Being Called by God!

De La Salle

The idea of God calling me to be a priest was hard to understand. I believed in the existence of God. I prayed to him, but I was not like any other Catholic. I had many questions that I could not answer. Would God think that it was boring hearing the same mass in thousands of Churches across the world? The same with prayers... Were the prayers from people genuine when they used a prayer that our ancestors wrote? Did they pay attention to the words and mean what they were reciting? Why did people not pray from their hearts in words of their own?

It did bother me when I did pray to God that he did not talk back to me. People tried to explain to me that God spoke through the Bible, nature, people and other ways. This was not an answer I could accept. I thought in a way that it was rude of God that he never spoke to me in a way I could understand. I felt as if I was not good enough and God did not like me enough. Despite that he never spoke to me, I still could feel his presence. I figured that this had to be good enough.

This led me to think a lot about what religious orders were telling me. They thought that a person was called by God to be a priest. How could this be when we could not hear God's voice? It meant that we had to interpret God's voice in other ways. I disagreed with the vocation directors that told me that it was God that was calling me to be a priest. I thought it was a person's free will to dedicate his or her life to the service of God. Maybe the decision to be a priest could be both things. It could be a call from God or a person calling God.

I believed that as a teenager, I should start my life in a religious order. I know that I was only 13 but this was something I wanted to do. I did not have the patience to wait. I also knew that I would not change my mind. I used to pretend that I was a priest in my bedroom and lead a mass for the teddys I could find. I did this a lot when I was a teenager while my brothers were doing other things such as sports. It may sound a bit foolish and a waste of time but it did show my desire to give my life to the service of God.

Grandmother would smile every time I would be frustrated that I wanted to join the priesthood. She would tell me that I had no patience and needed to work on this. She was right. If you are to be a servant of God, you need to have patience. Patience is needed with people and being a spiritual leader. It is needed when a priest does social work or fights for basic human rights. My grandmother could see this and could see my lack of patience. She told me that I did not have to live with a religious order to prepare for the priesthood. I could use my teenage years to work on myself and my spirituality. Once again, she told me that it was important that I experienced life as a teenager. My grandmother thought that I wanted to enter the priesthood to be secure and not worry about things such as my economy and what job I would do.

My grandmother also questioned my motives for joining the priesthood. She asked me did I want to have a special status in society. Did I want to work my way up in the ranks of the Church hierarchy? Did I want to be remembered as a saint? She told me the story of Saint Francis of Assisi. He was a rich man's son that was destined to be a great soldier. He gave up his riches and lived in poverty where he lived off the food that people would give him. In other words, he was a beggar! He built a small church and got permission to start a religious order where its members had no possessions and humbly served the Lord, My grandmother thought that I could learn a lot from him. I admired him and his life. The problem was that I do not think that I was humble and strong enough to follow his example.

When I was 14, I was speaking with a religious order of religious brothers. They originated in France and were called the De La Salle Brothers. I like their work and their community spirit. This time, I was not told that I should wait until I was 18. They told me that I attend one of their schools as a border. It would be the first step in joining them. My dad questioned it, as he wondered if it was the first step to becoming a De La Salle Brother, then why should he pay the tuition to be a border? I did not even think that this could be a scheme just to get an extra border. I thought this was the first step to the religious order. I begged my parents to let me go. Dad thought it was expensive, but mom persuaded him to let me go to boarding school.