“I did; we did; we were truly blessed. But getting back to your question on whether I felt called to become a deacon, yes, I did feel called on those occasions but I also felt called to be the best husband I could be, the best father I could be, and the best engineer I could be. And I thank God I had the hunger to pursue all three and this is really the nature of calls isn’t it? We often hear the expressions, ‘She was called to be a teacher’ or ‘He missed his calling’—The crucial point is not so much whether we feel we were called to pursue a particular career or activity, but rather to acknowledge that God speaks to us. We are all called! The real questions concerning God’s calls are first, how do we hear God, and second, how do we heed his calls?”
“You asked me if I was called to be a deacon. Yes! I was, but actually, my calling was more general—it was to follow Christ—to serve him. Of that, I have no doubt, but let’s be clear about what I mean by my calling. I emphasize my calling because God calls us all and he calls us in unique ways—in ways only we can understand. For some, such as St. Paul, God’s voice was rather loud and bold, knocking him off his horse and temporarily blinding him. But, for most of us, God’s voice is like the whisper of a friend. The Old Testament story of Elijah comes to my mind. The Lord told Elijah to go out and stand on the mountain and wait for him to pass by. As he waited, a strong and violent wind came, but the Lord was not in the wind; after the wind, an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake; after the earthquake, fire, but the Lord was not in the fire; after the fire, a light silent sound. That is the whisper that I am referring to. Sometimes, we set the stage for some grandiose call, but all we really have to do is still our mind and soul and to listen.
“If you search the Bible for examples of being called, you will find at least fifteen instances. I did this because I wanted to understand what is meant by a calling. One of my favorites is from the Gospel of John, ‘It was not you who chose me, but I who chose you and appointed you to go and bear fruit that will remain, so that whatever you ask the Father in my name he may give you.’ The essence of a call is essentially to be able to hear his voice—to be in a relationship with him and to be in a state in which we are receptive to his words.
“In order to have a relationship with God, he has to be real to us—not some far-away entity. In this respect, we have to know him. He certainly knows us, right down to the number of hairs on our head—some of us less hair than others.”
“I like the way you use scripture in an informal way,” Rick said. “I could see how patients would like that when you relate scripture to their experiences in a way they would understand. So many times, people throw scripture out there without any real context. I also noticed that you do the same thing with prayer, making up or building your own prayers.”
“Well, I truly believe that we get to know God through prayer, as well as through scripture, through books, through meditation, by going to church, receiving the Sacraments, and many other ways—some ways are good for some but not good for others. There are many paths to the truth, but the driver behind any of these activities is to understand that God truly wants us to get to know him. Pope Francis put it nicely in one of his homilies. He said, ‘When the disciples were afraid, faced with difficulties and behind closed doors, not knowing how to go forward, they go to the Lord, they open their heart and the Spirit comes and gives them what they need to go forward. Prayer is what opens the door to the Spirit and gives one this freedom, this boldness, this courage of the Holy Spirit.’
“Regardless of which path we choose, it will have its fair share of ups and downs. Our prayer life will go through phases, at times filled with many words and at other moments in complete silence. God knows this—he wants us to learn to trust that he is always near even when it may not seem so. By loving him, even in obscurity and darkness, our faith springs to life and our relationship with him becomes real. We will never know God up here (pointing to my head), we get to know him here, where he lives (pointing to my heart). Blaise Pascal, one of my favorite authors, argues that reason is fine, but the heart has its own reason—reason that the mind does not understand. I love that!”
“How did you come across Blaise Pascal?”
“When I was in high school or early in college, still living at home, my parents, for whatever reason, had a set of four Random House books called The World’s Great Thinkers. The crazy thing about that was that neither of my parents really read books. I mean, they read the newspaper and magazines but were not big on books. So, it’s really strange that these four books would even be in my house. It was in one of these books where I found and read Pensées, by Blaise Pascal. Pensées is French for ‘thoughts.’ That essay was basically Blaise Pascal’s thoughts that he would write down. Pascal was a mathematician and had some amazing things to say about God and faith and the heart. I still have those books. Through them, I was also exposed to Plato, Aristotle, St. Augustine, the Bhagavad-Gita, the Dhammapada, the Upanishads, Friedrich Nietzsche, Confucius, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thoreau, and even Sigmund Freud. They all made an impression on me, but especially Blaise Pascal. So here is the pivotal question. I attribute my hunger—my hunger to learn more about God—to those books. That hunger eventually led me to God and to a deeper meaning of the Catholic Church. Did my hunger start with those books or did it lead me to them? This question is important to me because it’s the hunger that led me to a relationship with God and the ongoing hunger that keeps my relationship alive. Many people, especially those I met in the hospital, told me that God wasn’t real to them. I know it’s because they don’t have this hunger. I wish I could instill this hunger in them but I can’t.”
“Well, Tom, as far as when the hunger started for you, it probably started before you reached for that book. Did you ever hear the expression, ‘When the student is ready, the teacher will appear’?”
“So, you are saying it was the hunger that led me to those books?”
“That’s what I think, yes, but I am just a reporter. That’s just my opinion, but wasn’t it this hunger that you speak of that led you to God?”
“Well, the books certainly did their part—eventually I began to see God’s wonders present all around me. In a baby’s laugh, in a sunrise or sunset, in the taste of my favorite fruit, and definitely in my favorite candy, milk chocolate. God seemed to be all around me and he became real for me. Jesus said he wants us to be his friend. He wants to have a relationship with us. If he didn’t want a relationship with us, he would have never sent his Son to be one of us. In every way, except sin, Jesus became one of us. God became one of us! When the priest or deacon mixes the water with the wine at Mass, he says a small prayer, ‘By the mystery of this water and wine may we come to share in the divinity of Christ who humbled himself to share in our humanity.’ This is the essence of building a relationship with God—realizing that he is one of us and realizing that he wants this relationship. This is the first step toward establishing a channel of communication with him—a channel to receive his calls.”
“And through this channel, we can hear him and receive his calls?”
“Yes! He is always calling us! And his call doesn’t have to be a call to be a deacon or a priest or a religious sister—it can simply be a call to action, a call to help someone, a call to contact a friend, a call to read, a call to rest or it can be an answer to a prayer.”
Rick looked up from jotting down notes. “Or a call to do an interview?”
“Yeah, in fact, when your call came in as ‘unknown’ I wasn’t going to answer it, yet I did and here we are.”
“You mentioned the second thing necessary to hear God’s voice was to be in a fertile state. What do you mean by a state?”
I took my normal pause, then explained, “Well, consider your cell phone. If it’s off, you cannot receive or make calls, correct? It’s in the ‘Off’ state, but when you turn the power on, it goes into a ‘Listening’ state. It is listening for a signal being transmitted from the closest transceiver station (a cell) to establish a channel for you when you wish to make or receive calls. When you make a call, your cell phone sends a signal to that transceiver station through the channel established