious vocation and take what should be a gift and turn it into to a burden. Keep it to yourself and the discerning a religious vocation can become lonely, confusing, and seemingly unanswerable. This is Jesus Christ we’re dealing with; it doesn’t have to be like that at all. Talk to someone.

Know of my prayers for all of you who are discerning, those who I’ve nagged about it, those who I quietly suspect might have a vocation, those whose vocation I’ve yet to know of. May God grant you peace, clarity, and the singular joy that is His.

God bless,

Joe

An Open Letter Part 4: From Maine to the Jesuits to CYFM

The Third Adventure

The Vocations Adventure

At this point I’ve talked about how God has molded and shaped me to be able to serve Him better whether in the Bronx or Calcutta, but what specifically does all this have to do with a vocation to religious life? Quite a bit actually. At its core, a call to religious life is a call to serve the Church wherever she is hungry to be loved, thirsting to know Christ, or longing for His light to break through the darkness. These lessons are all perfectly relevant to that. However, God does speak specifically about vocations sometimes and that has been an adventure in itself.

For the first few years of discernment, I discerned alone. I don’t recommend the practice, but I didn’t know what else to do. Everything that was happening seemed so strange to me that I didn’t know how to talk about it and was afraid of the reaction I’d get if I did. I did my best to read on my own, reason through these matters on my own, figure out what was going on on my own. (Truth be told, that’s how I got good at philosophy.) God understood, but He knew it wasn’t a good plan. I needed guidance and I needed direction. Looking at vocations websites at 2:00 AM after my family had all gone to bed wasn’t going to cut it forever. God took what seemed like an innocent volunteer opportunity to break the silence.

It was my senior year in high school and the Key Club was looking for volunteers to sell raffle tickets at the Harvest Ball (an annual fundraiser for the diocesan magazine, Harvest.) I was pretty bad about volunteering for Key Club stuff, and this particular day my conscience was getting to me. I knew I didn't have anything going on that night and it didn't sound too hard, so I figured why not? I'd volunteer. It turned out to be a better deal than I’d realized. Everyone else had paid to come to this dinner dance. (It was a fundraiser after all.) In my case, I sold raffle tickets for the first thirty minutes and then was invited to join the party. Not a bad deal indeed!

Me receiving my high school diploma from Bishop Malone

The organizers of the event had reserved a place at one of the tables for me for dinner. After I finished selling my raffle tickets, I sought out my spot and found myself sitting next to the bishop of Portland himself! We got to talking. He asked me where I went to school, where I wanted to go to college, what I wanted to study, etc. Naturally there came a point in the conversation where he asked me, “So what do you think you want to do after college?” Normally when people asked me that sort of question, I’d either try to dodge it or give a BS answer about possibly wanting to become a lawyer. This time I decided to be candid. “Well, to be perfectly honest Your Excellency, I wanted to be a priest in your diocese.” “Really?! Wonderful! Have you met our new vocations director?” And he got up from the table, walked me across the room and personally introduced me to the vocations director for the diocese of Portland. The question of a religious vocation wasn’t all on me anymore: I had a guide now.

For three years I was discerning primarily with the diocese of Portland, and it really was fruitful time. I learned more about prayer from the diocesan vocations director than any other person. The retreats, the pilgrimages, and the conversations with Fr. Bob helped me understand what the priesthood was and I fell in love with it. So why am I not a seminarian for the diocese of Portland now? There was another vocations director God had inserted in my life...

Discerning with the Jesuits

Queen's Court

When God works, He does in surprising and seemingly random ways. When I first moved into Fordham as a freshman, I lived in Queen’s Court (as in Our Lady…get your mind out of the gutter!) It was an intentional learning community which meant that two priests were living in the dorm for our edification: Fr. Koterski was across the building and Msgr. Quinn lived directly across the hall from me. One morning I was walking through the lobby to head back to my dorm room when Msgr. Quinn pulled me aside. “Joseph! I’d like you to meet my friend, Fr. Chuck Frederico. He’s the vocations director for the Jesuits. I was just telling him what a terrific organist you were.” Fr. Chuck chimed in, “I actually know the pastor at St. Ignatius Church down in Manhattan. They have one of the largest pipe organs in the city. I could probably get you on it if you’re interested.”

 I was.

The St. Ignatius of Loyola Church
pipe organ! You see why I was so
easily persuaded...

I met Fr. Chuck down at 83^rd Street. While we waited to meet the organist, Fr. Chuck and I had a very candid conversation about religious life. I told him I was discerning with diocese, I asked him questions about the Jesuits which he answered very honestly. Prior to this meeting, I was inclined to excuse the Society of Jesus as an order of overgrown hippies, but there was a depth to Fr. Chuck’s answers that made me rethink this.

At a certain point Fr. Chuck asked me if I’d be interested in being on the vocations email list. No pressure, he understood I was discerning with the diocese, but it was there if I wanted to learn more. Had I not been aware that God had called me to another four years with the Society at Fordham, I would have said no out of hand. But all this coincidence seemed a little too providential. Meeting the vocations director within the first two weeks of going to a Jesuit college that I’d never intended to look at? I didn’t know what God was up to, but I decided to be open to it. I said yes.

From the Diocese to the Jesuits

For the next two years, the Jesuits were on the back burner (although I don’t know if Fr. Chuck realized to what extent…) Fr. Chuck did set me up with a spiritual director at Fordham and that bore a lot of fruit, but I still couldn’t imagine any better life than humbly serving God by bringing the sacraments to a forgotten parish in rural Maine. That changed as I was entering my junior year at Fordham.

The tomb of St. Ignatius of
Loyola in Rome

For the past two posts, I’ve written about all the adventures God has taken me on. If it wasn’t perfectly clear what those had to do with discerning a religious vocation, it will become clear now. Those adventures came with lessons: they taught me that God's love had no boundaries and I needed to be prepared to follow Him anywhere souls needing to be cared for. Those lessons had implications for my direction in life.

I remember sitting in front of the tabernacle in my parish back home, speaking to Christ about my vocation. The idea of being a parish priest was beginning to make me feel claustrophobic. I wanted to be a bishop, I wanted to reach more people, preach to more people. When you start ambitioning to be a bishop, you know there's something off in your discernment process...Then I realized, in the diocese, I had boundaries. I knew exactly who I’d be serving, in what capacity, and where. Christ has spent the last two years breaking apart my boundaries, calling me to bring His love not just to those places where I felt safe, but beyond. By contrast, the charism of the Society of Jesus was set up to form men to go anywhere and do anything at any time the Church should need them. That wasn’t something I was inclined to by nature, and yet the thought of "going forth and setting the whole world on fire" lit my heart aflame. Christ's call in Calcutta to give everything I had out of love only confirmed that.

The Contemplatio retreat when Ignatian meditation first
took off for me.

Thus serious discernment with the Society of Jesus began. Throughout the process, the call to serve as a solider of Christ under the banner of the Society of Jesus became stronger. As a soldier of Christ, I would go anywhere my captain called. As His soldier, I would't flee the dark places of earth but seek out the battlefield to fight for souls. As His soldier, my only armor would be Him and I would depend on nothing but Him for my protection.

Through discernment retreats and further spiritual direction, I learned more about the ways of the Society of Jesus. I learned how to meditate over scripture passages the way St. Ignatius prescribes in the Spiritual Exercises and found they took off. According to St. Ignatius, you should place yourself in the scene you're trying to meditate over and watch what Christ says to you through it. I did; the scenes came alive and Christ spoke volumes.

Through the discernment process, I came to know the great saints of the Society of Jesus and wanted to live like them. I wanted to risk everything to save souls like St. Jean de Brebeuf among the Indians, or to preach the truth in love even when it wasn’t popular like Edmund Campion did from a priest hole. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vqbKuX8-jTs)

The Society’s ability to articulate the ins and outs of the interior life, their mission to go anywhere souls needed saving, their focus on interior freedom and detachment from all worldly things made sense to me. In June during the Ordination weekend, Fr. Chuck asked me if I’d be interested in applying. Once again, I said yes.

What Happened With the Jesuits?

Now we come to the big question. I know a lot of you are thinking, “Alright wise guy. You tell me all this stuff about discerning a vocation. You tell me God’s got it all under control and I’ll be happier than I can ever imagine. Look what happened to you!” It’s a valid question and I’ll do my best to answer it.

The cave where St. Ignatius spent many months
in prayer and penance and where he received
the Spiritual Exercises from the hands of Our Lady

As soon as I began the application process, my prayer life shifted. In the beginning, there was a lot of joy in promising to detach myself from all worldly things and go wherever Christ should want me. Now that I’d said yes, He asked me to make good on my promise. The next two years would be a process of letting go so that I could trust Christ absolutely and love Him unconditionally. The first phase of that came with applying.

Different people have different experiences with applying to enter religious life. For some, the application process simply reaffirms what they'd already discerned. You begin by writing your spiritual autobiography. Once that’s submitted you go through a series of interviews on different aspects of your life  both spiritual and secular. All this generates a pile of paperwork for the provincial to look through and then he makes his decision in light of the evidence at hand.

In my case the process was more difficult. Every aspect of my life was examined, from my vocation to my vices. I felt like I’d been turned inside out and all of my hidden flaws were suddenly brought to light. I had to eat a giant slice of humble pie to let others see those flaws and admit they were there. Frankly, I nearly choked on it. It took even more humility to resolve to deal with them. Christ sawing at the chains that held me back from Him, but it took a lot to decide I wanted them to go. It was a purgative process.

In February of my senior year, I got a call from Fr. Chuck saying that I had been accepted into the novitiate. It was a happy moment. I thought that would signal a shift back in my spiritual life. I was done with the application process, done with this intense self-reflection and could now be happy with Christ in religious life. Christ had other plans.

Outside the Monastery of
Montserrat where
St. Ignatius laid his sword at
Our Lady's feet

In the months between graduating from Fordham and entering the novitiate, I decided to go on pilgrimage. I went almost everywhere I had ever wanted to go. I stopped in Dublin, walked the Camino de Santiago in Spain, visited Fatima where Our Lady appeared, venerated the Black Madonna of Montserrat where St. Ignatius laid down his sword, went to Rome, and finally went to Jerusalem. In many ways, my trip followed in the footsteps of St. Ignatius of Loyola. My hope was that in the course of this pilgrimage, God would affirm me and give me strength as I transitioned from college into the Jesuits.

It was a good pilgrimage, but God had more in mind than simply reaffirming my decision. Instead, Christ asked me again to take up my cross and follow Him. Just when I thought I had moved on from the cross, when I thought I was moving on to a happy life devoted to His service, He asked me to trust Him in trials that were to come. I promised to follow Him to the bitter end, but even as I did so, He told me, "You don't know what you're asking for." I didn't know what trials Christ was bracing me for, but at the time I could only imagine it was a wholesale persecution of the Catholic Church because the sense of foreboding was intense. I found out otherwise when I got to the novitiate.

St. Andrew's Hall Novitiate Primi and Secundi 2013

It’s not that I had a bad community or that my formators were somehow out to me. The guys in my community were good men and the priests in my house were good priests. However, I was challenged in the novitiate. It had always been a temptation for me to look for refuge in a like-minded community. In the novitiate, I was one of a kind. I was the youngest, I was the only one from New England (except for my novice master), I was the only philosopher, and I even found that I entered the Society for a different category reasons than most of my classmates. If I was looking for a sympathetic ear, my community was not the place to find it.

Further, remember all that sleuthing I had done when I was in high school? The gems of wisdom that I had dug up to explain what was happening to me before the Blessed Sacrament were often either ignored or unknown in the novitiate. If they were known, they were usually discarded because of their age. Consequently, a lot of the time it was like I was speaking a different language. I think my community thought that I was just trying to be archaic. No matter how much I insisted, they couldn’t seem to understand that I was just trying to articulate what I saw right in front of me.

Jesus as I recognize Him

I’ll give a classic example: my novice master asked me to meditate on sitting down with Jesus, having dinner with Him and talking to Him like I would any friend. It sounds good, but you try doing that after you’ve been overawed and brought to tears by His presence in the tabernacle. No matter how hard I tried to imagine it, Jesus just didn’t seem to fit in the dining room. But obedience bound me to get Him there. When I couldn’t, I think my novice master assumed that I was just being stubborn, clinging to older more regal images of Christ. It was more complicated than that, but I couldn’t seem to communicate that to him.

Lastly, I was obligated to meditate for one hour a day using St. Ignatius’ composition of place. Given the way these meditations seemed to flourish just months prior, you would have thought that it would have been a fruitful practice. But Christ chooses when He speaks and when He stays silent. For all but a few occasions during my four months in the novitiate, He was silent. I really was left with nothing but my faith. Under obedience, I had to let go of most everything I’d come to know and love about Christ and be open to the counter claims I was receiving in formation. I had to let go of the need to feel affirmed because I wasn’t in a like-minded community. I had to let go of the need to feel comforted, because except for times of emergency (and there were a couple) Christ was choosing not to make Himself known to me the way He had done in the past. I simply had to trust Him and have faith even though He felt absent.

That call to put my complete trust in Him only grew over the course of my time at St. Andrew’s Hall. Every time I was tempted to disobey my novice master, Christ rebuked me. Every time I was tempted to say, “This is too much” Christ reminded me that He had called me there for a reason. The call reached its climax in December of that year. Every year the novices make the Thirty Day Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius in January. That means five one hour long meditations a day and thirty days of silence. To prepare us for this, we had a five day silent retreat in December called “Disposition Days.”

St. Peter turning away from His crucified Lord

During Disposition Days, Christ asked me for a degree of trust in Him that was deeper than anything I had pledged thus far. I realized that I had been acting like St. Peter, who had pledged to follow Christ no matter the cost. But when St. Peter saw the cross, He fled in terror. St. Peter had expected to follow Christ into battle, not to see his Lord killed as a criminal. He could no longer believe in Christ’s promises to him, and so he despaired and left, reneging on his own. I would do that no longer. I would not flee the cross, no matter what form it took. I would put my trust in Christ absolutely and endure with faith whatever trials He should send.

A week later, I got called into my novice master’s office. He was concerned about my ability to make the Spiritual Exercises. I seemed unsettled; perhaps I wasn’t in a good place to make the retreat. Ignatian meditation was difficult for me: could I do thirty days of it? The question was answered for me: I would not be able to make the Exercises. I would have whatever time I needed to get my affairs in order, but I would have to leave the novitiate.

Suddenly I understood what Christ was preparing me for in Disposition Days. He was asking me to embrace a cross bigger than I’d anticipated. Christ was calling me out to the desert to be radically alone with Him, so radically alone that I would not even have the comforts of a religious community, the ability to work towards religious vows or know what sort of spiritual work I might be able to do. I was now a man who longed to live like a religious, to do spiritual work, to base my life around prayer and to have a community that supported me in it, and instead I was homeless. Going forward, I really had nothing but Christ. That was exactly what He wanted.

The Basilica of St. Anthony
in Rome. I just happened
to pass by on his feast!

To be clear, Providence was certainly at work. I grew tremendously from this experience, even if it took me a little while to piece myself back together. For the next few months I read as much as I could. All the questions about saints, Church history, and the spiritual life that had bubbled up during college and in the novitiate were suddenly mine to explore. What else was I going to do? I prayed a lot and scoured my journals for whatever clues Christ might have given me. I started working as a substitute teacher at my old high school and as a coach at my old swim team. It was a difficult time, but a contemplative one.

Now Christ has brought me to Capuchin Youth and Family Ministries. If there was any doubt that His Providence was at work through all of this, my time here has put it to rest. Truth be told, I suspected He had something planned for me with the Franciscans when I was on pilgrimage. When I randomly found the tomb of St. Lawrence of Brindisi (a great Capuchin saint) on the Camino, when I bumped into a church with a glove of Padre Pio in it in Rome, when I happened to walk by the Basilica of St. Anthony in Rome on his feast day and wind up the procession, when the image of St. Francis embracing Christ on the cross kept coming up in my prayers, I thought maybe Christ had something to teach me through the Franciscans. If I were to be perfectly honest, that was why I googled "Capuchin Volunteer programs" when I was first looking to do a year of service.

It has been a graced year. Youth ministry was never something I thought I'd be doing; I figured I was too much of an old curmudgeon for that. It has stretched me, as God tends to do. It has also been extremely rewarding and filled me with great joy, as God also tends to do. I don't know what the next chapter in this adventure will bring. He doesn't give away the ending, He only tells me what I need to know at the time. Nevertheless, I trust that as Mother Teresa said, wherever He is calling me, there is bound to be great joy.

This concludes my vocational adventures to date. Tomorrow I will conclude this series with some last final thoughts about discerning a religious vocation. Blessed Feast of the Sacred Heart to you all!

An Open Letter Part 3: A Worldly Adventure

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xrEzr-rWwe8

While the first adventure occurred primarily in study and prayer, this second adventure happened out on the streets. God brought me to people and places that would stretch me and teach me how to better live as His servant. The places He would bring me, the things He would ask me to do were things I never would have guessed when this discernment began. It was a great adventure; in fact, it turned out to be an adventure across the world.

Believe it or not, I used to
whittle on this very stoop...

Believe it or not, I am by nature a homebody. I was one of those strange kids who grew up in Maine and never talked about leaving. I liked the cold, the lakes, the coast, the simple culture, just the fact it was home. When I first started discerning, I assumed I would eventually become a priest in the diocese of Portland. I could think of nothing better than bringing Christ’s love, mercy and presence to a humble parish in Maine, to my home. The idea of exploring strange and new places, having opportunities to do and see things normal Mainers don’t was simply off my radar. It wouldn’t happen. I was happy where I was at, I needed nothing more. I would live liked a Mainer and die like a Mainer.

So when God dropped me in the Bronx, it was a bit of shock to everybody.

My mother and I exploring Fordham
during the college visit

Don’t think that I exaggerate when I say that Providence brought me to Fordham. On my own free will I never would have given the school a second thought. My family was travelling down the coast to Washington, D.C. where I was hoping to visit the Catholic University of America. We stopped in New York City on the way and my dad suggested I visit Fordham. I did it, but I did it to humor him. I wasn’t interested in going to another Jesuit school. Four years of raising objections in theology had made me a little leery of the Catholic identity of Jesuit schools. But it made my dad happy, so we visited.

My parents and I outside Duane Library
at Fordham. Notice how pleased
with himself my dad looks.

By chance, we got a private tour of the school from a philosophy major. By chance, I heard about their Honors Program (it was everything I'd ever dreamed of.) By chance I bumped into the Italian parish down the street and knew I had a spiritual home. I applied. I got in. By chance I got a full ride. By chance I got into the Honors Program. But God knows that none of this was by chance. 

A Mainer in the Hood

So there I was. It was my sophomore year and the kid from Maine who didn’t know how to pronounce the letter “r” was living off campus in the Service Learning House. I would be living in a house with other kids from Fordham who were committed to doing service and getting to know our neighbors in the Bronx. Unlike most of the university,we'd be living outside campus walls and we were supposed to be ambassadors of sorts between the community and the school. My first night there, I met one of my neighbors, but it was an encounter neither of us intended.

We never learned his name. None of us ever spoke with him. Around the house we called him "Dennis" after our Resident Director. Dennis was a homeless man who used to store his shopping cart underneath my bedroom window. At about 7:00 or so in the evening, I’d hear a cart crashing across the threshold of my backyard. He never did anything, but it was a little weird sitting at my desk with only a screen separating me from Dennis' face.

One night we actually staked out for him from the 2nd floor. "Joe, quick! Get the flashlight! I hear something." We got the flashlight alright. We were going to speak to Dennis about storing his shopping cart somewhere else. We beamed the flashlight down. There was a man there, but it wasn't Dennis: we'd caught our security guard taking a whiz on the side of the house. I wasn’t in Kansas anymore…

Beyond the Metal Detector

Part of living the house meant doing service, so for my service project that year, I would be volunteering as a swim coach at the Theodore Roosevelt Educational Campus. Roosevelt was the public high school right across the street from Fordham and it had a rough reputation. When Roosevelt closed in 2006 to reopen as a bunch of smaller schools, their graduation rate was at 3%. I discovered that reputation was earned when I had to go through a metal detector on my way to practice the first day.

God had a lot to teach me through that experience. My swimmers referred to the fence that surrounds Fordham as “the force field.” According to them, by some strange magic, the force field let white people in but all the black people outside the gates seemed to bounce off. Inside the force field it was green and gothic. Outside people got shot. Ordinarily, the Bronx would have intimidated me and I would have stayed safe on campus, behind the fence. But that wasn't enough for God.

It’s true, coming from Maine there was a huge cultural adjustment to coaching at a Bronx public school. Just speaking their language took me long enough. “Mister this is type hard!” “Mister, I’m so brolic!” And then translating all the many strange acronyms that popped up on their Facebook posts…A lot of them were from immigrant families (actually, I think almost all were), whether from Puerto Rico, Kosovo, Nigeria, or the Dominican Republic. And they came from backgrounds that were sometimes tough for me to understand.

Their neighborhoods were often rough. I remember one of my swimmers coming into practice late and describing how he’d spent his morning running away from muggers. “Yo, mister, like, sorry I’m late. I was going to Enes’ house when I saw these two guys coming towards me…I didn’t like the looks of it, so I just booked it…you should have seen me, I was like woosh!...they followed me, but yeah, sorry I’m late.” It was a different world.

God’s love has no boundaries and He wanted me to understand and live that. It didn’t matter that these kids lived in often rough neighborhoods. God brought me there to serve them, to bring His love and joy there, even if all I was doing was teaching them how to swim. My time there was unbelievably rewarding. I saw my swimmers grow as athletes and as people, becoming more disciplined and more responsible as the years went on. I volunteered to coach there for three years. I saw a lot of them graduate and go on to things that I’m proud of them for. Some of them continued to swim when they went to college, others buckled down on their studies. My lesson was learned: even beyond the metal detector, those were people worth serving. God's love had no boundaries. It didn't matter where they were, if there were souls to be served He wanted me there.

Praying for Women and Children

At the March for Life in DC, January 2010

The Bronx held even more adventures for me. By chance (although I knew by then that God doesn’t usually play with chance), I got involved with the Respect for Life club at Fordham. During a club fair, someone called out to me, "Hey! Are you pro-life?" I thought a moment, said yes and put my email on their list. Within two weeks, I went from being a nominal but lukewarm pro-lifer to standing on the sidewalk outside a South Bronx abortion clinic praying for the broken women walking past who felt they had no choice but to end the life of their child.

Praying outside Dr. Emily's abortion clinic
in the South Bronx

Was I intimidated? Oh yeah…It’s amazing how much ire a quiet lap around the rosary can raise, and not from the women we were praying for either. Counter protestors and abortion clinic escorts would taunt us, swear at us and at one point I even got spit at….(he missed.) Again, God’s lesson for me was the same: His love has no boundaries. No matter how dark the situation, God’s love penetrated even there.

Outside that clinic, I saw miracles. I’ll never forget seeing a woman practically turn in midair when she heard one of the sidewalk counselors say, “Mommy, I have help for you.” She ran into Heather’s arms crying, telling her how she didn’t want to abort her baby, how her parents had threatened to kick her out of the house if she didn’t do it, how she felt like she didn't have a choice. The fact that someone was willing to help her changed everything.

Another time, as I prayed the rosary one morning, I saw a young guy my age coming out of the clinic. By some grace of God, I could tell he wasn’t doing well. I didn’t know why, but I felt like I needed to run across the street, give him a hug and tell him it was going to be okay. I couldn’t, so I just started praying intensely for him, asking Mary to be a mother to him since he needed one so much right then. I thought maybe I was imagining things, but prayers couldn't hurt. I later found out I wasn't. A sidewalk counselor said he’d talked to the young man: his girlfriend was in that clinic and he wanted to keep the baby. His baby was about to die and there was nothing he could do about it. I can only trust that Our Lady was there for him because in a dark time like that, it seemed that no one else was.

Fordham Respect for Life praying for women and children!

God brought me to dark and messy situations, places that ordinarily I would have been afraid to be in. But He called me there to show me that His love has no bounds, that my love should have no bounds, that wherever He was suffering in the poor and unwanted, there He was calling me.

If the Bronx was outside my comfort zone, you can imagine what Calcutta was like.

To Calcutta with Mother Teresa

I had had a deep devotion to Mother Teresa for years. In my desperate search as a freshman in high school to understand who Christ was, I picked a book by Mother Teresa called No Greater Love. It challenged me deeply, made me rethink what it meant to live as a Catholic, and inspired me to want to love Christ and His poor with the depth of love Mother Teresa did. For a moment, I wanted nothing more than to join the Missionaries of Charity, to be radically poor like they were and to serve the poorest of the poor. But I couldn’t do that. I was a kid from Maine. People from Maine didn’t do great things like that.

So when I found out that Fordham had a Global Outreach trip to Calcutta to work with the Missionaries of Charity for two weeks, at first I thought it was too good to be true. For a moment I spun my wheels saying it was too expensive for me, but next to what I had considered spending on a semester abroad, it was a drop in the bucket. I applied. I got in. On New Year’s Day that January I was in New York City getting ready to fly out to Calcutta, India.

A cow in the Calcutta streets: after
a week without meat I could have eaten
this thing raw.

Once again, God had a lot of lessons and a lot of adventure in store for me. I thought having lived in the Bronx I knew what a rough city looked like. Calcutta was rough on a whole other level. People literally almost dragged me to the ground, hanging on my arm calling, “Uncle! Money!” Not only did you have to watch your pocket, you also had to watch where you stepped because you were liable to trip over someone sleeping on the sidewalk. And if you thought NYC traffic was bad, Calcutta traffic had no rules. My life flashed before my eyes just getting into one of those Tuk-Tuks.

God had lessons waiting for me here, but this time the lesson went a little deeper. God was still teaching me that His love had no bounds, that His light would shine in even the darkest places and that He was calling me to carry it there. But this time it became more personal: my response to His love should have no bounds. There should be no limits on what I was willing to give out of love.

Fordham volunteers lining up to serve lunch at Prem Dan

My limits were stretched. I may not have been fluent in Bronx, but I could get by. I knew nothing of Bengali. I didn’t know how to care for the people in front of me and my only means of finding out what they needed was sign language. Even that was tough, because since Indians eat with their hands, their signal for “Food!” looked to me like they needed to take their medicine...

Often caring for them meant looking past things that would normally turn my stomach. Rubbing lotion on residents doesn't sound like a big deal, but amputated limbs could get dry too. And helping the handicapped get to the bathroom was not a skill of mine, but when Sister was too busy they’d take anybody. They weren’t all comfortable situations, but with each failure I had to pick myself up, learn from it and keep giving.

Me and my friend Steve during chai break

I wasn’t a particularly capable volunteer when got there, all plump, healthy and happy from a restful Christmas break. When my health took a turn at the end of the two weeks, I really wasn’t capable. Jesus called me to work anyhow and asked me to offer it all up for the poor I worked with. As I hung up laundry, I worked through the pain and offered it up. As I rubbed lotion on patients, I offered my pain in solidarity with theirs. I worked until I couldn’t stay warm anymore. I waited until lunch and then I left to go back to the school where my cot was waiting for me.

Prem Dan

As the sickness grew worse, so too did Christ’s insistence that I offer up all that pain out of love. He asked me to offer it in exchange for the sufferings of the poor of Calcutta, in exchange for the spiritual struggles of the people I volunteered with, in order to alleviate the burden of people who needed it by voluntarily taking some of it onto myself. Through this I came to realize that giving all out of love meant accepting physical suffering no matter where it would lead. If it meant giving my life for love, then so be it: if it was out of love, the benefits it would gain for other people were all that mattered. It meant accepting spiritual desolation because at the time, Christ’s joy seemed absent: if it was out of love, I could live the rest of my life in that virtual hell, if only that pain were accepted in exchange for another person.

I let go of two things that I thought were fundamentally important to me and came to understand a depth of Christ’s love and His call for me that I had never before imagined. Not only was He calling me to go anywhere no matter how dark or desolate, He was calling me to give literally everything out of love for the souls in those places. I had to go to the other side of the world to learn that lesson, but God in His Providence made sure I did.

Thus ends my worldly adventure. More would follow. In fact I would circumnavigate the globe on pilgrimage before I entered the Jesuits, but that's a story for another time. One adventure remains left to describe: my vocational adventure. Check back in tomorrow for the final post!