How To Stop Second-Guessing What God Spoke To Me
“You know, I really think I can say for the first time I think I see where Jesus is calling me to follow Him”.
It was the spring semester of my last year of seminary, and I had just gotten off the phone with my Vocations Director, a priest whose task is to prayerfully accompany other young men and women in this Archdiocese as they walk through the often unclear path of vocational discernment.
I was a senior student living with an inspiring community of other young men, I had a balanced routine of life that included everything from prayer to hockey, and I was daily receiving the rich nourishment of soul and mind through the Sacraments and theological studies. Things were going well in my life, especially given that most of my time in seminary up to this point had been a difficult, near-constant, interior process of wrestling with where is God calling me?
This phone call with my Vocations Director was one more piece of the vocational puzzle that had been falling into place lately, and perfect timing too: I was only weeks away from graduating before my next season of life would really start. Through prayer, conversation, and much time spent waiting, the seemingly never-ending fog on my vocational horizon was finally dissipating.
Yes, Christ was calling me to be his priest, and I could finally say ‘Yes’! There came with my decision an indescribable experience of peace; particularly that interior peace which Scripture tells us only God can give. I knew where I was going in life.
A short while later, I went home to my family in East Vancouver for a weekend holiday, bringing home with me a sense of interior peace and quiet assurance I had not experienced for a long time. Everything was falling into its God-appointed place—including, unbeknownst to us all, a global pandemic.
I never returned to the seminary and its environment that I had come to love after that weekend: the province immediately entered a strict lockdown, we were told to hunker down with our families, and studies shifted online. Literally, overnight, the cozy familiarity of my dorm room was forcibly swapped out for the unfinished guest room in my parents’ house, the lively classroom discussions with friends became distorted voices on a monotonous Zoom class, the elbowing on the seminary hockey court now became petty disputes with my family, and dawn Mass with the Benedictine monks became sitting cross-legged on a couch with a laptop trying to catch something called ‘Livestream Mass’.
I tried to replicate the routine at home, but even something as simple as a consistent bedtime seemed impossible—to say nothing of prayer. Most distressing of all, however, was the growing awareness that perhaps my decision to follow Christ into priesthood just a short while earlier wasn’t based on the peace that comes with authentic, prayerful listening, but rather on the fact that life at the seminary had become predictable, peaceful, and wholly under my control. Perhaps that peace I had expressed in that phone call just a few days ago was nothing more than emotions and idealism. Given my difficulty in adapting to the sudden reality of ‘pseudo-seminary’ at home, perhaps it was time to reassess everything I thought I knew about where God was calling me.
One morning, the idea suddenly came to me to leave seminary, and with that idea came many logical reasons supporting why doing so right now was ideal. It all made sense to me and I agreed.
As I debated whom to break the news to first, one more thought crept in: a phrase, rather, that I had heard so often before in seminary I had let it lie dormant. Yet this phrase, specifically Rule #5 of St. Ignatius of Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises, was now awakened:
“In a time of desolation, never go back on the decision made in consolation.” I.e., in a time of chaos, never undo a resolution made in peace. Never.
In my new reality thus far, every single day had been interiorly chaotic and a seeming failure; evidence strongly suggesting if I was barely cutting it at my own parents’ house I’d have no chance as a priest in a parish. Yet I could not shake the deeply-held remembrance of that peace I had known just weeks before when I had said with complete freedom, ‘Yes, Lord, I desire to be a priest for You’; every good reason to leave now and start fresh could not defeat that singular memory of God-given peace when I gave God my ‘Yes’.
I looked up in my prayer and saw before me a crucifix. It occurred to me then that when Christ went to the Cross, He made no conditions about how comfortable or nice it would be. For the sheer love of you and I, He accepted the Cross in all its pain, chaos, and seeming defeat. And the timing of Our Lord’s Passion was not unfortunate, but perfect, because it was God’s timing. If God knew there would be a global pandemic at a crucial point in my vocational discernment, then the timing was perfect, because it was God’s. I realized then the invitation in this realization: would I once again give God my ‘yes’? I gave him my ‘yes’ when things were calm and hopeful, but would I take my commitment to the deeper level, and give Him my ‘yes’ when all around and within me was chaos and confusion? Would I accept the call of Christ without my own conditions?
That same night I handwrote and mailed my response to the Archbishop. It was my Letter of Petition, a formal request to be ordained to Holy Orders. As I mailed that letter and began the process of waiting for a response, there was no overwhelming happiness or joy, but there was a deep, abiding peace; a peace that almost stubbornly refused to depart even as life around me was entirely upended. Mere weeks earlier I had found Christ in the calm, but now, Christ had found me in the chaos.
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