If you have come here expecting to read a testimony that recounts extraordinary happenings, then prepare to be disappointed. Mine is not a story of a remarkable conversion, there were no supernatural visions, no mystical revelations. Instead, my story is one that charts my exodus from delusion, the delusion of thinking I could outrun God.
It’s difficult to pinpoint the exact moment this journey of discernment began. One obvious place to begin would be that moment I first pondered the prospect of becoming a priest. The fact is, my journey began long before that, long before I was born, in fact.
My parents – neighbours from their youth – both hail from religiously illiterate, working-class families in Hong Kong. My mother was raised in a nominally Buddhist, though incredibly superstitious, household where nights of revelry, of booze and mahjong, were a constant feature. My father’s upbringing, though tamer, was nonetheless nihilistic. Both, however, through providence, converted to Catholicism in their mid-20s: my mum’s conversion was a response to an encounter with the love of Christ while my dad, a man of immense intellect, was won over by the Church’s great intellectual tradition. Thus, my parents came to embody two complementary aspects of Catholicism: the symbiotic relationship between faith and reason.
From my earliest days, it was impressed upon me that Catholicism was not a matter of a sincere, privately held conviction, nor was it a rigid, cultural phenomenon; Catholicism is an encounter, a living relationship with an event, a person. And so, as far as I can recall, the Catholic Church was always a subject of great awe and intrigue; no amount of television or sport could satisfy that innate sense of wonder, that insatiable appetite for knowledge and understanding. As a child, I was struck by the immense beauty of sacred art, music and architecture, I reverenced the Church’s rigorous intellectual life and was fascinated by her cult.
At this point in time, one might reasonably conclude that I was destined to follow this path. And perhaps you would be right to think so. But for me, though I was fortunate enough to be surrounded by good priests, to have been educated in Sydney’s premier Catholic school, and to have been formed by devout parents, priesthood was never given any consideration.
I still remember the moment I first entertained the thought of becoming a priest. It was July 2008 and following an all-too-brief mid-year break, I had returned to school in a state of Catholic frenzy in the wake of World Youth Day 2008. Lunch had just concluded and somehow, in amidst the utter pandemonium of schoolkids scrambling for their textbooks, I somehow found myself in a state of momentary silence and solitude, one in which time stood still. It was there that, for the first time in my life, I was confronted with “that” question, one which soon enough morphed into a profound realisation: What if God was calling me to the priesthood?
Me, a priest? Surely not. No, definitely not.
I was 12 years old at the time and had just commenced secondary schooling. I was on the cusp of teenagerhood, a period of raging hormones and overt rebellion. Much to the chagrin of my Chinese parents, I took little interest in academics and faith. Instead, I was thoroughly distracted by girls. My response to the call then was to hide and to run. And so, for a decade or so, I lived a life of obvious contradiction, one which consisted of public Catholicity and private debauchery. While I continued to observe Catholic practices exteriorly, and assented to Catholic teaching intellectually, my interior life was, to borrow from St Teresa of Avila, that of an unkept garden, of overgrown weeds and mountainous shrubs. The sacraments featured infrequently; prayer was a rarity.
Despite all the obstacles I had placed ahead of me, God continued to work away covertly, gently pulling the strings, like a patient father longing for the return of his prodigal son.
At the age of 22, I found myself in a relationship, and completely infatuated with the girl I loved. By then, marriage was the only goal I sought to pursue. “It’s over,” I’d tell myself, “My discernment is done.” There was no way I’d become a priest: I had unequivocally, definitively and unilaterally slammed the door shut on that front. That is, until one night, just passed the six-month mark, the call that had nagged me all those years ago returned. “Not me, Lord,” I prayed in desperation. But the more I prayed, the stronger the urge. Then and there, I realised all that running had been in vain: try as I might, there was no way I could outrun God.
The heart is a long way away from the head, some say, so while that experience left no doubt in my mind that seminary was my eventual destination, my heart was far from ready to pursue the priestly vocation. There was unfinished business.
By the time I had graduated from law school in 2020, I had decided I had no interest in pursuing law. Instead, I took to writing.
My initial foray into journalism came in the form of football writing. I had begun writing as a 16-year-old, spending countless hours honing my penmanship and analysing the world game. I had become quite successful too. In those days, staying up well past midnight to catch the latest La Liga action had become something of a religious obsession: football was the object of my worship.
My experience in football journalism, though, paled in comparison to working at Sky News Australia, which was a fulfilment of my life-long ambition. But my time there soon became marked by a deep interior tension, a struggle between two goods, a contest between a promising career as a writer and thinker and the prospect of devoting my life to the pursuit of my God-given vocation. For months on end, the words, “Bend my heart to your will, O God” became my catchcry, a prayer in times of distress. But after a relentless couple of months spent observing the internal operations of the newsroom, disillusionment set in. The longer I had spent working in my “dream” job, the more restless I became.
Journalism, for all its faults, can be a source of good when ordered towards truth-seeking and truth-telling. Even so, none of the “real news and honest views” my employers prided themselves ever satiated my appetite for Truth.
Indeed, in longing for the eternal, I had come to realise my heart’s deepest desire could only be fulfilled by spending the rest of my life in adoration of the author of Truth Himself.
Four months have elapsed since I entered the seminary, and while it would be patently untrue to suggest that everything gone swimmingly, I have come to see, with greater clarity, the beauty of Christ’s invitation to “Come and see” (John 1:39).
One of the greatest traps a seminarian can fall into is to wallow in self-pity, a mistaken belief and negative posture which holds that God demands the individual to give up everything, both tangible and intangible, in order to follow him. On face value, this might seem to be true.
In reality, though, God has taken nothing away. Instead, he has given me everything and continues to offer everything. The call of a priest is a unique invitation to participate in a life of intimacy, an opportunity to partake in the being and life of God. It is a life-changing offer I’d be foolish to run away from.
Cronan Yu is a former sports journalist who is now a seminarian for the Catholic Archdiocese of Sydney
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