Vocations

	My journey to where I am today has come in small steps with a few detours along the way. The idea of the priesthood started coming into my head off and on in my teens. I can still remember telling a few of my friends in high school that I wanted to become a priest. But after high school, while I still attended Sunday mass, it gradually became something I did more because of a feeling of obligation than anything. Money and things began to seem more important. I wanted to go my own way, do my own thing. Having grown up on a dairy farm, I had always liked working with my hands fixing things. So I became an Industrial Electrician. It was nice work, a stable job with good pay. Life was going well. My focus became being the smartest and best electrician around. This is how things went for me on into my early 20’s. But as time went by, all these things started becoming less and less meaningful for me. I began feeling a void in my life. Deep in my heart was a feeling that there must be something more. Then one day while I was sitting alone in my apartment, I opened up the bible. This was the one religious thing I had taken with me when I had moved from home. It had been sitting on a table for a few years begging me to open it, yet mostly out of laziness I hadn’t. As I sat there reading the Words, I felt the Holy Spirit moving in my heart in a powerful way. While I had felt Gods presence before, it had never been so strong. It instilled in me a deep inner peace and joy like I had never known. A few months later, when I was home visiting my parents, A Jehovah Witness happened to come to our door. Feeling my new zeal, I said to myself “what a great opportunity to set this guy strait.” Little did I know that he was an ex-Catholic who knew more about the Church than I did. He challenged me on some of the main beliefs the Church teaches and I had no response because I didn’t even know the basics about my faith. Once again, God used this simple experience to move me along my path. I started buying books to learn everything I could about the Church. As time went on, I was gaining knowledge and praying and becoming more involved with the Church in various ways, but I still felt something missing in my life. Occasionally someone would come up to me and say they thought I had a vocation to the priesthood, something I really didn’t want to hear because I thought it would mean I would have to give up a lot, like my job and my freedom. Yet deep in my heart I did feel this stirring; that God was asking something more of me and secretly I knew that I wanted to be a priest but didn’t want the cross that might come with it. God was going to have to do more if he wanted me to answer the call. It’s funny though how God puts the right people in your path when he wants you to change directions, for one day while I was volunteering my time to help build a new rectory, a seminarian showed up to help for a week. While I had seen other seminarians before, I had always tried to stay away from them because I was afraid of what might happen if I got to know one. Curiosity about the seminary got the best of me. He seemed so happy. I remember asking him a lot of questions that week and from his answers I got a good picture of what the seminary was like. I must have aroused his suspicion because after the week was up I remember him telling me he thought that I should go to the seminary, but I didn’t feel ready to answer the call yet. As providence would have it, a year or so later that same seminarian came back to my parish as a priest. We began spending time together and seeing what he was doing as a new priest seemed attractive to me. About this time, I also decided to take a trip to the holy lands, thinking that it would just be “a nice vacation”. Instead it became a transforming experience for me. I was walking in the actual places Christ had. It did something to for me inside that I can’t explain. I knew in my heart that God had brought me there for a reason and if it was to be a priest, he would work it out that way. The next year, I made a pilgrimage to Medjugorje in Croatia. It was here I experienced a deeper conversion. After this, I started going to mass every day, something I feared before because I didn’t want people to notice I was becoming more religious. I was now finding it hard to hold back the stirrings in my heart. I knew I needed to go to the seminary because if God had made me to become a priest, it would be the only path that would make me happy. So Father Keith and I made the trip to Yarmouth to see the bishop. To my surprise, the bishop accepted me right away and a month later I was off to the seminary. Time passed quickly. The first four years of seminary were intense because of the busyness, but they were good years. They were a time of growth for me. But after four years of study, I felt I needed some time off to sort out feeling that maybe I hadn’t given the possibility of marriage a good enough chance. I had met girl whom I had grown close to, and thought maybe I could be happy married instead. So I told the bishop, and I left formation. But it wasn’t long before I felt restless again. The “hounds of heaven” as some call them, would not stop chasing me. After my first year away from the seminary, I wanted to go back. There was a sense in me that I was wasting precious time. But in prayer, I felt God speak to my heart, that I shouldn’t be concerned about time and that I was right where He wanted me for now. The two years I took off became a spiritual time and allowed me to see my path more clearly. It let me see that while marriage might be good, it wasn’t my vocation. As a seminarian again, while I still find that I am challenged in many ways, my sense of peace has come back. And as one priest once told me, any vocation is going to have its problems, but to discover your true vocation; you need to find what it takes to make you happy. For me, being back in formation is where I feel most happy.
	Thy Kingdom Come! Leaving the World with a BOOM! I am the fifth in a family of ten: nine boys and one girl. I went to Mass every Sunday at St. Ambrose Cathedral, to the dismay of most of the parishioners, since I had a talent of being very noisy and distracting, a trait I shared with the rest of my brothers. My life was pretty much the normal life of a boy growing up in Yarmouth until, of course, the day God came into my life with a bang or, better said, a boom. I was 16 years old. I was in the 11th grade. It was history class. A friend of mine tapped me on the shoulder and asked me what I was doing for Halloween. Since I didn’t have any plans, he asked me what I thought about putting a bomb on our teacher’s doorstep. I thought it was a great idea and would be fun, so I agreed to be his accomplice. It would be a service to our fellow students. After all, the teacher was a little on the serious side. After school, Halloween day, we went and bought the necessary material to construct our bomb, i.e. a brick, white modeling clay, and some wires. Without entering into the details of police officers, bomb squads from Halifax and street evacuations, we fulfilled this particular service to our fellow students, but there was a small price to be paid. I had to go to court and I ended up with 150 hours of community service and a year of probation! I began working my hours off very slowly with different volunteer projects throughout the year, like cleaning up storage rooms at the hospital, supervising at the YMCA, etc., until one day my mother mentioned to me the possibility of finishing all my hours in one week by going as a counselor to a summer camp that was being run by the Legionaries of Christ. This was a great idea. One week and freedom. I went to this camp with one goal: getting my hours done. God wanted this too, but he also had something else in mind. At the end of the camp I was invited to go down to visit the seminary the Legionaries have in Cheshire, Connecticut. I decided to go. It was partly because some of the other counselors who I had met and made friends with during the camp were going, and partly because I was curious. Some of the counselors had been talking about priesthood during the camp in ways I had never thought about before: the priesthood is a tremendous gift from God, a call to heroism, to give your life for your brothers and sisters, to bring as many people as possible to come to know and love Jesus Christ, etc. I think another thing that attracted me to go visit was the authenticity of the Legionaries I had met. On the one hand, I always had the impression at school that people weren’t being coherent, that they weren’t really being themselves, that almost everything anyone did was done in order to impress others and to make others like them, even though it meant going against their own principles. Maybe these feelings I had weren’t totally fair, but that’s how I felt about it. On the other hand, I saw authenticity in the Legionaries I knew. They were simple, honest, joyful, convinced of what they were doing and not worried about what others thought of them. Anyway, I decided to go and visit. It was during a rosary on the evening we arrived in Cheshire that I made the decision that would officially put me onto a new road in life, though I wasn’t aware of this at the time. The Legionaries have a month-long program in the summer every year for junior high and high school students who are open to or interested in the priestly vocation. If a visitor finishes the program and wants to continue discerning his vocation, he has the possibility of entering the Legion’s minor seminary, which is basically a private school that allows one to finish his high school studies and at the same time live in an atmosphere that helps him grow more in his relationship with Christ: Mass every day, the company of others who are also thinking about the vocation, confession, the possibility of speaking to a priest when you have questions, etc. It was during this rosary on the night our group arrived in Cheshire that I decided I would go to the program. There was no thundering voice from the clouds or lightning bolts or anything like that. It was a very simple thought: “If God might be calling me, I should give it a try.” And that was it. I told the Legionary who was with our group that I wanted to try the program. I had to go back home because the program didn’t begin right away, but a few weeks later I was back in Cheshire. The summer program was a very beautiful experience; at the end of, I was asked if I was going to stay. I said yes. It was a hard yes to give. It was hard because I loved my family and knew that a yes meant leaving home. It was a hard yes because I knew not everyone back home would agree. It was a hard yes because it’s always hard to leave the things you know and are familiar with behind and head into something you don’t know. It was a hard yes, but it was also the greatest yes I ever gave. It was the greatest yes because I knew deep down that it was what God wanted for me. It was the greatest yes because I knew that God can never be outdone in generosity and that if I was giving up a lot, it was because God wanted to give me so much more. It is a yes that I have renewed every day. It is a yes I have never regretted. After my year at the minor seminary, during which I finished my last year of high school, I entered the Legion’s French-speaking novitiate in Cornwall, Ontario. In this two-year period, the focus was a lot more centered around the priestly vocation and on preparing to profess the vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience as a Legionary. The preparation consisted in learning more in depth the spirituality of the Legion, what religious life is, and growing in my prayer life. At the end of these two years I made my religious profession. I then returned to Cheshire for a year of classical humanities studies (Latin, Greek, history, art, literature, etc.). After this, I was sent to Thornwood, New York, where I studied for and received a bachelor’s degree in philosophy. I was then sent back to Cornwall to do some apostolic work. I was sent as dean for the French-speaking minor seminary we have in Cornwall. This lasted four years. When I finished there, I was sent to Rome to begin my theology studies. Currently, I am in my second year of theology and, God willing, I will be ordained to the priesthood on Christmas in 2009. “And so, today, with great strength and great conviction, on the basis of long personal experience of life, I say to you, dear young people: Do not be afraid of Christ! He takes nothing away, and he gives you everything. When we give ourselves to him, we receive a hundredfold in return. Yes, open, open wide the doors to Christ – and you will find true life. Amen.” – Excerpt from Pope Benedict XVI’s first homily as pope, Sunday, April 24, 2005 –