V. Seeds

After my conversion, I ate oatmeal often — and stone monastery arches filled my imagination. And I resolved to do life differently. I still did not foresee the Catholic priesthood on the horizon.

I turned down drinks at parties. I stopped going to parties. Not that there’s anything wrong with parties. But I thought there might be something wrong with parties. When I reconnected with old friends, and they invited me to have beers, and I’d sip at my Coors Light with slow hesitency, and refrain from laughing at the dirty joke, they would tell me I’d changed.

In my evenings I read my worn brown leather bound bible and listened to a light within my soul.

I left Wrightwood and it broke my heart…only modestly. My dad took a job in San Diego and my family moved to a suburb in Oceanside. And I was out of money and ideas so I moved with them, and I trusted new and interesting things would come to light in this coastal palm tree land of surf and beach.

Things did.

I enrolled in classes at the junior college, and started doing something that I rarely did in high school…study. I suddenly wanted to learn as much as I could, about everything. My grades improved…a lot. The bible I read came to look like a weathered baseball mitt. I attended bible studies with good looking young people who I hoped would like me and that would be my friends. At night I studied geometry or Leviticus at my desk. I lit candles and cared for houseplants. I sought to somehow pray without ceasing. I read a lot: Books by Mark Twain, plays by Shakespeare, hagiographies of Saint Francis of Assisi, diary entries by Mother Teresa, the backs of cereal boxes, just because I saw that reading was good.

I decided Catholicism made the most sense among the Christian traditions. I didn’t give Islam, Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism or the others, much thought. I figured that because I experienced a significant religious moment in a Christian setting, and because the words of the Bible suddenly made so much sense, I would be a Christian. And I would be a Catholic Christian. It was the oldest form of Christianity and with its history of art and stained glass windows it felt like coming home, like a family gathering, like the shelter of the woods, like a truth that nobody could say with words, whispered by Druids and Celts, and hinted at in the contemplative lives of Buddhist monks and nuns.

I would go to confession every week. Every Friday I would stand in the confession line against the back wall of Saint Francis of Assisi Church — an old shoe of a church with khaki walls and brown institutional carpet, a beige altar built upon beige tiles, colored to life only by the flowers ladies carried in for the morning’s funeral. The church was dressed in brown like the saint himself. I believed I stood on favored grounds to hear whatever it was God wished to say in the silence of light pouring through the windows. Plus it was the closest church to my house.

One morning it came my turn to confess and I stepped into the dim cozy confessional room prepared to disclose the most embarrassing corners of my life. However with each passing week, I had less and less embarrassing stuff to confess. I cleared out the things I found so frightening to say, and now I talked about the smaller shortcomings of the week. But even these felt terrible and I wanted to get them out of my soul. I wanted a pure soul. I wanted an inner life as clear as a….well… something that’s clear. I set out to be perfect as I believed God to be perfect. I’d confessed my past enough times over. Now I confessed grumpiness or moments of forgetting God or moments of emotional darkness.

I took my seat across from the priest, a latino man in his forties. He was a handsome guy. I note this detail because back then I barely knew any Catholic priests, and before meeting priests, I envisioned priests having hunched backs or something and living in dim church towers and eating sad soup every day. But he and the other priests at the parish appeared happy and well adjusted.

We exchanged the Catholic ritual sentences: Let us begin in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Bless me Father for I have sinned. And I told him everything I had. Maybe he noticed how mundane my confessions had become with each passing week that I saw him. When I concluded, he told me to keep my practice of prayer and some other things that struck me as his routine advice. Then he paused, and asked…

Have you thought about becoming a priest?

I felt honored. I heard it as an affirmation that my spiritual house had fallen into order.

Had I thought about becoming a priest? I don’t know. Maybe?

I went through a phase from about age ten to fourteen when I loved altar serving in the mass at our small church a few blocks from our home in the mountains. Aside from the time that we all had to stand for a long time during a solemnity mass, and I stood with my knees locked to maintain excellent decorum, and then passed out, and woke up to what looked like every face in the village staring down at me with concern…I thought altar serving was cool. There came a ceremonial reverence in the burning candles and floating incense smoke. The ritual had a quality of not fully existing in time. It seemed like a space where eternity and the ordinary spilled over into a new sort of space.

One afternoon I rode in the back seat of our family car. My mom drove and talked with her friend in the passenger seat. My friend Mikey sat next to me and we talked about Ninja Turtles. My mom said, What do you want to be when you grow up, Mikey?

I want to be a paramedic, he said.

What about you, Nate?

I want to be the pope.

That’s nice. He wants to be the pope, she said to her friend.

You want to be the pope…? Her friend said back to me.

It occurred to me that I had said something strange. It also occurred to me that there was only one pope which made the odds of becoming pope low. How embarrassing. I revised and selected a more realistic and socially conforming life goal.

No…not the pope.

Yea?

More like..a bishop.

Maybe I was trying to say that I wanted to be a priest, and I lacked the vocabulary. But maybe what I wanted to be wasn’t a thing…it wasn’t a title or a carved out job. Maybe it was a state of life. I wanted to live within the in the sense of mystery that washed over me during the mass. This sense of mystery happened in other places too — when hiking in the mountain backcountry — when the humming birds landed on the red feeder that hung on the front deck — when the summer rains came and you could smell the thirsty grass and dust of the fields… But the mystery happened in mass too…especially in mass.

I thought about the priest’s question. I told him that I had thought about becoming a priest.

A seed of an idea, a calling, a something, had been planted into the soil, and the rains came, and the sun shone upon young, and seemingly ancient, sprouts.

Back in these college days I worked at a restaurant — an Outback Steakhouse. I sought a job in a restaurant after I read a book called The Practice of the Presence of God which is the transcribed wisdom of a 17th Century French monk named Brother Lawrence. As the legend goes — and this might be a legend — but the legend stuck with me — Brother Lawrence, a simple kitchen aide, discovered a harmony between prayer and work to the extent that the sight of Lawrence washing dishes attracted the gaze of his fellow monks. First the monks gathered to watch Lawence work, then the people from the town, then as word spread, people throughout the whole country of France.

To be like Brother Lawrence. I too loved washing dishes and sweeping floors. It was contemplative work. And I needed a job. I carried my completed application into an Outback steakhouse one summer afternoon. I had applied to three restaurants prior and never heard back for an interview. It was early before the crowds filled the polished wooden booths and high top bar tables. The dining room reminded me of some medieval European tavern where townspeople could gather to know the joys of communal life.

A tall attractive woman, who I soon learned was the manager, greeted me. She read my application and then asked me to take a seat across from her in an empty booth. She asked me what my hobbies were, and I said surfing, and she complained that surfboards cost so much, and I agreed, and we laughed, but mainly I laughed because she laughed and I didn’t want her to be the only one laughing. She looked surprised that I requested a dishwashing job. She said she didn’t have an opening for a dishwasher. But she could give me a job hosting, and from there she said, I could learn to wait tables.

I said okay. Hosting and waiting tables here seemed close enough to sweeping stone floors in a European monastery to the tune of a single blue bird chirping divine mysteries into the sun lit corridors.

I was wrong.

I walked through the front doors my first night, and beheld the dining room packed with people. An NSync song played loudly from the overhead speakers. I nudged my way through the bar crowd and walked into the even more noisy kitchen where flames tore upward from the hot stove burners and cooks shouted at each other in Spanish and servers shouted at cooks and and cooks were shouting back at servers, and I saw one guy, a server, bump into one of the women servers, and he slapped her butt, and she laughed and gave him a look of playful endearment. The manager who once spoke to me with such comradery shouted at the cooks, where the hell are my camerones dammit!? When she finished her demands, she looked at the plates of food in front of her. I said…hi. And I regret saying that. She shot a glance back at me, as if to say, Have you lost your mind?

I realized then that I’d not taken a job in the same sort of kitchen as Brother Lawrence.

After their shifts, servers drank. They would gather around the bar until it closed. Looking back I can see why. Great pressures accrue in the psyche after a mere five hours of remembering what customers ask you to bring them. You never feel like you’re getting things fast enough. And it returns to you in your dreams. Everyone said they had dreams. I had dreams. I would walk out to the patio and see people seated around each of my eight tables, way more tables than I would ever have to wait on. None of them have place settings or water or bread and butter. It’s my job to take care of them. I can feel their frustration with me. Everyone is mad at me. And I’m alone. Except for my boss. She’s yelling at me, Where the hell are my camerones dammit!

I would have those years after resigning.

After their shifts, servers gathered around the bar. You’d watch two servers, in that sinking submarine of a kitchen, yell and cuss at each other over a missed order, then an hour later you’d see them having a drink at the bar with each other.

When the restaurant bar closed at 10pm, all the servers closed their bar tabs and drove to the next late night dive. They invited me to come out a lot. Aside from a few hungover episodes, I usually said no, but thanks. I’d hear murmurings the next day. Complaints of hangovers peppered with words like cocaine and phrases like getting laid.

I did make a couple friends who lived more at my pace. Bethany and Regan. After our shift we might buy a few tall cans of cheap beer and sit on the Carlsbad sea wall watching the waves crash. We talked about what we hoped for in the years to come. Out of the three of us, Bethany could always say best what it was she wanted. She wanted to finish her degree in business, then earn an MBA, get married, she could name with precision what qualities she wanted and didn’t want in her future husband. She could name what she didn’t like in her last boyfriend. And she wanted to have kids, two, but maybe three, and she wanted to travel.

In contrast, I couldn’t say what I wanted with the same simplicity. I had told that priest that I had thought about being a priest. But did I want that? What I wanted didn’t seem to exist in the world in the form of an established profession.

Did I want to be married? I had dated in high school and shortly after, and I always felt a heavy weight on my shoulders that came with a relationship. It was always as if a part of who I was disappeared into the other person, and neither of us fully existed.

Also…did it matter what I wanted? How did what I wanted to do play into what I ought to do?

I poured over the spiritual writings of saints and mystics who always spoke of doing God’s will. Their own desires ranked lower than a higher value…a more mysterious value to discern…God’s will.

Maybe what I wanted didn’t matter so much. Maybe God called me to put aside what I wanted to make some great heroic sacrifice.

I contemplated the lives of Old Testament prophets. God called Ezekiel to lay on his left side for 390 days to show the people of Israel how many years they lived in a state of sin. Then Ezekiel needed to lay on his right side for 40 days. And during all these days, he had to bake bread for his food using human excrement for fuel. Back then I took the words of the Bible more seriously. In reading a story like this one, the frightening question arises, to what embarassing and awful lengths might God call someone? I don’t suspect that Ezekiel wanted to do these things.

And what happens when someone hears a calling and refuses it? God called Jonah to preach to the people of Nineveh. Jonah did not want to do this. And so he boards a ship to sail as far as possible from this voice of God, and a storm comes, and the crew recognizes Jonah is the problem, and they throw him overboard, and he gets swallowed by the whale, and I knew to take a story like this figuratively…but a frightening idea remained. When you run from the voice of God, you fall into a state of existential misery.

I couldn’t just look inside myself, detect the things I wanted and then go after them. I needed to hear the calling of God. So I listened. I sought the restaurant tasks like filling a bucket full of ice and carrying it to the bar, or I signed up every week to “run food”. This meant you didn’t interact much with customers. You just carried trays of food to tables to help the serving staff.

Then one evening I worked up the courage to ask my boss for time off to take a retreat with my university catholic group. I found her in the back office looking over an open binder and marking notes. Her assistant sat in the room turning the pages of a PEOPLE magazine on her break. After stuttering some, I completed the sentences needed to make my request clear. She looked up from her binder as if to say, Do you want me to kick your ass? Then in a sweet tone, she said, Of course. You can take some time off.

Then when I turned to leave, her assistant said, So what’s the deal with you…are you going to be a priest?

I hadn’t told anyone that I sometimes thought about becoming a priest. I don’t think I even told anyone that I was Catholic. Also, people ask all sorts of things. Why did I care so much about the assistant’s comment? When I was asked at drive throughs if I wanted fries with the thing I ordered, I didn’t always say, yea, I need fries.

Sometimes I got fries.

A priest was something in the world I could be. It was a thing. It existed. I thought about doing other things: I could be a teacher or a psychologist. We daydream about our futures. I started to daydream about becoming a priest. That daydream brought about more joy than the other things.

I drove home one evening after work. These days people will text you a link to a podcast or song they want you to listen to. But in the olden days in which I lived, people illegally pirated CD’s and labeled them with sharpies. A friend from my university Catholic group had given me a CD, a talk, to listen to. It was a talk by a nationally prominent priest who spoke with a booming voice and haunting cadence. He told the story of how he came to the priesthood. I always wanted to be a somebody, I recall him saying, so I played football, he said, and excelled into college football. Then I joined the army, and became an army ranger…

After injuring himself he left the Rangers and entered the Real Estate profession in Los Angeles. He excelled there. He said he owned several homes and a yacht and attended parties with famous people. It was at one of these parties where an actress, he didn’t say who, introduced him to cocaine.

He became an addict and he soon lost everything and slept on park benches. He moved home to live with his mom where he continued to use. But his mom encouraged him to say one Hail Mary a day. That’s all. The Hail Mary turned into three Hail Mary’s a day, then a whole rosary every day. And he got sober. And he became a priest. In football, or the Army, or in Real Estate, he said, I never felt like a somebody…when ordained a priest, I finally knew I’d become something.

Then he said, For you young men who feel a call to the priesthood…answer the call! Answer the call!

I felt like I was one of those young men. By the end of his talk I dried my eyes with my sleeve.

I remember climbing into bed that night and looking to the dark ceiling. In my prayer I said…Sure, God, I’ll go. Take me. I’ll be a priest if it’s your will. And I remember closing my eyes and seeing the stars… the cosmos, and I belonged to it all. I belonged to the truth of things. My life, after that, whether I liked it or not, would be tied up with the Roman Catholic priesthood.