Eleven & Counting...

Memories from way back on August 12, 2000...when, as you can see, I was still just a kid...

In April of 1945, French poet and diplomat Paul Claudel wrote the following in a letter to a young "country priest":

The Mass which you say each morning pours out a torrent of inestimable, incommensurable blessings not only on your village but on all humanity. It empties purgatory. And then each morning, as you awake, you can tell yourself that these men, women, children, have been specially entrusted to you by God himself. To others he gave cows or horses; to you these immortal souls. You are their Christ, able to give them life, fully invested with a power of vivification, illumination, resurrection. You immolate yourself for them each day on the altar. You have an inside knowledge of them--and of what is unknown to them--but what makes them who they are. You are the agent of their guardian angels. You stand in for them. In this sublime role, what do human contretemps and contradictions count? Were you promised a paper cross? Or a good honest heavy cross, which is just your size, precisely because it appears overwhelming? Besides the immense divine joy reserved for you, and whose dispenser you are, how simply ridiculous these little pebbles in your shoes appear. 

Believe me, the vocation of a priest, and I would add of a country priest (our Lord was a country priest) is the sublimest of all.

I thank you, Lord God, for the call of which I remain so unworthy.  

I ask you, Lord God, for the grace to answer it each day.