I have been in Rome for a conference, which happened to coincide with the Jubilee for Priests, the feast of the Sacred Heart, and a stay in my alma mater. It was the first time I had stayed there in 17 years, the first time, in fact, that I had been back properly to the place where I was formed for priesthood and ordained: the Venerable English College. The conjunction of these things – the return, the feast and the jubilee – have all provided much food for thought and prayerful reflection on my priesthood.
This was not an experience of nostalgia for something lost or the experience of the past as a foreign country where they do things differently. It was more an experience of the past as a mirror in which I was reassured to be able to recognise myself and my priesthood immediately, despite the inevitable changes brought upon by the years.
It was a very interesting experience to sit in my habitual place in the Martyrs’ Chapel and just allow myself to feel the connection between then and now. The sensory impressions of the clock’s chimes and the particular music of the old benches’ creaks and groans initially gave the sensation of returning to bathe in the same river. But this quickly gave way to a feeling of returning to the beginning to know the place for the first time.
The surprise was less about discovering some past which had been forgotten and more about recognising how much the past is present, that there is a radical continuity between the younger man who sat here before the Lord trying to discern a vocation and the older man who is still trying to live it. This recognition brought a feeling of deep peace and renewal. This means that it is the vocation that is the continuity, not the subjective feelings about it, still less any sense of “progress” in it. It was a beautiful recognition that “He who calls you is faithful.”
There came, in that moment of prayer, in the strange confluence of then and now for the same spirit, a realisation that there has never been a shred of regret. That’s not to say that there have been no difficulties and struggles, but there were difficulties and struggles then. Yet seen from this distance, I realise that then the struggles were about finding an identity. Whatever difficulties since, they are of a different order. I realise that this is my identity and that at no point have I had a moment’s doubt that this is the case. So today’s struggles are not about what I am to do, but rather about how am I doing it.
Even so, it occurred to me that in one aspect the discernment of vocation is no different from the living it. It is not that forsaking all others requires some huge and constant act of privation or renunciation, but, rather, what one receives in return makes the renunciation possible, even desirable.
Amid a recurring temptation to take back the gift in some way, what prevents one is the increasing realisation that to do so would be to lose oneself. It is to enter into the paradox that the man who tries to save his life will lose it, and the man who loses his life for Christ will save it.
When, under the influence of grace, I give myself to Christ, as it were in spite of myself (that is, my sinful self), then in spite of myself grace changes what it is I desire – like the merchant who sells everything he owns in order to buy the pearl of great price. The merchant could, at any point, liquidate his precious new asset and buy back his old stuff. But if the old way of dealing really was the fullness of his ambition and happiness, he would probably never have become a collector of fine pearls.
All this seems to find its most adequate expression in the celebration of the feast of the Sacred Heart, in which Jesus seeks to win us to his heart by baring its excessive love and tenderness for our struggles. If, as the Catechism reminds us, in biblical expression, the heart is “the place to which I withdraw”, then St Paul’s assertion, “It is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me”, expresses perfectly the identity of the priest: the identis, the union of desire in the one who has accepted Christ’s call to borrow his humanity for priesthood. If he then withdraws from Christ, instead of more deeply into him, it is himself he would lose in the process.
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