From the Altar of Incarnation to the Altar of the Chair.

      When I was in 5th grade Fr. Johnson the parochial vicar at the Church of the Incarnation, our parish in Wethersfield, CT, asked if any of the boys in 5th grade and up would like to join his training sessions to become an altar server. It was a group of 10-15 of us who committed to learning the different exotic names for things like "Chalice," "Ciborium," or the ever outlandish "Monstrance," and memorizing the confiteor, and I have to say that in those afternoons in the parish I probably learned more about the liturgy than I have in the almost 20 years that I have been studying and participating in it since.
       I remember that I wasn't supposed to serve the first time that I did serve the mass. I was supposed to have one more week of training, but Fr. Johnson saw a bunch of us there in the church that Sunday with our families and pulled us back into the sacristy to get ready. I also remember being terrified, because Fr. Johnson wasn't saying mass, it was Fr. Crawford.  I now know that Fr. Crawford was a great man and an excellent priest, but when I was 10, all that I knew was that he was the pastor... and I didn't want to screw it up. So I stood there, on the altar, biting my lower lip, trying to remember all of the prayers. I made it through well enough, and after to celebrate my family went out for brunch. I remembered that nervousness again this past November, though.

Processing in to the Mass. I am without my customary facial
hair here, because we weren't sure whether or not it was ok at
St. Peters, and we knew that JPII wasn't a fan.

    The call came on a Monday night, one of the Jesuit Cardinals in town had died. St. Peter's Basilica had called the college looking for acolytes. (altar servers) Could we do it? It really wasn't out of any sort of merit or seniority, but really just dumb luck that meant that I got to serve on that morning. The main criteria for my selection to go to St. Peter's? I was one of only a few guys who fit into one of the collection of cassocks that we have in the house for just such an occasion. So on Wednesday morning, I put that cassock on and met up with the other guys who were serving. We got on the 64 Bus, and went over to St. Peter's.
    After a VERY brief rehearsal, we went into the sacristy of St. Peter's and waited for the mass to begin. Watching the Cardinals assemble is something to behold. Despite the large "SILENCE" sign posted in the sacristy, the moments before a mass in St. Peter's is something of a social hour for many of them, and rightly so, particularly when they are mourning one of their own. There is obviously a time for the prayer and reflection that that sign is asking for, but there are also times when it is ok to abrogate that silence for the time being. In the spirit of that, I went up to greet and congratulate one of the new Cardinals who had just been made a Cardinal the weekend before. As the immediate preparations for mass began, though, I was handed the thurible, the thing in which the incense is burned. The coals were already lit, and I was told to take the incense to the Dean of the College of Cardinals for him to fill the thurible... All of the sudden the 10 year old boy was back, my heart was racing, and I was biting my lower lip.
    I will not pretend that this mass was my finest hour liturgically. I didn't screw anything up too badly, but I wasn't in the sort of sync that I would have wanted to be. If you watch the video, you can even see a place where I almost fell down while holding the chalice. One little nudge led to another, and another, and another, and I could almost hear the old tennis coach inside my head saying "don't snowball because of a dumb mistake, just focus and get back to it." Then something remarkable happened.
   At the end of communion, the Holy Father arrived to give a homily and the final benediction, and everything just became calm. There I was three feet from the Pope, holding the thurible that he was going to use to incense the casket, and everything just calmed down. In that moment I realized something, that so many moments in my life had led to this one. While this wasn't an end point, or the climax of a story, or even necessarily one of the top ten most important moments of my life, I realized something very important. God calls me as I am.

Serving Mass in St. Peters, I am third from the left, right next to
my friend Gvidas, who is holding the Pope's Mitre. 

    Maybe it is because I am approaching 30, or maybe it is because I am (God-willing) getting closer to ordination, but lately I have been thinking about how so much of our lives lead us to bigger moments. The nervousness I felt that day serving mass for the first time came back on the Altar of the Chair of St. Peter, when I was serving Cardinal Navarette's funeral, and getting ready to hand a flaming hot thurible to Pope Benedict XVI. I think it is good to remember sometimes that no matter where we go, or what we end up doing, that God calls us as we are precisely for who we are. There is no reason to doubt that from the first moment of altar server training at Incarnation that God was planting the seeds of the moment on the Altar of the Chair, and more importantly of my vocation to the priesthood. It is also important to know that I am still that same person that God began calling all those years ago. I am that same person with the same ability to be nervous, and even some of the same nervous ticks, and I think God rejoices in that.  No matter how much I learn, how I grow, or how this formation for priesthood takes hold in me I am discovering that I am still that same person He called, with all of my weakness, nervousness, all of my fears and frustrations.
      Nothing in following God's call in our lives says that we become someone different, whether it is to married life, single life, religious life, or priesthood, what God is calling us to is to become more and more who we are. (A great insight of my friend, Jim Martin, S.J.)  The psalmist reminds us that we are fearfully and wonderfully made, and Jeremiah reminds us that God knew us before He formed us in our mother's wombs. Of course we are free not to follow that call, but trying to follow it at the very least helps us to become more fully alive, because we are more fully ourselves. As I was standing there in the midst of that mass at the Altar of the Chair nervously biting my lip I couldn't help but ultimately rejoice just a little, because I realized that I was perhaps in that moment, and in others like it, more than ever myself.