[This letter, written at the request
of a 29-year-old deacon to help him prepare for priestly ordination, was
published in a slightly different version in The Priest magazine for August 2013, pp. 35-39.]
Dear Pietro:
You
have asked me to share with you things I have learned, in 59 years as a priest,
which might help you as you prepare to offer yourself to the Lord for service
to him and to his holy people as a sharer in the high priesthood of Jesus
Christ.
Let
me begin by recounting a story told by our current archbishop in St. Louis, Robert
Carlson. Decades ago, when he was Vocation Director in his home diocese of St.
Paul, a young man considering going to seminary told Carlson that he needed to
go home first and pray about whether he was good enough to be a priest. “I’ll
save you some time,” Carlson said. “You’re not good enough.” He was right, of
course. God doesn’t call us because we’re good enough. No one is good enough to
be a priest of Jesus Christ: not the Curé of Ars, not Padre Pio, not even the
Pope. The Lord doesn’t call us because we’re good enough; he calls us because
he loves us.
Never
forget that, Pietro. The desire for priesthood which is in your heart has been
put there by the One who is love (cf.
1 John 4:8). He wants you to be a messenger of that love to others: through
words when appropriate, but always through the example of your life.
You
can never do that unless you are constantly receiving the love that the Lord
wants you to pass on to others. This brings me to the first thing that almost
six decades of priesthood have taught me. You can’t make it in the priesthood,
and you certainly can’t be happy as a priest, unless you are spending time
alone with the Lord, every single day. We can all pray when we feel like it.
The test comes when we don’t feel
like it, yet still set aside time for the Lord. For this we need –
A Rule of life, centered on prayer. One of the
Lord’s great gifts to me is to have had such a rule since I was twelve years
old. At that age I joined what Catholics would call a sodality: the Servants of
Christ the King. Members promised to follow a simple rule of life, centered on
prayer. You can read the details on p. 64 of my autobiography, No Ordinary Fool. Members made an annual
report to the sodality’s Director, grading themselves on a scale of 1 to 10,
and received from him a friendly note of admonition and encouragement in
response. You should have such a rule, for which you must be accountable to a
spiritual director.
Why
is this so important? Because it will keep you faithful to the daily prayer
time with Lord which every priest needs. There will be many times when you
don’t feel like praying, when the time you have set apart for the Lord is dry
and nothing but a mass of distractions and prayer seems a complete waste of
time. All that is of no importance, provided that you remain faithful to your
commitment to prayer, because you have “a date with the Lord.” When you seem to
“get nothing out of it,” because of your dryness and distractions, this means
that you are making a costly offering
to the Lord. And the Lord loves a costly offering.
Here
is what St. Teresa of Avila
writes about this, in chapter eight of her autobiography:
Very
often, over a period of several years, I was more occupied in wishing my hour
of prayer were over, and in listening for the clock to strike, than in thinking
of things that were good. ... Whenever I entered the chapel, I used to feel so
depressed that I had to summon up all my courage to make myself pray at all.
... In the end the Lord came to my help. Afterwards, when I had forced myself
to pray, I would find that I had more tranquility and happiness than at certain
other times when I had prayed because I had wanted to.
Should
a daily Holy Hour be part of your rule of life? You must decide that for
yourself. I have never done that. I think that those who do, fill up the hour
with praying the breviary, the rosary, and other devotions. That’s not my
scene. The one universally applicable rule for prayer is this: pray as you can
and not as you can’t. For decades I have sat in silence for a half-hour before
Mass, waiting on the Lord. I pray the Office of Readings and Morning Prayer
after Mass.
That is a 75-80 minutes spent with the Lord, a half-hour of it in what the
books call contemplative prayer. Later in the day I pray the rest of the Divine
Office; and I also spend time invoking the prayers of more than twenty Saints
and Blesseds for various people and intentions.
Another
spiritual practice which I strongly recommend to you is “the practice of the
presence of God.” I write on page 87 of No
Ordinary Fool about resolving as a new seminarian to remember the presence
of God every time I went up or downstairs. Today I say one of the holy names at
each step: Jesus, Mary, Joseph. Because of this practice, constantly renewed
over the span of 65 years, I find myself praying the Our Father, the Hail Mary,
and one or two other familiar prayers as I walk down a hallway, from one room
to another, back and forth to my car – and at many other “empty” times during
the day. I don’t consciously start; I just find that I am already praying one
of these prayers, quite spontaneously.
You
have mentioned difficulties with celibacy. Well, join the club, Brother! I have
had those difficulties almost all my life. In his Life of St. Benedict, St. Gregory the Great says that during the three years Benedict
lived in his youth as a hermit, he became so inflamed with desire (a polite
word for lust) for an attractive young woman he had known, that he threw off
his clothes and rolled in a thicket of thorns and nettles. “He vanquished sin by changing one
fire into another,” Gregory says. “As Benedict told his disciples, from then on
sexual temptation was controlled to such an extent that he never felt it any
more.” The modern reader, living in our sex obsessed society, could be excused
for commenting: “Lucky man!”
That
has not been my experience. Nor is it likely to be yours. After decades of
inner turmoil and much chaos in my life, the Lord evidently said: “Jay, you’ve
had enough. I’m telling the Devil to lay off.” I say “evidently,” since I knew
nothing about this. But gradually, I think it was in my seventies, I realized:
“I’m free! Free at last!” The temptations had simply disappeared, and with them
the images and videos that used to run in my head. I couldn’t get them back
even if I wanted to. How lucky can you be? So don’t be discouraged. Never, ever
give up. And keep in mind, when you fail (as we all do at times), what our wonderful
new Pope Francis has told us: God never gets tired of forgiving us. It is we
who grow tired of asking for forgiveness.
Will
you be lonely in the priesthood? Sometimes, sure. Loneliness is part of the
human condition. Through pastoral ministry I learned early on that married
people are lonely too. Loneliness comes about because no human relationship
– not the perfect marriage nor
the ideal friendship (and how many people have found either?) – can fully satisfy the deepest desires
of our hearts. Only the Lord God can do that. No one has said it better than St. Augustine: “You have
made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless, till we find rest in
you.” Or, to put it in terms best understood by your generation, we are
hard-wired for God.
As
a 20-year-old seminarian, I read something about loneliness which has helped me
all my life long:
Turn your loneliness into solitude,
which is the loveliness of being alone with God.
In
my head I realized that was true the moment I read it. Internalizing it in my
heart has taken me a lifetime. Read what I write about this on page 298 of No Ordinary Fool.
Here
is something else I read as a young seminarian. It helped me then, and it helps
me still:
The conversation of the brethren
should help and cheer us, but God’s
voice speaks most often in silence.
Keep some part of every day free
from all noise and the voices of
men, for human distraction and the
craving for it hinder divine peace.
It is common to see members of your
generation going through the day, and half the night, with those ghastly
electronic buds in their ears, so they don’t have to endure even a nano-second of
silence. How pathetic. Adults are afflicted as well, priests included. I know a
priest, more than forty years ordained, who keeps the television on all day and
until he retires for the night, listening to some sports event or other. He says
that without that background noise he feels restless. He is a good priest. He
would be even better if he were able to experience, in silence, the peace of God
which passes human understanding.
So turn off the TV, Pietro. Learn to
be content with the presence of God. Turn off the radio in your car too when
you are driving, and pray the rosary (the only time, incidentally, when I am
able to pray in that way: I wasn’t brought up on the rosary and am not really
comfortable with it even today.)
The priest with whom I live is away
this week, and, once the parish secretary has left in mid-afternoon, I have the
house to myself. I just love the silence. I have whole shelves full of long-playing
records and CDs with recordings of classical music, which I love. I seldom
listen to them any more. I prefer the silence. “God speaks most often in
silence.”
You’re keen to be a good preacher.
For that you must read, widely: anything that has substance and value, provided
it is not trash. Reading
stimulates the imagination. Watching TV kills it: it’s not called the Boob Tube
for nothing!
You will need especially a rich knowledge
of biblical images and themes. Read all you can on Jesus’ parables. Allow
yourself to be inspired by Paul’s personal witness to the gospel, starting with
his conversion story, told three times over in the Acts of the Apostles.
Don’t neglect the Old Testament. The
stories of the patriarchs in the Pentateuch show God doing his characteristic
work in every generation: bringing life out of death. He creates new life in the
dead womb of the aged Sarah. He repeatedly rescues Joseph from death (from his
brothers, from false accusation and from famine in Egypt). He rescues His entire people at the Red Sea
(which the exegetes tell us was the Sea
of Reeds). Those stories
are part of what Jesus was referring to when he told the two disciples the
first Easter afternoon on the road to Emmaus: “O slow of heart to believe all
that was written . . .” (Luke 24:25)
There are rich treasures in the
prophets as well: the message of social justice in Amos and others; Isaiah’s
call in chapter 6 of his book; the assurance of God’s forgiveness (“Though your
sins be like scarlet they shall be white as snow;” Is. 1:18; “Their sins and
offenses I will remember no more” Jer. 31:34). I could go on and on.
Finally, time spent alone with the
Lord in prayer is the preacher’s sine qua
non. There was a day when the text from John 12:21 was posted inside
pulpits for the preacher to see: “Sir, we would like to see Jesus.” That is
what people want from us above all. And the people of God, whom we are ordained
to serve, have a keen spiritual sense. They can tell whether we simply know about God; or whether we know him as one
knows a dearly loved friend – because we spend time with Him.
Only
if we are spending time alone with the Lord will our preaching manifest joy. Few
things are more pathetic that the joyless proclaimer of the good news. How can
we maintain joy, not just when our mouths are filled with laughter, and our
tongues with joy (to quote the psalmist), but when we journey, as all of us
must, at one time or another, through the psalmist’s dark valley? Let me tell
you about what works for me: cultivating the prayer of thanksgiving.
I
started to do this as a schoolboy. On my birthday each year I used to spend
time in the school chapel. Kneeling, or sitting, before the Lord in the
tabernacle, I would write a list of all the reasons I had for thanksgiving. It
was always a long list, and it was never difficult to compile.
It is decades since I have done that.
But that adolescent practice has made the prayer of thanksgiving easy for me.
My greatest reason for thanksgiving today, apart from my baptism, is my joy in
priesthood. At age twelve the Lord planted in me the desire for priesthood.
From that day to this I have never wanted anything else. Priesthood has brought
me joys beyond telling, Pietro. It has also brought me bitter grief and pain. If
you were to ask me, however, whether, if I were able to live my life over
again, knowing in advance the worst that priesthood would throw at me, I would
still choose to be a priest of Jesus Christ, I would answer without hesitation:
In a heartbeat! I would change just one thing: I would try to be more faithful,
and above all more generous.
I
was ordained a priest over fifty-nine years ago. And I’m still head over heels
in love with priesthood. I couldn’t tell you how many times I say every day:
“Lord, you’re so good to me, and I’m so grateful.” Find your own way of saying that, Pietro, and
there will be joy in your heart – a joy so intense that you will be able one
day to say with me: “If I were to die tonight, I would die a happy man.”
You
probably know the story of the man whom St. John Vianney saw every day in his
church, without rosary or book, his lips not moving, his gaze fixed on the
crucifix.
“What
do you do?” John Vianney asked the man one day.
“I
look at Him,” the man replied, “and He looks at me.”
St.
Teresa of Avila
calls this silent waiting on God “friendly intercourse, and frequent solitary
converse, with Him who we know loves us.”
Your
parishioners won’t always love you, Pietro — though some of them will, probably
more than you deserve. Your pastor and your brother priests will find you, much
of the time, less than lovable. Your bishop will tell you he loves you. You may
find it hard to believe. (Pray for him, and cut him some slack: he receives
more critical letters in a week than you will in a year.) But there is One who always loves you. He doesn’t love the
ideal person you’d like to be. No. He loves you as you are, right now: with all
your faults, and compromises, and sins. It is his love, and his alone, that can
enable you to persevere in the priesthood to which he has called you, and to be
happy in it.
In
the priesthood, as in every life, you will experience times when your will is
crossed, your self-love wounded, what you think are your rights are
disregarded; when you feel put upon, passed over, disliked, unjustly attacked. You
will feel the downward pull of ambition, envy, covetousness, lust. There will
periods that seem colorless and monotonous, when prayer is difficult, and other
people are hard to live with, perhaps impossible. The only way you can survive
— and not merely survive but be deeply happy despite all these things — is to
spend time alone with the One who loves you more than you can ever imagine, who
will always be close to you no matter how far you stray from him or how often
you let him down; whose love will
never let you go.
His name is Jesus Christ.
In His love I remain always, dear Pietro, your devoted friend and brother,
John Jay Hughes
Fr. Hughes is a priest of the St. Louis archdiocese and author of the
memoir,
No Ordinary Fool: A Testimony to
Grace (Tate).
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