“I believe Nick is a Jesuit,” my poetry professor once wrote. She was recommending me for a teaching position and knew my affinity for Gerard Manley Hopkins, the nineteenth-century English Jesuit priest whose poems were charged with the grandeur of God he saw in the world around him. I smiled at her gentle mistake: She was almost right. Years earlier, as a student at Susquehanna University in quiet central Pennsylvania, I’d imagined myself a future priest.
I’m a cradle Catholic. I’m the only person in my family to not attend Catholic school, and that was only because the Catholic high school in my town was about to shutter its doors. For me, Marian devotion was as natural as basketball practice and hanging out with friends on a Saturday night. I was a New Jersey kid whose family came from Newark, Dover, and the Bronx. I grew up knowing Catholicism was a religion of immigrants: Mexicans, Italians, Spaniards, Portuguese, Irish. We were a superstitious, devoted bunch. We crossed ourselves and talked to the saints. We held grudges, and then, kneeling before Mass, flushed with something between guilt and hope, we’d pray to be better.
I felt out of place in Pennsylvania. Susquehanna was a small school, and I had a lot of friends, but home comes sharply into view from a distance; I missed my family, and I missed basketball. When my coach gave the starting point guard position I’d hoped for to a senior, I left my jersey and sneakers in my locker and quit. Two things entered that void: writing, and God.
I had become close with Father Joe Celia, a laidback, caring priest who served Sunday dinners for students at his rectory. We hand-rolled meatballs and mixed piping pots of gravy while Father Joe’s two boxers barked and jumped in the next room. We said a prayer before dinner, and then ate salad with crisp cherry tomatoes and talked about classes, movies, and home. We didn’t talk about God. At least not directly.
Even before I met Father Joe, I’d always been fascinated by the priesthood. My father, an All-American high school football player, was a running back for Holy Cross College and still venerates the Jesuits who taught him. They were scholars, worldly men who could have been secular lawyers, astronomers, doctors—could have been fathers — but had been called to become Fathers. When he wasn’t playing football in college, my father was at Mass, trekking across the Worcester, Massachusetts snow that falls in November and remains like concrete on the ground until spring. He studied theology and philosophy, and was planning to become a priest himself—until he met my mother.
I, too, thought I had been led by grace to this Lutheran campus in the middle of farmlands. Father Joe read my stories. God bless his patience, for they were bad: long-winded narratives, mostly starring priests in rural parishes. In one story, I spent over twenty pages methodically describing a priest’s celebration of Mass. Father Joe took a deep breath, handed me back the story, and said “make it a paragraph.” There’s something very literary about being a priest: devotion to the Word delivered through close-readings of words, stories, metaphors. The belief that we can come together through a shared story. I had been blessed in my Catholic life to know priests and nuns who, like Father Joe, were honest and real. Many of my friends who are lapsed Catholics have not been so lucky; they feel like the church judges rather than loves them. But Father Joe saw God in all things, and spoke of inclusion rather than exclusion. I wanted to be like him.
Soon my longtime thoughts about becoming a priest became actual plans. I wanted to become a Jesuit, just as my father had years before. I had begun to pray for discernment, Saint Ignatius’s practice of being attentive to God’s presence in our daily lives. I would be out late on Saturday nights—I was a college kid, after all—but in the morning, I would be back in church, the place that felt closest to home. The life and sacrifice of Christ—scourged, beaten, and killed because of his love for us—made me cry well-hidden tears those Sunday mornings.
I was aware that, if I entered the seminary, I was about to start a long, rigorous process of formation that began with my time as a novitiate. My daily life would be full of prayer and pilgrimage, guided by the Spiritual Exercises. I would likely teach at a Jesuit high school and intensely study theology before entering my ministry. Ordination would follow, along with my final vows. The process can feel overwhelming—as it should. A priest is a spiritual leader, a mentor, someone who must care for and counsel and serve others. It was not a decision to be taken lightly.
And I was consumed by the decision, and its implications, and the routes my life would take when, one Sunday afternoon, a new student showed up at Father Joe’s rectory. She was gorgeous. She was sitting in the living room with her friend, and I announced that dinner was ready, but it came out like I was some butler in a television show. My head was spinning, and I was, all of a sudden, wildly aware of myself at the table.
I felt like I’d known Jen all of my life, and in a strange way, I’d grown up parallel to her. She’d gone to the same Catholic school where I’d had AAU basketball practice and games; we’d later discover that she’d crossed the court with her track team minutes before we’d come out of the locker room each week, our lives moments apart for years. We quickly became close friends, and truthfully, I’d also fallen absolutely, dizzyingly in love. I would never be the same.
I soon told Father Joe that I’d had a change of heart about the priesthood. He listened to me, but I could see the look on his face before I’d finished the sentence: This is how it is supposed to happen. Father Joe wasn’t disappointed; he was happy for me. After all, this is the process of discernment: to try to discover our way in this confusing world. It would be untrue to say that it was a long, drawn-out process, or that I struggled over the decision. It was an easy one. I was in love—am still, all these years later, very deeply—and it was not my calling to become a priest.
I trust enough in God to believe that our hearts can be full of one thing today, and another thing tomorrow, and that if that thing is pure and good, the change is a blessing. I do sometimes wonder what it would be like to be Father Ripatrazone, but those daydreams quickly pass into the air, like some childhood memory. She thinks I would make a good deacon, but we know even that is a real commitment. Another form of discernment.
I went from being a potential Father to another type of father—one blessed with identical twin girls, a wild and beautiful gift. I have realized that my earlier, naïve idea of Catholicism was largely shaped by an unfair elevation of the priesthood. I did not see the sacramental worth in love, family, and everyday life.
A few years later, Jen and I had hoped to have Father Joe celebrate our wedding, but sadly, he passed away. I am left with the memory of his kindness, and the path he’d opened for me. I think of what Thomas Merton wrote, talking of meditation: “We must attune ourselves to unexpected movements of grace, which do not fit our preconceived ideas of the spiritual life at all, and which in no way flatter our own ambitious aspirations.” If I was to truly believe, it meant to let go of my plans and assumptions about my place in this world. Love taught me to truly have faith.
