On the Third Anniversary of my Sacerdotal Ordination

Words cannot describe the supreme gratitude, thanksgiving, praise, adoration, and awe, I feel towards God as I celebrate the third anniversary of my ordination to the Sacred Priesthood.

On one hand I feel that I was ordained yesterday. It seems like I am still in the honey moon of being a priest, for every mass, every confession, every session of spiritual direction feels as if it were the first time. On the other hand, because of the sheer density and wide spectrum of emotional and psychological experience of a priest, I feel that I have been ordained for time immemorial. I do not remember what it was like to not be a priest, even though in human terms it was only 1095 days ago I was ordained.

This is who God has called me to be, for I was born to do this, to be a living offering, an oblation, a living sign that men and women may know that God is fully alive and that he loves them vigorously with great joy, and that he will continue to call men to the altar to lay down their lives in union with the Eucharistic Victim for the salvation of all mankind.

Even if I had a thousand lives to live, I would live every single one of them as a priest. How glorious is God, how vast and incomprehensible is his great love, that he would fashion on earth the sublime masterpiece of his Sacred Heart, the wonder of his presence, his Fatherhood, his love, alive in his priests!

Please pray for me, for although I am a clay vessel, a poor and humble instrument of his grace, he has entrusted me with dispensing his mysteries and graces to his people. May God pardon me for my sins and failings, excesses and defects, imperfections and faults, and may Mary, Mother of Priests, pray for us, now and at the hour of our death, Amen!