Priests//ft. a blog party entry, wherein much hilarity ensues, I promise

I'm so excited that Miss Megan and the lovely ladies at Horseback to Byzantium are hosting this blogathon on Good Men! I could talk for a long time about how the dearth of good men in our times is a huge problem...but I shan't, because that would probably be boring, and instead, I shall go on to the good men I'm going to talk about today!

I'm going to be honest, the first thing that comes to mind when I think about good men is not my dad (although he's an extremely close second)--it's our priests. 

So, I know that people have written great posts about priesthood, how awesome priests are, and so on (like THIS one by Miss Megan, which you should DEFINITELY read), but most of them are focused on abstractions. Now, this isn't a bad thing! It's great to read about how awesome the Catholic priesthood is! But just to change things up...today I'm going to talk about how awesome our priests are. And thus, how awesome the priesthood is, I suppose. In other words, I'm going to be sharing a small handful stories, from the funny to the very beautiful, of our priests from over the years! Some of them will just be bits of dialogue, some longer stories with mini reflections...but I hope you enjoy all of them! I think priests often get idealized, and my hope is to show that priests are people, too. Special people. But people. :)

I know that not everyone is as close to their priests as we our, and not all priests are as awesome as ours, but I want to share these stories in the hopes that they'll show off some of the unique beauty and awesomeness of the priesthood, through our individual priests! 

For those of you who don't know, I live in a Dominican parish, meaning it's run by the Dominican order. The Dominicans move around a lot, so we've had four different pastors in my growing-up years, as well as a huge number of other priests (parochial vicars, those assigned to the Newman Center, and so on.)
So, I'm going to be mentioning a lot of priests in this post, all of whom are friends of ours, and many of whom are not stationed at our parish anymore, so don't worry--we don't actually have a million priests at our parish right now! Just three. 

(All the pictures interspersed through this post were taken by Frodo--and generally don't correspond to the actual priest I'm talking about at the moment they're there! Just an extra layer of showing the beauty of the priesthood.) 

When Father DD celebrates Mass, he always takes extra time in his genuflections to the consecrated Eucharist (sometimes he genuflects for longer than I keep my head bowed), and when he says the parts of the Mass that address Jesus directly, i.e. "Jesus Christ, you said to your apostles, 'peace I leave you, my peace I give you'", he looks directly at Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament. And it's amazing--he has a slowness and reverence about him when he's working with holy things that makes you realize yes, it is Jesus in the Eucharist. And Father knows it. And so do we. And it's SO beautiful. 

Father TA [to me]: Hey, Sister.

Father TA [to Father RM, who is looking confused]: I've decided that Samantha's going to become a religious.
Father RM: You can't make that decision for her! She has to discern that herself. Wait--cloistered, or active?
Father TA: Oh, cloistered, of course!

It's so true what Fulton Sheen says, that a priest is not his own. And our priests have embraced that. One of the best examples of this radical abandonment of "my will", even when it comes to doing God's work in the world, was from one Easter. Father A had been planning to say Mass for a parish that didn't have a priest for the Vigil, but (long story) he wasn't able to, so Father TA, who had been planning to be the main celebrant for our Vigil volunteered to do it. So, Father DD, on Holy Saturday, learned that he would be saying the Vigil by himself, and he needed to run through the Exultet and all the things he'd be chanting, reading, and singing that evening. Just then, an elderly couple, who hadn't heard that there was no Confession that morning, showed up, hoping to go to Confession. And he put everything to the side, to take twenty minutes and hear their Confessions. Always at the service of God's people. Always. 

The year I got Confirmed, Father JJ came to Galadriel's First Communion, but went to Mexico for some priest's ordination anniversary instead of coming to my Confirmation a week later. Instead, he surprised me by showing up at our house on my birthday, several months later--having been in town for several days, without anyone giving it away! Somehow, he was back in town during August the next year, and it's become somewhat of a "tradition" that he be here for my birthday, since he missed my Confirmation...which I'm still holding over his head. 

One of my most vivid (and embarrassing) memories from altar serving with Pippin as a kid was the time when we were sitting in the choir stalls and whispering back and forth during the readings about how cute baby Galadriel was...and Father B saw us doing it, and read us the riot act after Mass. Needless to say, we did not whisper during Mass again while serving...at least, not for a long time.

Me: *finishes helping our friend livestream Mass, my first time*
Father DD: *comes over* How did it go?
Our friend: It went great! She's a sharp one, is Samantha.
Father DD: So, why are we letting her go to college, again?

The year we had our first goat give birth, she had doe twins, and we named them Noelani and Nebula. Father JJ came over shortly after, and suggested that we should definitely change the names to Stew and Chupacabra (Chuppa for short). This, of course, went over like a lead balloon, but for the rest of the time we had those two goats (which was a good two months), he only ever referred to them as Stew and Chuppa. 

My aunt: It's really hot today!
Fr. M [in his Polish accent]: It's even hotter in this habit!
Fr. M [still in his Polish accent]: *turns to sun* *shakes fist* Curse you, death orb! 

At one point, I think it was the second time we ever had Father DD over for dinner, we somehow wound up playing frisbee with Father in the yard, and everything was going fine--turns out, he's an excellent frisbee player--until Eomer was the monkey in the middle. Mom threw the frisbee towards Father, and Father jumped for it, and Eomer bodyslammed him out of the way! (Mom was...slightly embarrassed, but Father thought it was hilarious. And he still caught the frisbee.)

This story is kind of embarrassing, but Legolas insisted I tell it...at one point, when Father TA was over for dinner, he introduced us to the Chinese number game, which, if you don't know what it is, I won't ruin it for you, but suffice it to say, it's slightly like a magic trick, and there is rearranging of pens, and you have to figure out the number from how the pens are arranged, or, I should say, the manner in which the pens are arranged. Whether they figured it out or he told them, it worked out so that every. single. member. of my family (except Galadriel, she tells me. "You're overestimating it, Samantha." XD) figured it out before I did, and I was LOSING MY MIND. Turns out, it's deceptively simple. And kind of embarrassing, when you don't figure it out. And, of course, my entire family + Father TA enjoyed it FAR too much.

Our friend Father J, when he was stationed here, used to go camping with us and several other families every summer, and we have SO many stories from that! For instance:
-He taught 2-year-old Eomer to say "Fire, ugh", every time Dad lit a fire.
-Every morning, when he unzipped his tent, Legolas would go flying over to jump on him and give him a hug...which he said was not how his priest brothers usually greeted him? What's up with that? (My family likes to joke that our vocation is confirming priests in their vocations.) 

-Legolas toasted her first marshmallow, and then stuck the stick in front of him so that he could see, but he didn't realize that she just wanted him to look...so he ate the marshmallow right off the stick! (And then she wailed, and he felt AWFUL.)

-He was saying Mass at a picnic table, and a family came by on bicycles, and were like "Oh, are you saying Mass? We're Catholic! Can we join you?" So they did!

-Tiny Eomer was trying to throw rocks in the water, but he kept accidentally dropping them over his shoulder as he did so...so Father J would stand behind him, and every time Eomer dropped a rock, Father threw a rock, so that it looked to Eomer like he was throwing rocks. 

There's one Bible character who I share part of my name with (don't think about it too hard...), and whenever that character comes up in Mass readings--daily Mass readings, that is--I get the hardest smirks from Father TA. Seriously. No attempt to conceal, straight-up smirking at me. XD

Who's the first person you think about when you think about good men? Which story was your favorite? Have you ever met a Dominican? If you're not Catholic, are you hopelessly confused? Because if so, put your questions in the comments, and I'll try to clarify. XD