Doing The Devil's Work

 Sometimes the little moments remind me what's missing in my life.  While spending time entertaining my nieces at a family gathering, one relative said it was too bad I wasn't married because she thought I would make a good dad.  A few years ago, I was having dinner over a friend's house and his wife started looking at me with adoring eyes.  I asked what the matter was and she replied, “You’re so charming.  I can't believe you don't have a girlfriend.”  During a trip to the grocery store, I spotted the image of a cute baby eating spaghetti on the packaging of paper towels and lamented the family I didn't have yet.  While dropping my uncle off at the airport recently, a young couple standing nearby shared a passionate embrace.  I said to myself, “I want THAT!”  Unfortunately, the Church is too busy promoting priestly vocations to help singles like me find what we're desperately looking for.

You know life is pathetic when paper towel packaging makes you sad.

The pastor at my former parish made encouraging vocations a top priority and during one sermon he said, “There is no greater feeling in world than being a priest.”  The statement bothered me because his very subjective experience was being applied to everyone.  Frankly, I can think of several things that probably feel greater than being a priest and most of them stem from the sacrament of holy matrimony.  Big moments like falling in love, making love, and bringing new life into the world come to mind but also smaller moments like when a spouse lovingly looks at you or when your child says how glad they are to have you as a parent.  (The married friend I had dinner with confirms this.)  Humans are social animals and physical contact has been shown to lower blood pressure, increase trust and optimism, boost the immune system, and reduce pain and anxiety.  A life spent in isolation usually brings the opposite.

Psychologist Harry Harlow showed how great the need for physical contact was by giving baby monkeys a choice of two surrogate mothers: one was made of wire mesh and provided food while the other offered no nourishment but was made out of soft cloth.  The monkeys spent most of their time attached to the cloth surrogate and only approached the wire one when they needed to eat.  Sometimes I think about this infamous experiment when my longing for physical contact becomes unbearable.

As our best years pass us by, anger and doubt can set in and soon we start to wonder how a merciful God can be so indifferent to our suffering.  When men of the cloth promote priestly vocations at the expense of singles seeking marriage, they are doing the devil's work.  For churches to thrive, they need devout families who will raise future generations of faithful Catholics.  The Evil One must be delighted every time singles who would make great parents never get married.

Do priests think romance or sex is gross?  Maybe on some subconscious level they want Catholic singles like me to fail so they can push vocations on us.  They might say our inability to find a spouse is a sign from God that we weren't meant to be married but this line of thinking is like handing someone a scorpion when they ask for bread.  We often hear a vocation comes from God and you can't give yourself one.  If that's the case, then selling a priestly vocation to someone who was meant to be married is wrong. 

A young gentleman at my former parish was in training to be a priest so he dressed in robes and became our pastor's right hand man.  To the surprise of many, he decided to not pursue this vocation and got married instead.  Our pastor expressed a sense of loss but he should have been happy because this young man found the path he was meant to take in life.  Vocations should not be seen as a numbers game where loses and gains are tallied.  Before our pastor moved on to another assignment he had hoped to get one more vocation from his congregation.  No help was ever given to struggling singles, however.

Some of the most devoted priests have said they felt the call at an early age.  If that's the case then no one should be cajoled into a vocation.  I've known for a very long time that God created me to fall in love with a woman but my spiritual shepherds continue to ignore the more inconvenient members of their flock.