As I age, I find the road less traveled tolls me back, mysteriously, to my sole self.

This possibility hit me this week in a way I didn’t expect. My oldest son returned from college on Sunday night. I reacted to his homecoming with a divided heart. Of course, I was happy. This child and I used to share everything in common. From the age of 2, I coached him in the sport in which he now excels in college. Along the way, I taught him about God, taught him how to pray, counseled him through the setbacks and mountaintops of sport, showed him that these are metaphors for the ups and downs of life. But he is a man now and has chosen a field – investment banking – that I know nothing about. His mind now swims in corporate finance, in terms far less familiar to me than participles in Greek. He has peers and mentors far from my natural zone of operation. In a few short years, he will make more money than I do. And here is what I fear: when that day comes, I will rapidly fall in his estimation, as a man, a thinker, a person of consequence. With his arrival home this past week, I feel like that process is already underway. I feel a kind of failure in the eyes of my oldest son. It’s what I feel anyway. Such was the first stab to my heart this week.

The second stab happened at school. This week I administered final exams for my students for the semester. I have completed my course in Old Testament for sophomores in High School. We have broadly surveyed the Hebrew Scriptures, close-read a large number of critical prophecies, and learned how to practice a version of Lectio Divina that I developed for high school students. The exam was designed to sum up and crystallize their learning. I was hoping to see, in these scribblings, evidence of living souls; souls able to enter into prayerful dialogue with the God who created them. To some degree – let’s say, in 25-40% of my students – I did see that. But no one prepared me for the sorrow of grading so many papers where there was evidence of the opposite truth; evidence that the message just isn’t getting through. This will sound strange, but the experience produced in me a state of heart not unlike that of expressing your feelings to a significant other for the first time and having her respond back: “Sorry, not interested.” To spend a semester trying to unpack the myriad of ways God has tried to express His enduring love to every human being and then to see a majority of my kids miss the marvel and the tenderness and the wonder of that message – it hurts. It feels like a participation in the pain of divine and unrequited love.

This was all backdrop. These two sorrows piled up in the first three days of this week; they left me limping home on Wednesday afternoon with a headache, a slower step, and a heavy heart. I felt like I was shouldering a heavy load.

But thank God for rhythms of prayer; for patterns of tapping into the eternal; for habits of listening to the Holy Spirit. These can save us when the grinding gears of daily life wear away our thinnish souls. So it was that I plopped into my car late on Wednesday afternoon, turned right from Hackberry Street onto Madison Road and eased my way toward the on-ramp of I-71 North. The limits of my time now require that part of my daily liturgy happens in the car. Normally, I begin my afternoon prayer just as I merge onto the highway. I first started this practice ten years ago, during my many athletic road trips with my son: prayer would start as soon as we entered the wide, clear expanse of highway. There’s something about that moment that opens the spirit, that opens horizons.

I cannot explain it, but something happened on this day, as I entered that ramp and raised a prayer to the Holy Trinity. It was as if my soul itself stepped onto an on-ramp toward the Temple of God. It was as if the blinds of an inner window were opened and light poured in. In an instant, I saw. I knew.

I am here – came the thought, like an arrow from heaven – I am where I am called to be. My pain may be what it is. My son may not find my work admirable. My students may not all get, today, what I am trying to teach them. But I am here, in the place on earth, where, forgotten by the world, I can sing a hymn of love to the Trinity; where I can live in love for those around me. I have found my Bemerton and there is nothing else of consequence.

Bemerton. This a place I have not thought of for several years. But suddenly it sprang to mind and snapped the elements of my week and my semester into a crisper focus.

Bemerton, England – 75 miles southwest of London – is the home of St. Andrew’s Church. St. Andrew’s is a stone, seven-centuries old, single-room Church that seats just 30. Even today, it still hoists a sonorous bell that a 37-year-old priest and poet George Herbert would have likely tolled twice a day, during his priestly years there. George Herbert, who died in 1633, was one of my earliest “dead friends” – as my Mom used to call the handful of saints I loved to learn about in college. He was an Oxford scholar, a poet, a Greek and Latin classicist, and an aspiring politician. At 23, he was named the Public Orator of Trinity College, in Oxford, a role typically awarded to those on the path to some high office of state.

But in 1630, Herbert surprised his peers (but not his mom) by turning from these paths to become an Anglican priest in a small rural village named Bemerton. Bemerton, and the smaller neighboring town of Fugglestone, numbered about 200 villagers. Few, if any, were literate. It was hardly the place one would expect one of England’s finest minds to serve. Nevertheless, there Herbert prayed, toiled, tilled the field of souls, and wrote – until his life was cut short at 39 years old. He fixed the abandoned parson’s home up with his own money, walked twice a day to the Church for prayer services and was ultimately buried near the altar. His was a life poured out in prayer, humility and love.

I am not an Anglican, as Herbert was; and I have never been a priest; but as a Senior, I wrote my Harvard Honors Thesis on Herbert’s poetry and have ever since, down through the years – as I slowly grew mature enough to understand them – had little snippets of his poems chirp here and there in the back of my mind. It has been a mysterious friendship. He has always felt like the friend who understood me – back when I was an undergrad reading John of the Cross, a 20-something exploring monastic life, or now a 50-year-old deciding to teach Scripture to High School sophomores. Once I even walked into a small town, roadside Church that reminded me of what I imagined St. Andrew’s in Bemerton was like. I knocked, met the Pastor, kicked the tires a bit, and whimsically wished there was a way I could make a little roadside parish like this the center of my work. At the time there was not.

“To have my aim and yet to be / further from it than when I bent my bow; / To make my hopes my torture, and the fee / of all my woes another wo, / is in the midst of delicates to need, / and even in paradise to be a weed.”

These lines, from Herbert’s “The Crosse,” fell upon my consciousness as I woke one morning, 8 months ago or so. At the time I was reaching the end of a three-year drama and this line fell like an illuminating insight from heaven. Herbert’s poetry made me think the pain of my struggle  was not without reason; was not something I alone had to bear. Those lines helped me understand the struggle in a new way. Let me explain.

That difficulty can be summed up like this. From the age I began reading Herbert (at 20), I found myself wondering, wanting, feeling summoned, it seemed, toward the life of a priest. I was never so happy in College as during those hours, in my Junior and Senior years, when I was poring through Herbert’s marvelously metered and rhythmic and rhyming lines, setting forth the inner life of a soul. His poems are the literary dramatization of a character who resonates with the pulses of the Word of God, labors to respond, suffers the crosses that come, offers himself, praises, sings. He was the first to captivate my soul with the ideal of the priesthood. Inspired by Herbert and later Thomas Merton, I explored several seminaries and a monastery, looking for a place that resolutely pursued the gospel life; that did so without compromise; a place steadfastly set upon the ultimate things and how to live them out practically.

Two years later, I found what I was looking for in a monastic community in the French ‘desert’ (the stark, lofty and cold Chartreuse mountains). I ended up living among those monks for three years: first as a student, then as a writer, then as a novice. Though my monastic formation has ever marked me and still stands, to this day, as a paradigm for my spiritual life, I did not feel called to that way of life. I returned to the States in 1998. Looked at a few more seminaries but nothing could come close to the depth of the spiritual life I encountered in that monastery. And, besides, I had a long-held and persistent sense that I was called to marriage and family life. Turns out I met my wife in 2000 and we married in 2002. We then searched, together, for how one might live out the gospel life while in the midst of secular America.

I tried a few roads. I taught, did graduate studies in Theology and Philosophy, then worked in finance, then the non-profit world and then in marketing. But always there was some nagging part of me that was not at rest. Always I tried to explore ways to pursue the gospel life and to proclaim it. Something shifted when I received a call in March 2020. It was from one of the leaders of the monastery where I had lived.

“Now is the time,” they said: the photodocumentary you compiled on the monastic life (a work they had asked me not to publish in 2002) – now is the time to publish it.

I was puzzled by the call. I thought, out of monastic reserve, they wanted me never to publish this work. I had long since resigned myself to that fact. Wasn’t even sure I wanted to go back and invest the necessary labor in preparing, publishing and marketing this work. But after a few months of consideration, I decided to do it.

Then, what I didn’t anticipate happening happened. Revising, formatting and revisiting this intensive work of writing and photography brought about a deep spiritual renewal in me. It was like fresh wood being laid upon a pile of white-hot, burning embers. Something in me caught fire again. I was brought back, in spirit, to the monastery, in a way that had not quite happened since my return in 1998. An interior monasticism was born in me that has not since left.

At that point, twenty-two years after my return, I could see that that what I learned in the monastery remained deeply relevant. In addition, the call to be a priest took flame in me again. I don’t mean the leader of liturgy for a congregation. I mean a priest in the sense that echoes everywhere in Scripture. A common priest. A lay priest. A priest in the sense to which we are all called, and which is perhaps best summed up by St. Peter when he said to his flock of lay people:

“You are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people set apart to announce the praises of him who out of darkness called you into his wondrous light.” (1 P 2:9)

It turns out, this was the priestly call that I heard in college and followed to the monastery. But it had grown somewhat dimmer since, as I failed then to understand that this call does not attach solely to the functional priesthood or to the formal life of a monk. Finishing, publishing and presenting to live audiences my book on monastic life, The Gospel Life, brought this call back to the foreground.

This aspiration to the priethood was amplified in a circuitous way when I visited my first American Orthodox Church in November of 2021. By this point, I had long been deeply familiar with Orthodox Christianity because the monastery where I lived intentionally weaves, within their walls, a synthesis between Eastern and Western Christianity. For that reason, I was already steeped in the role of icons in worship, in metanies, in the Jesus prayer, in the simple chanting of the psalms, in the Orthodox feel of the liturgy, in the otherworldly Hymn to the Cherubim sung before communion, in the luminous figures of Orthodoxy over the years (like Sts. John Chrysostom, Cyrille and Methodius), and in the architectural forms common in the East.

I had also long since read Pope John Paul II’s bold letter, Light of the East, which presents the essentials of the Orthodox Church and urges Catholics to come to know her wisdom. I knew and agreed with his admonition to all Catholics that the Church is one and that we should learn to breathe from both our Catholic and Orthodox lungs, as John Paul II said. Thus, upon returning from my monastery, I visited several Orthodox Churches. But these were either Greek or Russian or Syrian, so the language was always a barrier. Somehow, I never knew that there was such a thing as the Orthodox Church of America, where the liturgy is in English.

I made this discovery in November of 2021 – and when I did, I was thunderstruck. The liturgy and the spirituality was a close cousin to what I had known in the monastery. Indeed, spiritually, it was closer to my monastic experience than anything I had seen in the States. Discovering the Orthodox Church of America was like a spiritual homecoming. It prompted me to explore more seriously the questions as to why and how the Catholic Church had separated from the Orthodox Church in the first place. After a careful study, I came to believe that the Orthodox were right on the two points of dispute that had precipitated the Great Schism. Yet I also believe that the Catholic Church remains part of God’s family; He will never renounce her, any more than Jacob could renounce his sons, Judah or Benjamin, on account of some deep personal failing.

As I see it, God’s will lies in the reconciliation of all his children in love, not the excommunication of any given member or group of members. And so, though (even from my monastic days) half of my soul is Orthodox, the other half is and remains Catholic. You could call me a pre-1054 Catholic. As Pope John Paul II urged us to develop, I have two lungs, one Catholic, the other Eastern Orthodox; and my heart receives oxygen from both of them. After all, in Christ, Paul writes, there is neither Jew nor Greek (Gal. 3:28). If he could write today, I am sure Paul would add: there is also neither Catholic nor Orthodox (nor Protestant, for that matter). Jesus’ love reaches out to all and draws all, somehow, into a unity we fail to capture in our denominations. This unity I try to hold in my heart.

Uncovering this deep unity between Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy has been a great grace to me, one I wish every Catholic and Orthodox could receive. But this grace also brought me an unexpected cross, a “Crosse” that Herbert’s poem addressed that morning eight months ago. A cross that, in turn, led me to a deeper blessing.

I mean the cross and the blessing of the priesthood: this luminous path so long sought, so long sensed, so long struggled for; this road, seemingly closed to me when, as a Catholic, I married; this road now opened up again with my discovery of Orthodoxy in America. For Orthodox clergy can marry. Thus, if I became Orthodox, I reasoned, I could become a priest. A formal priest not just a lay priest. And so, following that logic, down a long path of discernment I went, exploring every avenue of this possibility, my heart opening wide to God, hoping, wishing, yearning as I did so.

Alas, though possible hypothetically, to become an Orthodox priest was not possible practically or logistically. My family did not feel comfortable in the Orthodox Church (they would have needed to convert) and the costs of seminary were beyond what our financial means could afford. So the formal role of the priesthood died in me a second death; and this one was far more painful than the first.

As Herbert wrote and I now felt: “To have my aim and yet to be further from it than when I bent my bow, / to make my hopes my torture and the fee of all my woes another wo. . .”

But every wound of the soul heals.

For there was this: in the Orthodox Church I found a richer sense of the lay priesthood than ever I had known. And my newly opened aspiration for the priesthood drove me toward a deeper exploration of the priesthood in general.

My favorite writer is the French Orthodox layman and theologian Paul Evdokimov. Evdokimov writes there is no ontological difference (that is: difference at the level of being) between a priest and lay person, because the layperson also participates “by his very being” in the unique priesthood of Christ in which every one of his members is a part. In the body of Christ, one plays the role of a hand, so to speak, another a mouth; another His limbs; another His heart. But there is no participation in the Body of Christ without also participating in His priesthood. Because Jesus is a priest, in the truest sense of the term.

“The idea of a profane or lay people has no place in the Bible,” Evdokimov further adds. “It would be absolutely unimaginable.” “Alongside a functional priesthood (the Levitical, priestly caste), Scripture speaks of the universal priesthood of the People of God in its totality” . . . She teaches “in a most firm and consistent manner the sacred and priestly character of each member of the people.” Thus “the layperson participates in the unique priesthood of Christ by his sanctified being, by his sacerdotal (ie priestly) nature.” As such “every lay person is the priest of his or her own existence; offering in sacrifice his entire life and existence.”

This is not to suggest “an anti-clerical egalitarianism nor a division by the clergy of the one Body into two parts” . . . No: “the “universal priesthood implies no opposition to the functional priesthood of the clergy.” Instead, it envisions “[the priestly] participation of all in the one divine Priest, Christ, by means of two priesthoods.” (cf. Evdokimov, The Ages of the Spiritual Life, pp. 228-232).

That’s Evdokimov. Then there is the equally great light of the Russian Orthodox priest, Alexander Schmemann, who became a leading figure of the Orthodox Church of America and long-standing Dean of one her leading seminaries. He writes:

“The first, the basic definition of man is that he is the priest. He stands in the center of the world and unifies it in his act of blessing God . . . both receiving the world from God and offering it to God.” (22)

“Clericalism and secularism have made us forget that to be a priest is from a profound point of view the most natural thing in the world. Man was created priest of the world, the one who offers the world to God in a sacrifice of love and praise and who, through this eternal eucharist, bestows divine love upon the world. . . Christ revealed the essence of the priesthood to be love and therefore priesthood to be the essence of life” (in For the Life of the World, p. 112).

The essence of the priesthood is love. And therefore priesthood is of the essence of life.

This vision of the lay priesthood, merely hinted at here, was like a light from heaven to me. It matched the intensity of longing and love I have always felt. I came to realize, more deeply than before, that I am already a priest. That I can daily receive my life from God in the Spirit, that I can pour it back out as an offering in love and thanksgiving, in prayer and in action; and that to do so, as a layman, is ontologically equivalent to what a priest does at the altar. It is a layman’s mode of being a priest.

We each have our places in the world where we can raise to the Trinity a song of love and praise, and that is what I was doing on that on-ramp to I-71 North. I was stepping into the vertical stream of prayer, offering my life back to the Trinity, and in the process I, unwittingly, tapped back into my sole self. Which is to say I recovered the core reason why I do what I do as a high school teacher of Scripture and one who accompanies young people in their process of becoming.

That core reason is this – and in a way I think it can be true of all of us:

The lay priest, stationed in his corner of the world where he alone lives and works, has the task of raising a hymn, a collection of notes composed of the prayers and actions of a child of God. This hymn gives witness to God’s great love, a love that fills little human hearts. And when sufferings come, he steps into them, offering them to God, as St. Paul counseled him to do, in such a way that fills up what is lacking in the sufferings of Christ (Col. 1:24).

Herbert found this path in Bemerton, England.

After six months, I have reached the point where I can say I too have found it: at a modest high school on a quiet street in Walnut Hills, in Cincinnati, OH. I have found a place where I can labor to light a flame for those who wish to draw near it. Where I can love as best as I am able. Where I can labor until my limbs and mind grow tired. A place, it must be said, that stands in the shadow of the very Church spire that first drew my young eyes toward God, fifty years ago.

Though I teach high school sophomores; though it is primarily an African and Latin American population; and though they don’t all get or care about what I teach; this is a place that nevertheless feels like home to my soul. A place where I can cast seeds and lay down roots.