SPIRIT WOW: JUNE 6TH

Priesthood, Petitions, Weakness, Touch

Earlier today, a friend texted me wondering about the bill I’d paid for dinner with him the night before. Checking the receipt, which had been emailed to me, I discovered that I’d been overcharged kind of a lot. And so late this afternoon I dragged myself back into the heat that has finally arrived in New York City to dispute the fee.

I actually spent a ridiculous amount of my time beforehand talking through that conversation, bracing myself for disbelief and planning my counterattacks. None of which happened. They were great. It got settled almost instantly.

It was only when I checked the corrected receipt they sent me that I realized today is June 6th.

22 years ago, at about the time I’m writing this, I was laying face down on the floor of the Cathedral of St. Paul, in St. Paul, Minnesota, listening to my friends and family sing the Litany of the Saints, each saint mentioned by name and asked to pray for us all here. Soon after the four of us being ordained would go up one by one to kneel before Archbishop Harry Flynn. He would take our hands in his and anoint them. Then we’d all kneel before the congregation and one by one every priest in the church would walk by us, laying their hands on our heads (or in a couple cases whispering a prayer in our ears).

Having spent 11 years watching these things happen at the ordinations of others, I had so many expectations for that night. But much of what made it special were how those expectations proved different from reality—the coolness of the marble floor of the church; the weight of the priests’ hands pressing down on our heads; the emotional intimacy of the bishop holding my hands, which was so overwhelming it wouldn’t even hit me until I saw photos of it.

Eight years later I would do what’s known as “final vows” in the Jesuits. For a lot of the people who had been to the ordination, the whole idea of another big event Mass was kind of puzzling. The language often used to describe the event confused me, too: “At first vows, you make your perpetual commitment to the Society. And at final vows, the Society makes its perpetual commitment to you.” What?

But it finally made sense to me when I saw it as not an opportunity for me to get something, but as a chance to share some of what a life in the Society and Church had given me with all the new friends I’d made in Los Angeles. It wasn’t anywhere near as fancy as my ordination Mass, just a Sunday Mass at Loyola Marymount University, where I lived, followed by a reception in our community—which had this lovely outdoor patio/garden area that looked out on the Pacific Ocean. I had no idea how my UCLA friends, many of whom were not Catholic or believers, would take all this. But it was just this really joyous occasion.

Maybe that was a point where priesthood started to make a different kind of sense to me, too, where it could somehow be about or for people who weren’t Catholic at all, or were but in a way that defied expectations. Even from my very first year as a priest, my happiest moments had been with the oddballs and the rebels, like the lady dying of cancer who wanted to talk about whether there was life on other planets, or the auxiliary bishop of Milwaukee who broke all the rules at the confirmation Mass, slathering each confirmant’s whole head in oil as an image of the “reckless extravagance” of God’s love.

And I always knew I was in the right place when someone would want to talk to me about how angry they were with God or the Church—not because I might or might not feel the same way, but because they were at a point where the truth of their experience was finally more important than how it might be perceived or whether some would categorize it as a sin. It was the same hearing confessions from queer people talking about their relationships without apology for having them. Their self-acceptance and trust was so liberating.

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In December when I was in Australia, I stayed mostly in Jesuit communities. Most communities would have Mass for guys in the house at some point during the day, which is pretty normal in the U.S. Society, too. It had been many years since I actually gone to daily Mass, other than on community nights, and I was reluctant to try it. But when I did I found the experience moving, and also consoling in an unexpected way. My niece was at the time very sick. Without explaining why I would pray for her at these Masses. And I felt so much relief when I did. It was like I was allowing these men to help me carry all the feelings I had.

It also unexpectedly reminded me of a part of my Jesuit work in New York that I had not really paid much attention to. America Magazine had a chapel where we’d have Mass once a week and on feast days. It was kind of hidden away in a corner, perhaps because it was also the room staff were meant to go to in case of a live shooter crisis, and it wasn’t terribly big. It could probably hold 10 or 12 at most.

As one of the few priests on staff (and the one with the fewest responsibilities), I said a fair share of those Masses. And members of the development team would sometimes come to Mass and ask us to pray for a donor or some member of their family that was struggling. This is not an uncommon practice, and in the moment I’m not sure I realized that those prayers were impacting me. But years later in Australia as I was having this experience sharing my own prayers, those Masses came back to me, and I realized how much it had meant to me that we had been entrusted with the needs of those people, that the development team had allowed us to participate and help in that way.

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A few days before my ordination, a Jesuit gave me a copy of an article by one of the grand old fathers of the U.S. Society called “Because Beset By Weakness.” And it was all about how the Church has it all upside down and backwards: The question isn’t whether someone is strong enough to be a priest, but whether they’re weak enough.

Is this man deficient enough so that he cannot ward off significant suffering from his life, so that he lives with a certain amount of failure, so that he feels what it is to be an average man? Is there any history of confusion, of self-doubt, of interior anguish? Has he had to deal with fear, come to terms with frustrations, or accept deflated expectations?

(If you’ve been with the Wow for a good long while and this sounds familiar, I actually wrote about it and my ordination way back in 2017.)

The article was enormously consoling, so much so that I ended up preaching about it at my first Mass. But lately I’ve been realizing that it’s really only in recent years, as I’ve finally proven incapable of warding off some of the suffering of life, that I’ve maybe actually started to understand what it was talking about.

Right around the time I turned 50, I started to do interviews with older Jesuits that I knew to be happy. And I told them I wanted to interview them because I wanted to learn how to avoid the pitfalls of aging in religious life, the cynicism and isolation. (During the pandemic I also wrote a script about a gay Catholic priest from Chicago who suddenly leaves the priesthood and moves to Australia, a country he has never been to, to try and figure out how to live a happy gay life. And in both cases, at no time was I consciously thinking about leaving or had I considered it as an option. True story.)

The more of these interviews I did, the more I realized the thing that really distinguished these men, the thing that made them good priests and happy people is the fact that they were great friends to other Jesuits and to non-Jesuits both.

(I originally imagined those interviews as a podcast. In fact it was the possibility of this becoming some kind of podcast that got me a summer job back at America that ended up turning into two incredibly meaningful and happy years there when things in L.A. fell apart. The audio files still sit on my hard drive, waiting for me to figure out what to do with them, which kills me every time I think about it.)

At the time that was as far as I took it. But now I wonder whether what made them both good friends and good priests was something else, not some kind of generosity of spirit or strength of character but the fact that they allowed themselves to be vulnerable, that they had at some point learned to be honest about their struggles and let other people help carry their burdens with them, and love them that way. They’d seen the heat of the day, it had broken them down, in the face of it they admitted to themselves and others that they were human. And they found welcome there.

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I think I thought of the priesthood as a sort of service industry. You come with a need. I help you with that need. And you go. It’s Lucy at the Psychiatrist’s Booth.

But you think about those elements of an ordination—lying face down; being touched in blessing; being prayed for; being held. They’re moments of pretty significant vulnerability, moments where you are emotionally and physically exposed.

By this time 22 years ago, the ordination was over, and we were headed to the reception in a Catholic middle school gymnasium. I couldn’t tell you anything about it now other than standing in a corner of a hallway, taking it all in, I felt really happy. And stumbling upon the realization that it’s my anniversary, I feel happy, too. As much as my life has changed, somehow it also feels like I’m still growing into something that started then.