One week from tomorrow, on May 25th, my classmates and I will be ordained priests of Jesus Christ. It is the culmination of a formation journey that began six years and ten months earlier when we arrived in Cincinnati, Ohio, to begin our Dominican formation as novices. As now, we set out to answer the Lord’s call, not knowing fully what God is calling us to, what it would include, but knowing wherever God was calling us that he would be there with us.
But of course the call began long before then. The journey that brought us to the novitiate began with the first time that we thought, “Yes, strange and wonderful as it may seem, I do think that God may be calling me to this life.”
The Lord had been preparing each of us long before we even became aware of our calling to be Dominican priests. When that moment of realization finally came, and later when we made vows, we realized that this was the answer to longings we’d had our whole lives—the completion of a good work that Jesus had begun in us years earlier.
A week from tomorrow we will become priests forever, yet Jesus knew from all eternity that we five would be conformed to him in this way. It is the shape of the love which he has had for us from before the foundation of the world. It is a fulfillment of God’s eternal plan for us.
And still, this is only the beginning.
Our priestly ordination is not graduation from seminary. It is the beginning of a life lived in unique conformity with Jesus for the praise of God and the salvation of souls. And what does it mean for us to live in the shape of Jesus’ own life? It is a new and deeper friendship with him.
Jesus says to all the baptized “I call you friends.” Friends for whom Jesus exercised the greatest love by laying down his life. And we are all called to live precisely from the knowledge of that love and gratitude for it. But even more so the priest. The love of Jesus for the priest is unique. It is intimate. Jesus speaks through the lips of his priest. Christ works through his hands to bring grace and healing and life to the souls of his people. Through the words of Jesus on the lips of his priest, he becomes present in the priest’s own hands and rests between his fingers.
Yet all this, as great as it is, is not given to the priest for himself. Jesus loves his priests with a special love so that his priest can love his people as Christ has loved him. The priest celebrates the sacraments and brings Jesus in the Eucharist not for himself, but for Jesus and for his people. St. John Vianney, patron saint of priests, said that “the priesthood is the love of the heart of Jesus.” A week from tomorrow we will receive a new outpouring of Jesus’ love, not so that we might keep it for ourselves, but so that love can flow through us to God’s people.
As God has called us in love to be conformed to his Son and planned the moment of our ordination from before the foundation of the world, so too has he willed each absolution we will give, each anointing we will administer, each Mass we will offer, each priestly act that he will work through us for the life of his people. It is for the sake of these moments of outpouring love that he has called us. It is truly a great and humbling mystery to be incorporated in such a unique way into God’s love for his people. May we accept it in humility and in confidence in the Lord who has loved and called us in love from all eternity.
Please pray for us, especially in this coming week:
Luke Mary Neitzke, O.P.
Christopher Maria Daniel, O.P.
Cornelius Marie Avaritt, O.P.
Charles Marie Rooney, O.P.
Cyril Stola, O.P.
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Image: Fr. Barry Braum, Sacred Heart Chapel, (on Unsplash)
