September 2022

     The day before I was ordained a deacon, I was pretty nervous. During the ordination, a deacon makes four promises: celibacy (if he is not already married), to proclaim and preach the gospel, to live a life of prayer, and to be obedient to the local bishop. As some of you may know from experience, making public promises that you can only live up to by the grace of God can be a bit daunting. It was definitely an exciting time. After years of preparation, I was finally heading out for some real ministry. Still, thinking about how I would begin preaching homilies the day after ordination and how I would begin full-time diaconate ministry in less than two weeks created some nerves. I was confident that God was calling me and would provide the grace I needed, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t pray with some added intensity in the days leading up to ordination.

            The day before my ordination, God showed me yet again that he was with me and cared about this important time of my life. A lot happened that day before ordination, but a couple things stood out. I got some extra rest that day and went to the 9am daily Mass at St. Catherine. The gospel briefly mentioned how Jesus calls us to him and not the other way around, but it was not a central part of the readings. My mind gravitated towards another part of the Gospel, until the homily. Fr. Tim’s homily was about vocations. He preached things including how “God doesn’t call the qualified. He qualifies the called.” Fr. Tim didn’t know I would be at Mass that morning, and he didn’t see me in the pews until Communion, but I took the homily as a direct message to me. The homily itself was a blessing, but even more so was the awareness that God was speaking to me through Fr. Tim, who would soon be my supervisor and pastor. It became easy to see that God would speak to me through the people of St. Catherine. I did not need to worry about losing contact with him in the midst of days full of activity.


            On the drive home from Mass, I saw a woman who seemed to be homeless standing at a red light. She was holding a sign with something written on it that I didn’t expect to see: “I need a blessing.” Blessing religious items, houses, and people is something deacons do a lot of. I couldn’t bless the woman that day, but her sign reminded me why I wanted to be ordained in the first place: to serve other people and help them make Christ a bigger part of their life. That thought led me to think less about myself and my nerves and more about the people I hope to serve. That calmed me a great deal and gave me a better way of approaching my ordination.