(Take a look at "A Day in the Life of Fr. Bob" by clicking here.)

"...The call of God to our vocation is a loving divine desire to be true to our innermost self where we encounter God’s divine love.  My priestly ministry empowers me joyfully to help others experience and respond to God’s love..."

I am a “second career” vocation.  I have taken a roundabout route into religious life by first establishing myself in the career of human services and education.  In my mid 30’s, inspired by a natural desire to settle down and a need for spiritual deepening, I began exploring whether I might be called to religious life.  More and more I came to see myself as a Norbertine, to feel this strange yet comforting sense of my vocation as a religious.

I think the ground was prepared for my vocation growing up in an Irish Catholic family in Massachusetts.  Particularly inspiring was my grandmother’s faith which I remember to this day with awe.  Nana was an old school Catholic whose later years were filled with devotions, novenas, and rosaries—prayers and practices which I admired but seemed shrouded in a mystical obscurity.  Nana definitely helped foster an appreciation for mystery while my family’s Catholic fidelity ingrained in me a religious perspective as a matter of course. 

I often reflected with my students during my teaching tenure at the local Catholic school that, for those of us baptized as babies and raised in the faith, our Catholicism is “in our bones.”  It is part of our fundamental identity.  We are naturally sacramental, almost instinctually seeking God’s actual presence in the world as He is actually present in the Eucharist.  I am grateful to my family for this gift of sacramentality.

During undergraduate studies my sense of vocation deepened as I attended a private Catholic liberal arts institution called Stonehill College, run by the Holy Cross Fathers.  I was inquisitive and majored in Philosophy.  I took another step in my vocation journey when I attended a unique seminar on contemplation given by a Carthusian monk named Fr. Denis.  I still vividly remember that sense of amazement as he entered the room in his monk’s habit, but most striking was his peaceful blue eyes.  You know someone is drinking from a deep spiritual well by gazing into their eyes. 

We intuitively know when we are in the presence of soulful people, and I wanted what he had.  I yearned for soulfulness, wisdom, and peace for my angst-ridden soul.  I desired then (but didn’t know it) and seek now the kind of peace that only Christ can give.  Fr. Denis mentioned that he became a monk after reading the great American Cistercian and spiritual writer, Thomas Merton.  I voraciously read Merton and began meditating, and my sense of vocation deepened. 

I discerned that I needed somehow to help people.  So after college I embarked on a road that took me into the Peace Corp as a volunteer in Sierra Leone, West Africa.  I later earned a master’s degree in education and performed my student teaching at a high school in Harlem.  I taught autistic adolescents at a school for the deaf/blind founded by Helen Keller.  My educational career took me from New York to Boston to the Green Mountains of Vermont and eventually to highly fulfilling work with developmentally disabled adults in Miami, Florida.

My final position was the director of an intensive program for adults with mental retardation and behavioral challenges in Dade County—the only one of it’s kind in South Florida.  Yet, as I reflected on my life I remained unfulfilled.  It was a strange feeling of being unsettled.  I was doing what I loved and living my dream of helping people but there remained a spiritual emptiness which disturbed me. 

In a search for the meaning to this desolation of spirit I enrolled in a graduate program training spiritual directors at St. Thomas University.  The director of the program was surprised that I had simply walked in off the street since all those in the program were sponsored by their religious orders or their parishes.  The program was wonderful, although I never really intended to be a spiritual director—I just wanted to figure myself out!  I learned about spiritual journaling, and how to share my faith experiences with others in ways I was never able to before. 

As I began talking about my relationship with God, I found the dryness disappearing.  The entire second year of the program was spent studying and practicing the spiritual exercises of Saint Ignatius of Loyola and it was then that the image of that soulful monk I met in college vividly returned to me. 

With the help of my spiritual director I began looking at religious orders and eventually made my way to the desert southwest to an obscure community called the Norbertines of New Mexico, and if you want to know what the feeling of discovering one’s true vocation is, I can only describe it as a powerful sense of coming home. 

Now, as a solemnly vowed Norbertine, I am continuing my mission to help people but from a religious, faith-filled perspective I never had before.  After several years of teaching as the department chair at St. Pius X high school I am now a chaplain at the local hospital in Albuquerque.  I love being a chaplain.  I am privileged to be with people at the most intense turning points in their lives: in moments of sickness and death, and times of healing and the birth of new life.  I have blessed a premature baby that fit neatly in the palm of my hand, and held the hand of a woman who didn’t have to die alone because I was there for her.  I am blessed and grateful for my vocation and for the support of this Norbertine community of friends that I call my brothers.

And the Story Continues…
When I served as department chair of theology at Saint Pius X High School, I designed and taught a course on vocations.  I brought in lots of guest speakers from all the vocations of the Church:  married, single, religious brothers and sisters, and religious and diocesan priests.  Some spoke of an easy discernment and a clarity they had since childhood.  “I always knew I was called to be a priest.”  “I knew I wanted to be a mother and when I met my husband I had no doubts I would spend the rest of my life with him.”  Others told of a long process of vague yearnings which clarified only after years of prayer and wondering.  My process has followed the  latter route.

 I first entered the Norbertines as a priesthood candidate.  In my mind the notion of religious life and priesthood were linked.  One came with the other.  But as I proceeded through my formation, I saw them as two separate discernments.  As I fell in love with Norbertine religious life, I became less sure of priesthood.  In the final year of my theological studies I made the choice to profess solemn vows as a non-ordained brother.  I was, and remain, quite happy with that choice.  As a brother my ministry and service in the Church have been fruitful, both as a teacher and, most recently, as a lay chaplain at Presbyterian Hospital in Albuquerque.  However, it was my experience as a chaplain which led me back to the discernment of priesthood.

 As I visited with Catholic patients, I saw their need for the sacraments as part of their healing.  I believe that severe illness challenges our spirit as well as our body.  Eucharist, reconciliation, and anointing of the sick are integral components of the healing process, and I have seen the power of these sacraments in action.  The sacrament of anointing, in particular, bestows special graces to help us in our healing, or as part of the last rites, gives us the grace for our final transition into God.  I observed how this sacrament transformed a patient’s spirit from distress to peace, from fear to hope.  This touched me deeply.  I felt God leading me to take another look at priesthood, asking me if I might help meet the tremendous need for sacramental ministry.  I decided to say yes.  Ordination to priesthood now allows me to bring the sacraments to people who hunger for grace and the real presence of God in their lives.

 However, I will always be a religious brother because brotherhood is the paradigm for our lives as Norbertines.  I did not see myself as abandoning my vocation as a brother at all.    Norbertines are all brothers first and foremost.  We take our solemn vows as brothers first, before any ordination to holy office, and our lives are primarily shaped by our Norbertine charism of living together as brothers in community.  This is our way to holiness as we witness to the transforming presence of God in our midst, and this charism will never change. 

As an ordained priest I now enjoy clarity in my vocation and a completeness I never had before.  The call of God to our vocation is a loving divine desire to be true to our innermost self where we encounter God’s divine love.  My priestly ministry empowers me joyfully to help others experience and respond to God’s love.

 

(Take a look at "A Day in the Life of Fr. Bob" by clicking here.)