Apologia Pro Vita Sua, Act 1

Giving an explanation for my decision to pursue the priesthood

12/12/2023

Have I ever shared with you the real reason I decided to become a priest? I like to joke it was because I could not find some unsuspecting beautiful Catholic girl to marry me and have ten children. Actually, there is more truth to that joke than I care to admit. But I want to take a moment and explain my vocational decision because this choice is not only counter-cultural in America, but sounds down-right crazy in any culture. Why would any healthy, red-blooded, virile young man choose a life of celibacy, church service, and a salary slightly above the poverty line? In other words, I want to present what St. John Henry Newman titled his autobiography, an “apologia pro vita sua,” meaning a defense of one’s life. Just like he took pains to justify his conversion from an Anglican to a Catholic, so I want to take a minute to explain my decision to choose celibacy over marriage, poverty over affluence, taking orders instead of taking charge, in a word, the priesthood.

My final decision to be ordained happened in three major steps, each marked by three blinding insights. I would like to present them in three "Acts" so this is "Act 1". The first step or insight occurred when I was seven years old, and it was a traumatic experience. Incidentally, I think many people find their life purpose in some trauma, trial, or tribulation. Tragedy has a powerful way of opening our eyes to who we are supposed to be. When I was seven – as I have shared before – my family left India and moved to the United States. That may sound like a dream-come-true for many immigrants, but not for me. I felt like overnight I had lost everything: my friends, my food, my music, my language, my neighborhood, in short, everything I valued as a little boy. It was “the end of the world as I knew it” to paraphrase the rock band, R.E.M.

But hidden within every trauma or tragedy, I believe, is a golden seed of grace. Like St. Paul taught the Romans, that seed of grace eventually blossoms into something far bigger than the trauma is was born from. St. Paul wrote: “Where sin increased, grace abounded all the more” (Rm 5:20). St. Paul means mainly a spiritual tragedy, but I think the same can be said for all tragedies. What was this golden grace I received as a little boy? It was the insight that in the end we lose everything that we hold dear, that is, when we die. Think about it: everyone will eventually experience what I did as a seven year-old when they die: “the end of the world as we know it.” But there is one Thing we will never lose even after death, namely, God. Dt 1:31 describes this sense of God sustaining us like a father carrying a son, saying: “You have seen how the Lord your God bore you, as a man bears his son, in all the way that you went until you came to this place.” And that “place” to which God the Father carried his son Israel was the Promised Land.

In other words, that childhood trauma taught me a profound truth – perhaps it is the most profound truth of all – namely, that all things are passing and eventually expire. Nothing is ultimately self-sustaining forever. At the same time I learned there is One who is always self-sustaining, that is, God. One of the best descriptions of this difference between the Creator and his creation I have found was by Etienne Gilson. He wrote: "This created universe, of which St. Augustine said that it unceasingly leans over towards the abyss of nothingness, is saved at each moment from collapse into nothingness by the continuous giving of being which, of itself, it could neither give nor preserve” (The Spirit of Mediaeval Philosophy, 71-72)." It is like that bumper-sticker I saw once that said, “There is a God and you ain’t him.” Only One is eternal, everything else – and everyone else – has an expiration date.

So how did this insight about the Eternal versus the expiring help me discern the priesthood? Well, in high school I began asking myself what I wanted to do when I grew up, as all youngster presumably do. But even as a young teenager, I could perceive two important truths that blossomed from that original insight. First, when I did something for others, I felt a deeper joy than when I received something for myself. For instance, one Christmas while in eighth grade, I made straight A’s on my report card (no small miracle). I did not really care about grades back then, and I did that as a gift for my parents (who cared far more). That same Christmas I received a beautiful bike as a present. By the way, it was the fastest bike on the street so I named it “Flash”.

I noticed something curious, though: even though both giving and receiving made me happy, the former (giving) was not only quantitatively better, it was qualitatively better than receiving. It was not only more happiness; it was happiness on another level. This is why we read in Acts 20:35, where Paul quotes Jesus saying something not recorded in the four gospels: “It is more blessed to give than to receive.” I am convinced that this discovery about joys that last versus happiness that fades was a fruit of that seed of golden grace planted in my seven year-old soul. How so? Well, I was far more interested in the Eternal (lasting) joys than those things with an expiration date (fleeting pleasures). And I found that difference in my own feelings, which confirmed that original insight.

Another low-hanging fruit I picked around the same time in high school was that if “giving is more blessed than receiving”, then what was the best way to give, or to help others? Here, again, I noticed a yawning divide between what lasts and is forever and what fades or is temporary. I recognized that there are two ways to help people. You can give people food, shelter, and clothing, that is, take care of their physical material needs. And this is very important, mind you, and not to be neglected! Or, you can provide for their spiritual needs, like helping them know God, teaching them how to read the Bible, praying for others and making sacrifices for them, etc. And I further asked, which of these two needs lasts longer? Clearly the spiritual needs far outweigh the material needs – again, though, we need to fulfill both. After all, I could not compose these thoughts without a good night’s sleep in a firm bed, and a strong cup of coffee at hand.

But did you notice how the seed that was planted in my soul in that early childhood trauma was now bearing great fruit? In other words, the very reason I could catch the difference between enduring joys and fleeting pleasures, and cared more about helping people meet eternal needs and not just earthly needs, was because my heart and head had been pre-programed to ask precisely these questions. Presumably, other teens, my classmates, who had not been so traumatized, were oblivious to such concerns, and went about life as normal kids do. Jeremiah heard God calling him in his mother’s womb, saying: “Before you were born I consecrated you; I appointed you a prophet to the nations” (Jer 1:5). I heard God’s call first when I was seven and grasped the difference between what is eternal and what has an expiration date. Years later I was able to take my first step toward the priesthood when I applied that insight I gained as a child and asked what I should do with my life. That is, God had called me to be a priest long before I even knew there was such things as priests.

End of Act 1.

Praised be Jesus Christ!