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Mar
22
Why am I here?
Posted By Augustine | Filed Under Augustine
I am on the horns of a dilemma. When our host, reynor, invited me to join this blog, it was because he had read many of my posts over at Catholic Pages and he thought, I suppose, that I might have something to offer here. He was also interested because I mention in my profile (and once or twice in posts) that I am discerning a vocation. I think he actually said something about that when he invited me to post.
I look at the discernment process as just that, a process. And, for me at least, it’s been a difficult one. I won’t give too much information about myself, because I want to be able to be frank here, and that frankness requires some anonymity. It’s neither my desire nor intent to speak in any way that is outside of the Church, but I know I might and, like many cowards, I don’t want that biting me in the bohunkus when (and if) I start seminary.
So, I think I will take Reynor at his word and use this blog mostly as a chronicle. Because I am moving from one stage of discernment (I call it Phase I: Someone call the guys in the white coats, I’m going crazy here) to the next (Phase II: I may be crazy, but I’m a crazy guy with a Spiritual Director who is taking me seriously), this seems like a good time to start. You’re probably not interested, but unless I start getting comments telling me to put a sock in it, I will continue. (Warning: this post is painfully long!)
So, for this, my inaugural post of the “Augustine Tries To Decide if Christ Wants Him” blog, I thought I would give y’all my not-so-specific spiritual biography.
First, I was born a poor, black child. — No wait, that was Steve Martin in The Jerk. I was actually born a middle-class son of middle-class parents. My father was a devout Catholic, a man through whom the true image of the Father shone. His love for God, Christ and Christ’s church was so strong that he struggled for the last 30 years of his life with what some Americans were doing to the venerable institution into which he was born. He grew up in the north, went to war (WWII) went to college, met a beautiful, wonderful woman, married and raised a brood that was sufficiently large to field a baseball team.
My mother was a study in the true attraction of opposites. A southern, protestant army brat, she was the antithesis of what my paternal grandmother wanted in a daughter. She was neither Irish nor Catholic. There is one thing that she had, though, that no other woman on earth had: a devout love for my Dad. My father was my mother’s world. And so, when only two weeks after they met, he asked her to marry him, she said yes. Thy “courted” for a year and were married shortly after Easter and after she had been welcomed into full communion with the Church.
Years later, their lives were complete when I came along. OK, not really. I was the second to last of their kids and the last one born before the close of the Second Vatican Council. My mother nearly died the night I was born, and my father was away on business and had to rush home. Still, they didn’t hold it against me.
They raised their kids within the Church as much as possible. We were all baptised Catholic and all had a first communion. However, the lower half of us are swiss cheese when it came to Confirmation. Some were, some weren’t. My younger brother and I, sadly, fell into the latter category.
When I was 16, my parents decided that I was old enough to decide for myself if I would attend Mass. My father, God love him, had become so disillusioned with both the liturgy and the clergy in the US at the time, his heart wasn’t always in it either. “Those were difficult times for the Church,” my S.D. recently said to me. He was right. He was also right when he said that those “difficult times continue even today.” They do.
So, at 16, I became and on-again/off-again (mostly off-again ) Catholic and at 18 stopped going completely. It’s funny, though. Two and a half years later, a college drop out living hand to mouth, I started back, briefly. It was around this time, sometime around age 21, when a voice first popped into my head that said, “have you considered the priesthood?” Considered the priesthood?!? You have to be kidding me! I don’t even go to MASS with any regularity.
With my life getting better (better job, better home, back in college) my interest in ME returned and my interest in HIM waned. Stop me if you’ve heard this one: I still “believe in God and Jesus,” I would tell people, “I just don’t agree with organized religion.” What a copout, huh? At least my grandfather was honest when people asked him his religion: “I’m a Sooner,” he’d say. “I’d sooner stay in bed!” I didn’t need a real relationship with God because I had my friends, my purient interests and my career! (Is anyone wondering why “Augustine” is my nom be web now?)
God has a funny way of waking us up fro our stupor. In 1994, he took my father. The grace, dignity and spirituality with which my father faced and accepted his own death was inspiring. Near the end, he asked me to do two things. I think he asked everyone in my family to do these, and I think most were as good as I was about it. Only my younger brother complied. “Go back to Mass,” he asked, “and say the Rosary every day.”
“Dad,” I answered, “I love you, but I don’t even know how to say the Rosary!”
Too soon, he was gone. Six weeks from diagnosis to death. And my poor mother, after four decades of marriage, was without her Charlie. When I returned home at Christmas, there were pictures of my Dad everywhere, and I mean everywhere! On the coffee table, on the buffet, on the refrigerator, on the little ledge over the kitchen sink, in her bathroom, on every flat surface (and some vertical ones) throughout the house. “What’s with the ‘Shrine?’” my bother asked.
“I’m afraid I’ll forget what he looked like,” she explained. Looking back, I wish I had been a better son back then. I wish I had been closer to God, Christ and the Church. I could have given her real comfort instead of platitudes. I could have explained, from my heart, how I knew we’d be with him again.I also could have understood that kind of love. They weren’t rich, they struggled. But they had love, and I mean the REAL thing. They had, I believe, the closest thing the LOVE, the Holy Spirit, the love between Father and Son that any two human beings on earth could have.
But, at the time, I still had my career — and it was taking off. I coasted for a few years, left one major metropolis for another. Tried my hand at skiing, got a master’s degree and went to Mass on June 6 every year. That was the day my Dad died, June 6. So I went, and did Catholic gymnastics, and never really thought about what I was doing.
By 2002, though, there were cracks in the armor. A failed business attempt, a dishonest boss with a small company, a dishonest large company and an ego the size of the Grand Canyon had my career in tenuous circumstances. In March of that year, I got the phone call I had been dreading for 8 years:
“Hey, it’s your brother,” Richard, he’s a doctor. Mom went down to visit him this week. “It’s not good.”
“How not good?”
“Colon cancer, maybe metastisized to her liver.”
“What’s the prognosis?”
“We’ll know after surgery and chemo.”
I took three weeks off of work and flew to help out. I helped my brother and his new wife (two years) and their new baby (five months) deal with a 75-year-old cancer patient. I took her to chemotherapy, but the cancer was pretty advanced in her liver and inoperable. You hear it so often that it’s cliche, but as the eighth anniversary of my father’s death approached, I could tell that her heart wasn’t in it. In a very real way, she’d been dead for eight years. She just never lay down.
“You can only stand at the elevator for so long,” she told her grandson when he expressed sorrow at her illness, “sooner or later, you have to go up.” As we surrounded her bed on that warm July night, I did something I hadn’t really done in, gosh, twenty years. I prayed. Not for me, but for her.
I guess God decided that my Dad’s death wasn’t enough to wake me up, so he knew my mother’s death wouldn’t do it either. (Here I should point out: when my father died, I was sad for a long time. When my mother died, I was devastated. Call me a “Momma’s Boy,” I don’t care. Had you known her, you would have been a momma’s boy too!) So, less then four months later, I lost my job too. Here started the real downward spiral.
Unemployment looked good to me, for about a month. Nothing to do and no money, soon no home. Still, in my arrogance, I insisted that “I was better than this.”
I took a job waiting tables (I’m better than this), but it didn’t work out. I moved from family home to family home, trying to find a place to live. Without a job, they didn’t have too much patience and frankly, I was being a jerk anyway.
Ultimately, I ended up homeless, living in my car and (serendipitously) I ended up in the parking lot of the very Church where I was baptised. I went in, I knelt down and I prayed. I said, “I can’t do it on my own. I’ve screwed up enough. I need help.”
The next morning, I found a new job with a big sign-on bonus, Company car, secretary, expense account, you name it! NOT!
Nothing changed, at first. Nothing, that is, but my attitude. I meant it when I said I needed help, and help came. Help came in the form, first, of admitting I needed help. A friend took me in, let me live with her to “watch the cat” while she travelled. I got a job as a bartender.
The job was the key. It wasn’t glamorous and it didn’t pay well. The hours were long and my feet (and legs, back, shoulders) ached when I got home. People could be rude, demanding, arrogant. I learned to smile. I smiled at each one of them. I said, “Yes, sir,” and “I’m sorry ma’am,” and my pat answer to “Thank you” wasn’t “you’re welcome,” it was “my pleasure.”
And I said that because it was my pleasure. It was my pleasure to serve them, to try to make them happy. Most of all, it was my pleasure that God saw fit to find a way to build me back up (my despondence was ending, and my bank account was growing, if very slowly) through teaching me what it means to be humble. I learned that I wasn’t better than most people, I was worse. I was much worse because I considered myself better. I didn’t do that (as much) anymore.
And, I started back to Church.
Through everything, I think it was a foregone conclusion that, if I returned to the Church, the Church I returned to would be Roman Catholic. I was going to Mass (but not communion - twenty years without a confession!) and I was thinking. What did God want from me? What, if anything, was God telling me?
We are moving towards a dictatorship of relativism which does not recognize anything as for certain and which has as its highest goal one’s own ego and one’s own desires.
Those were the words that did it for me. Hadn’t that been my life? Hadn’t, in fact, that been the problem with my entire life? Many men call themselves John Paul II priests. Well, if I become a priest, I am a Benedict XVI priest. Not only that, but in my mind I will be the first Benedict XVI priest, because I was converted by him before he was Pope, with that one phrase!
So, back in Church, into an RCIA class to get my confirmation, back in confession (my priest told me to “hit the high points”) and back to communion. I joined the choir, attended mass, dare I say it, religiously. I went to Mass on Holy Days of Obligation, going so far as to tell my employer that I couldn’t work on Ascension Thursday! Then, my job situation changed! Three days before my confirmation, I was able to leave bartending behind. I got a new job, in my career field of choice. I was able to get a place of my own and retrieve all of my “stuff” from three years’ storage!
Yes, my life had turned around. Many atheists would say it is just coincidence. Ah, for a man without faith, no proof is sufficient; for a man with faith, no proof is necessary.
Then came Easter 2006. This was my VERY first Triduum! I mean, this was the first time in my life that I attended Mass on Thursday, Friday and the Saturday Vigil. My parish, a Tridentine Rite, had a real vigil Mass, 10:30 - 2:00 am! I intoned the response to the Litany of the Saints. It was beautiful.
Of course, the good Schola member’s work is never done, and I was needed again at the 10:00 Easter Mass. I was happy to be there. I loved the Mass and I looked forward to going. So, Easter Sunday, during the Credo, it happened. I mean IT happened.
Now, I can’t tell you that there was a light, or a figure before me: there wasn’t. I can’t say that I felt a real tap on my shoulder: I didn’t. I didn’t even hear a voice. What I did do was feel. I felt a thought, an idea, a concept, a sentence. In my head. And it didn’t come from me. I felt my life, my situation, everything I had lost and now had regained. I felt it all with a joy I can’t even express. And, I felt one more thing.
All of this I have done for you. What are you willing to do for me?
And, with those words, it began.
[...] my last post I told what is, for lack of a better term, my conversion story. It was a little biography mixed [...]
I felt sorry for being a little impatient thinking that i would not be reading the 2nd part sooner.
when can i start asking questions?
LOL! Sorry for the delay. I didn’t figure anyone was reading, so I took my time.
Beside, I do have work to deal with.
Ask away.
Your final decision to start your discernment, did you make it before finding a SD or was it a product of continued conversation with your SD?
The truth is, I only recently found a spiritual director with whom I “click.” So, it’s not really a surprise that, in spite of everything, including the intensity of the initial “call” last Easter, that I languished over the past 12 months.
I can’t emphasize enough the importance, not only of a director, but of one who is, to some extent, of the same mind as you.
My current director, JR, made it clear to me that “pressing the issue” wasn’t his way. In fact, he had been pressured when he was younger, so the last thing he wants to do is push. However, he insisted that I make some effort.
As a result, I will soon be going on a Vocational Retreat.
[...] a follow up to my previous posts (here and here) I would like to share the story of a recent discernment retreat on which I went. I [...]