In the rite of priestly ordination, the candidate hears himself addressed with this invitation: Accept from the holy people of God the gifts to be offered to Him. Know what you are doing, and imitate the mystery you celebrate: model your life on the mystery of the Lord’s cross.
These are words that sum up the life of the priest, words whose depth can never be plumbed. They indicate an extremely high ideal, a vertiginous ideal; at the same time, they describe a life that continues to attract many young men who decide to pursue the priesthood.
Every vocation is born from the fascination that we feel for someone: for a woman, for a man, for a companionship, for a form of life that we see incarnate in a given person. In each of these vocations there is hidden, in reality, an attraction, often unaware, for Christ. In the stories of the ordinandi that have been published recently, this attraction is evidently present.
At the same time, a certain resistance emerges that often we must pass through before abandoning ourselves to the will of He who will lead us on an unknown path, to the point of bringing us where we would not want to go (Jn 21:18). Every vocation, in fact, implies a sacrifice, that which in time conforms us to the cross of the Lord Jesus.
All the time of our lives is given to us to travel the journey of letting this mysterious attraction dominate ever more in our days, embracing that which instinctively scares us or even repulses us. This is not a voluntaristic effort, gritting one’s teeth merely tolerating what we do not like in order to obtain what we desire. Instead, it is about recognizing, in time, that what we desire truly is not what we have in mind, often suggested by what the world proposes. It is rather the opposite. If the world points to having everything as the fulfillment of life, in the encounter with Christ we discover how what really attracts us is being able to give everything. Jesus said it in the gospel in these words: Whoever wishes to save his life will lose it; but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it (Mt 16:25).
The cross of Christ carries with it this truth: life is fulfilled only in the total offering of self. Every vocational form holds this great possibility, and the priestly form is its paradigm.
What fascinates us so much in the lives of the saints if not this radical self-giving?
What fascinates us so much in the lives of the saints if not this radical self-giving? Every person who lives his or her vocation, whether to marriage or virginity, experiences it. Such self-giving fulfills us because it enables us to participate in Christ’s self-giving on the cross.
It is the same event that happens again every day in the celebration of the Mass and that has changed the history of the world and the lives of millions of people. Cardinal Van Thuan said, in fact, that “the saints are those who continue to live the Mass during their day.” All of life is not sufficient to become fully aware of what happens in the Eucharistic sacrifice. And yet, slowly, one discovers that it is the heart of all of our action. Those who are called to approach the altar and celebrate this mystery are surely privileged. Such privilege is at once an undeserved gift and a highly demanding task. For no one can claim to be a priest: it is the Church who ultimately chooses those whom she deems suitable and needed. By choosing them, she entrusts them with a task that would be impossible to perform except through surrender into the hands of the One who calls. You have not chosen me, but I have chosen you and constituted you that you may go and bear fruit and that your fruit may abide (Jn 15:16) Jesus said in his last discourse before his Passion. This is the source of the peace and initiative that the priest is called to live. And what remains, in the end, is only the offering of self.
