September Issue: Personal Encounter with Jesus (Fr. Samuel)

“A voice crying out in the desert, prepare the way of the Lord.” (Matt. 3:3; Luke 3:4) 

At the age of 35 I converted to Catholicism.  Less than two years later I entered seminary.  In 1991 I was ordained a priest.  During the years prior to those things coming to pass, none of them was my intention.  What happened?  I finally listened to the voice that was calling to me in what was the wilderness of the life I was living in that first part of my life. 

I think that, in many respects, many of us spend at least part of our lives wandering.  We follow voices that call out to us.   Some are of our own making. Those may have their foundations in both our hopes and our fears.  Others come from people and events in our lives.  Following those voices we try to make sense of who we are and how we want to live.   

In those first decades of my life all my aspirations were in the realm of academia.  I never really left school.  After college I accepted a faculty position at a private school in central Pennsylvania.  After nine years there I moved on to graduate school and a position as a lecturer at Texas A&M University.  On one level things went very well for me.  I was being successful as we often tend to measure success in life.  However, while I was doing well at what I and others thought I should be doing, there was another voice.  It was a voice that came in moments of loneliness and doubt.  It told me that while I was telling myself that I was where I wanted to be, in truth, I was wandering through my life on paths I was not intended to follow.  However, I did not want to listen. 

St. Benedict wrote at the beginning of his rule for monastic life, “Listen carefully…to my instructions and attend to them with the ear of your heart….”  From the vantage point of years now past I can look back on that desert time of wandering in my life and see that there were moments in which God’s voice was there, speaking to me.  However, for many reasons, I did not understand how to listen with anything other than the “ear of my mind.”  Yet those moments have stayed with me even though, because, while I could not or would not listen more deeply, there was about them something about them that I could not dismiss.  There was, for example, my relationship with my favorite aunt, the only Catholic who I knew as a child.  In her I experienced a love that, unlike in my relationships with many others, was unconditional.  While she moved away when I was 6 and died when I was 12, I have always remembered her. Then, later, in my mid-twenties, I was traveling in Spain with a friend who happened to be Catholic.  One Sunday, while in Palma de Mallorca he decided to go to mass.  I went along, although for me at the time the state of my faith life meant that I went as a tourist.  However, as I sat there during communion watching the people move forward in the communion line, I experienced what I now know was a moment of transcendence.  My heart was stirred but, still, I did not listen.  But I did not forget. 

Those experiences and so many more that I now know were there in those years along with my more than 30 years of priestly experience have taught me that God speaks to us in the contexts of our lives as we live them.  I believe, as well, that he speaks to each of us unceasingly.  The issue, however, is that most of the time we are not listening.  God speaks to us in the contexts of our work, our play and it the events, both good and challenging, that we experience.  He speaks to us, too, though the people in our lives, including those to whom we don’t want to listen for various reasons that close us off from one another.  However, as a wise abbot once wrote, “If we stop listening to what we find hard to take, we’re likely to pass God by without even noticing him.” 

In 1982 I decided to take a closer look at the Catholic faith.  I met with a priest at a parish near Texas A&M and joined a class that underwent a five-month period of instruction.  When the class ended, I was not ready to become a Catholic.  The issue for me was that while I learned about the faith it remained a head thing, not something that reached my heart.  I went on with my life at the university.  I did continue reading.  Thomas Merton had a significant effect on me and I read many of his works.  I became fascinated with classical works such as those of St. Teresa of Avila, St. John of the Cross and many others.  At the same time, I began to pray and to meditate.  In addition, I took some literature classes for fun.  Among those was a class on 19th century American novels.  One of the books we studied was Moby Dick.  As I read that book, influenced by what I had been reading in classic mystical literature, I began to develop a theory that Herman Melville had written that novel, at least in part, was a means of exploring his own mystic insights, which, in the end, he dismissed.  I discussed that idea with the professor who was teaching the class.  He agreed and encouraged me to explore that idea further. 

Thus, it was that one day, in mid-October of 1984, I was sitting in the library at Texas A&M reading, from his log, a letter that Melville had written to his friend and fellow author, Nathaniel Hawthorne.  In that letter he wrote, and here I quote from faulty memory, “I do not understand how some people can believe in truth in momentary and transitory insights.”  In that moment I realized that my failure to listen to that voice that had been there in so many moments in my life, amounted to the same thing.  A week later, having completed instruction in the faith two years earlier, I received the sacraments of initiation in the Catholic Church.  Less that two years later, leaving behind the life that I finally accepted was not mine to follow, I entered seminary and the life that I now know I was meant to live.