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!