contradictory desires

prostrate priests


I have a friend who wants to take on Rome.

In short, she wants to become a priest, a particularly Catholic priest. This came to her recently, when her life of mild but fervent conviction was spectacularly consummated by a revelation in light one Sunday, Jesus himself in the Eucharist. Catholics take these things literally; betraying that revelation in order to serve God in another church, under the banner of another faith, would be contradictory, she says, because that revelation is what sealed the deal between her and God. It’s a Catholic thing.

But there are other deals that have to be worked out first, because God made her a woman, and a wife, and a mother. She imagines a day when the popes will change, women will be ordained, her husband will die (he is significantly older than she is) or failing that, celibacy among priests will be made optional. By then, her son will be in college, and she will be free to obey God’s calling and become a priest. He wants it of her.

Meanwhile, she spends more time with her priest than her husband, a man closer to her in age and (obviously) theological disposition -- so much more time that he, her priest, her counselor, her friend (her best friend, she says), was involuntarily transferred to a distant parish, in order to dispel some of the rumors that still encircle them. There are phone calls, though, lengthy, secret ones that her husband is not aware of. There must be lies as well.

She admits that what God wants, the direction that God is urging her to go, doesn’t match her life on the whole. She lives in a contradictory world, appreciative of what she’s got, but unfulfilled.