A priest forever

A few months after being ordained, I was asked to write a brief article for the diocesan vocation newsletter.   I was asked to reflect on my experience as a newly ordained priest.  For the first time since ordination, this project gave me the opportunity to sit back and reflect on how quickly and radically my life had changed from being a seminarian to being a parochial vicar who was called “Father” just like every other priest.

There had been very little transition.  I had walked into the cathedral and suddenly I was “Father,” expected to know all the answers and solve all the problems.  I was terrified the first time I sat to hear confessions, but for that old man kneeling in front of me, I was “Father” and I could do for him what countless priests had done for him before, grant him absolution.  It did not matter I had been ordained the day before.  My life had changed forever, and despite seven years of seminary formation, the change arrived suddenly.

Last Saturday Father Brian O’Shaughnessy and Father John Wright were ordained to the Priesthood of Jesus Christ at the Cathedral of Saint John the Baptist in Savannah.  They entered the same cathedral I did seven years ago and left it as priests forever in the line of Melchizedek.  Their souls were sealed with a special mark which configured them to Jesus Christ.  It appeared that nothing changed, they looked the same as when they entered the cathedral, but everything had changed because God had marked the depths of their souls to be priests forever.

Saint Gregory of Nyssa drew a spectacular parallel in the fourth century between the consecration of bread and wine in the Eucharist and the ordination of a man to the priesthood.  Just as after the consecration the bread still looks like bread and the wine like wine, and we know that the Body and Blood of Christ are present on the altar, in the same manner, after a priest is ordained, he looks the same, but we know that his soul has been changed forever.  Saint Gregory wrote that “while but yesterday [the priest] was one of the mass, one of the people, he is suddenly rendered a guide… a teacher of righteousness, an instructor in hidden mysteries; and this he does without being at all changed in body or in form; but, while continuing to be in all appearance the man he was before.”  In other words, both in the Eucharist and at an ordination nothing appears to change, but everything does change, and it does so radically.

Just as the baptized remain children of God regardless of their choices, a priest remains a priest forever because he has been marked for the service of the Body of Christ.  May the ministry of the newly ordained be fruitful, and may it greatly enrich our Diocese of Savannah.