MY 91ST BIRTHDAY

91^st Birthday Homily: May 14^th, 2019

          “It was not you who chose me,” we heard in our gospel reading, “but I who chose you.” I was born in New York City, 91 years ago today. I give thanks today for the long life which God has given me. Even more, I thank him for choosing to give me a gift of which no man is worthy, not even the pope: a share in the priesthood of his divine son Jesus Christ. Let me tell you how the Lord did this.

           The son and grandson of priests in the Episcopal Church, I grew up in an atmosphere in which public worship and private prayer were as natural as eating and drinking. I had an almost magical childhood — until the day after Christmas 1934, when my father came home from the hospital to which my 27- year-old mother had been taken, a week before, with pneumonia. He gathered his children — myself six, a sister four, and a brother two — and spoke the three most terrible words I have ever heard: “Mummy is dead.” My whole world collapsed.

          In the three days following my mother’s body lay in one of chapels of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, in a simple wooden coffin made for her by the cathedral carpenters. There my father celebrated three Masses for the repose of her soul. I attended, grief-stricken. I remember her funeral, the first I ever experienced. And I remember her burial, especially the sound of the heavy clods earth falling on her coffin, at the bottom of a deep grave, the most terrible sound I have ever heard. At family prayers the next day, my father told us children: “We must still pray for Mummy. She is with God. He is looking after her, and our prayers can help her.” I have followed my father’s injunction faithfully, on every day of the 85 years since then.

          A year later, at age seven, I had an experience which I can see, looking back, would change my life forever. It came home to me one day, with blinding certainty, that I would see my beloved mother again, when the Lord called me home to himself. Since that day the unseen, spiritual world – the world of God, the angels, the saints, and our beloved dead -- has been real me. I know people who are there: my beloved mother first, and now so many other dear ones who have gone home to God in the years since her death.

          Fast forward now to my twelfth birthday. My English teacher at school told me to write about what I would be doing in twenty-five years. About that, I had no clue. But since I had to write something, I wrote about being a missionary priest in the west African country of Liberia. That idea came to me from the school chaplain, a priest of the Anglican religious Order of the Holy Cross, which had a mission in Liberia.

          The idea of missionary work soon faded; but priesthood never. From that day to this priesthood has been all I ever wanted. I went straight to that goal, like a steel needle to a magnet, until, on April 4th, 1954, I achieved it. For six happy years I served the Episcopal Church as a priest, doing with joy literally everything a Catholic priest does, without exception.

Six years later, at Easter 1960, I decided to enter the Catholic Church – the most difficult decision I have ever made, but also the best. Eight years later the Catholic Church gave me the rare privilege of conditional ordination as a deacon and priest, which allows for the possibility that my previous Anglican ordination may have been valid.

Priesthood has brought me joy beyond telling. It has also brought me pain, sorrow, and grief. Countless married people would say the same. If you were to ask me, however, whether I have ever regretted obeying the Lord’s call to serve him and his holy people as a priest, I would answer without hesitation: never, not one single day. If I were to die tonight, I would die filled with happiness, joy – and thanksgiving beyond telling!