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Once, a brother priest told me that shortly before he was supposed to be ordained to the priesthood, he took a tranquilizer prescribed by a doctor to relieve the tension of "ordination jitters". By a strange bio-chemical irregularity, for him the tranquilizer proved to be a stimulant. He returned to the doctor and reported the deterioration of his condition. The well-intentioned doctor consequently doubled the dosage, and soon the young man's vision became clouded and his nervousness seriously worsened. Aware of these developments, the superior of the seminary called him into his office and sympathetically but firmly informed him that he could not be ordained.
My friend told me that he went to his room, knelt down at the side of his bed, and thrashed his arms down across the bed again and again, protesting. "Oh God, you can't do this to me. You can't take thirteen of the best years of my life and then, within arm's reach of ordination, take it all away from me !" The agonised protest soon became a litany: "You can't.....you can't....!" Finally, exhausted and emotionally spent, he fell across the bed and whispered, "But, of course, you can. You can do anything you choose to do. You are my God. I am your creature. Thy will be done."
Then he added something that I did not anticipate: "It was the first time in my life that I had ever experienced complete peace. There were still many unanswered questions throbbing in my head, but my heart knew only the peace of surrender."
Later, as the pages of the calendar were turned, the painful questions were answered in time and the young man was granted his desired goal of ordination. But the lesson of peace in the open hands of surrender will be with him all the days of his life.
John Powell S.J.
The Christian Vision
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