My Life.  My Journey.

            “Água mole em pedra dura, tanto bate até que fura.”  “Water dripping day by day, makes hardest rock into softest clay.”  This ancient Portuguese proverb effectively describes how I came to be who I am today:  a seminarian.  It took me 17 years to accept God’s invitation for me to discern the Priesthood as a real possibility in my life.  I’m 27 now and I entered seminary one year ago for the Diocese of Lafayette, however, the call first came to me long ago.  I’m going to tell you about my path to active discernment in the seminary and a few instances of God’s grace profoundly moving in my life.

            The call first came to me when I was nine years old.  Despite the years that have passed, I can still remember the moment with perfect clarity.  I was at Sunday Mass with my parents, Jean and Margie, and during the consecration at the Elevation of the Host a deep sense of God’s peace and joy entered my heart.  I knew at that moment that someday I would do the same thing as I had just witnessed. I continued for some years in this knowledge, however, with puberty, girls became very attractive and little by little I abandoned the idea of a calling by God.

Some years passed by, but God was not ready to give up on me — though I was sure ready to give up on Him.  Towards the end of my senior year of high school, I was planning to go to UCLA-Berkley to study Meta-Linguistic Semantics — a high level Language based philosophy on the nature and origin of meaning in natural languages.  A week before graduation my cousin Bridget, an atheist at the time, asked me if I had ever considered the priesthood.  I had to answer yes, but that I no longer wanted to do that with my life.  However, she had planted the seed.  I tried desperately to get all thoughts of priesthood from my mind.  One day, I was in Barnes & Nobles with James, while not an atheist, he was a the time an proclaimed agnostic, when we left the store he pulled an NAB bible out of his bag and handed it to me saying, “This is yours.”  Perhaps I should give this Priesthood thing a chance I thought to myself in that very moment.

I wasn’t living a Christian life, sure I went to church, but I didn’t want to — it was mainly social.  However the Lord used the circumstances of my life to guide me.  After many hours of prayer and tears before Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament, and reading the bible daily, I grew in my faith and the Priesthood again became the desire of my heart.

Drop by drop, God’s grace has softened my heart, which had grown hard in the wilds of a profane world.  But as the proverb says, “Water dripping day by day, makes hardest rock into softest clay.”  “Água mole em pedra dura, tanto bate até que fura.”

Mom, Dad, my sister and her husband, and myself, out to eat at Logan's Road House.  December 2001.


Me at work in Crowley January 2002 as a photolab technician.


Me, His Excellency Bishop Jarrell, and my Confirmation sponsor Linda Gary on the night of my confirmation.


Posing for a photo with Alyson, at Dulles, on my last day of work, March 31, 2004.


Kelly, Tom, Beth, Krystal, and David; members of Quest Team 2004 at St. Michael's.


Me and Mathew after a weekday Mass during the 2005-2006 Christmas break at St. Michael's.