Father John was your typical parish priest, trapped in the reality of operational budgets, church bureaucracy and tending to his ever withering flock. It seemed like forever since he could feel the power of God and his being calling to the priesthood. It seemed like he had been doing the priest thing forever. Doing the priest thing…seems like a bad joke or just plain bad saying it. At the time of his calling to the priesthood, he was in his twenties attending college for business. His families’ goal for his life path was to become a Wall Street big shot with a big car and summer house in the Hamptons. The idea of just taking people’s money to make more people money and feeding the big corporate machine stopped appealing to him and he started to feel a draw to the church strangely due to a girl he was seeing. Go figure, meet a nice girl then move on to become a priest, even that was cause for much grief from his few friends. Not that his family were regular attendees growing up either, just the usual holidays to make the show in the community that they were not complete heathens, he just didn’t quite get it at the time. But in his junior year he dropped out business school and entered the seminary.
Over time, feeling a sense of security in the rituals of the church, he began to feel a comfort level that many people get in any long term relationship. There is a kind of cruise control. You go through the motions of daily life and occasionally have to go out of your way to perform something out of the daily grind. The strange feeling is that there is an annoyance occasionally for having to do the out of the normal things and that was beginning to make him feel weird.
As he sat in the Denny’s restaurant a block down from the rectory as was his custom on Saturday mornings taking his time with the morning paper, he looked out the window and around the restaurant and just watched the people in their mechanisms of life. He wondered if any of them thought the way was thinking about; the bigger picture of life and your purpose in it, yeah sounds cheesy but really, when you sit around a watch people and listen to their confessions every week you begin to wonder... He still had his faith, but it felt more like a security blanket. He believed in God but more because he saw the evils that were going on around in the world. And if there was evil then there had to be a God and there had to be a reason why he let these bad things happen on more frequent and larger scale. Almost a knowing there is a higher power, more than faith, if that makes any sense.
Anyway, as Julie his waitress brought him more coffee, she seemed to have a sixth sense about when his cup was about a quarter full she would materialize and refill it. He was thinking this stuff is going to kill him some day. He smiled, thanked her, and thought about her seemingly empty eyes. It was almost like she was hoping that by doing me this service would guarantee a good position with the lord at the end. Just another example of what the overall purpose of life was and what in the heck was he going to drone on about for is sermon tomorrow. The church is helpful enough to provide examples of what should be discussed depending the time of year in the liturgical calendar. But to make it interesting and energizing enough to fill the pews was always the challenge. Scandals, the need to sleep in, and the hundred other things that are more interesting to do than sit in church for an hour and feel bad about the things you do during the week always feels like the challenge for any priest. When you are young and freshly minted you feel like you can change the world. The power can be intoxicating. Power…maybe not the right word or feeling but there it is, just ask a rookie cop. You feel invincible, everyone will do what you tell them and you’re there to help everyone. Then reality sets in. You can never be there fast enough, do enough, and when you show up you didn’t do enough nor do it right. Life sucks even for a priest sometimes. Well, with the coffee pot drained it was time to go and get on with the business of the church. Father John collected his coat and hat, smiled and nodded at the other patrons and wondered if any felt uncomfortable with his presence and was glad he was leaving?
Little did he know that there was something very unhappy with him and was planning to meet him face to face soon….
