+Up to Date

So Casey got baptized, then a week later vanished entirely off the map after a less-than-positive phone conversation.  Didn’t return phone calls or emails for months.  I was rather hurt.  But now he has resurfaced and things seem to be OK.  I’m still not entirely sure what that was about.  (He’s also married now, which doubtless took up a lot of his time!  But even so.)

The parish sent me and some other people on the RCIA team to a conference out of state on the RCIA.  It was dynamite!  I learned a lot, and we got tons of ideas.  Implementing them all is going to take a lot of time and work, but we’ve made a start this year.

Now for the fun part.  A month ago I visited Fr. Gerald, as I so often do.

And I tell him about the conference.  I mention that a ridiculous number of people there asked me if I was going to be a priest.  (People at my parish don’t ask much any more, they’re resigned. 🙂  But any time I’m with a bunch of Catholics from elsewhere, it comes up.)

And Fr. Gerald gets this fey look and starts laying down the law.  (He told me later he’d had no plans to do it – it just came to him.)

He says, "Isaiah, you really need to consider the possibility that you just aren’t wired for the religious life."  I’m getting too old for it, and he pointed out that I still don’t really live in any sort of community.  (Other than the People of Praise, but he meant on a daily basis in a home.)  I protested that I’d like to, and have asked to be part of a People of Praise household, but he retorted that it hadn’t happened, that in point of fact I live alone.

He continued, "But the Christian people continue to call you to the priesthood.  I think you should apply to the diocese."

Here’s the really funny thing.  After the initial shock, I realized he was right.  Dead right.  I have experienced a calling to the priesthood for years now.  But my attraction to the religious life, I am now convinced, came from me – it was something I wanted for myself.

So, I contacted the vocation director of my diocese, and will be meeting with him next Friday.  Prayers are appreciated.

Taking that step resulted in about a week and a half of extreme consolation in prayer – almost as if a broken bone had finally been set.  It was amazing.  (It was followed up with some pretty extreme temptation, but that’s pretty much par for the course, I’m afraid.)

The bizarre thing is, knowing my own character, I ought to be angry and resentful against myself for having "wasted" the last ten years.  I should regret that I didn’t come to this realization long before now.  But I don’t.  I am completely at peace.

If I had applied to the diocese and been accepted ten years ago (well, nine – you have to have been Confirmed two years to apply), it probably would’ve been a disaster.  I’m a very different person now than I was then.  There’s been a lot of water under the bridge.

And I’m not really nervous about meeting the vocation director, either.  Either they’ll accept me or they won’t.  If they don’t, something else will open up.  I know this.

But my gut tells me it’s going to work this time.  Wouldn’t be the first time my gut’s been wrong, but that’s what I’m feeling.

Please pray.