“Are you sure you don’t want to play professional golf instead of becoming a priest?” I was asked this summer after making a 15-foot putt at Chateau Whistler to shoot 69.
The question my golfing foursome posed me was an earnest one, for seven short years ago I left a promising career in professional golf to begin the long road of priestly formation.
Eleven years ago, I began my golf scholarship at St. Mary’s College, one of the top Division 1 NCAA schools in California. The academics were easy, the weather was perfect, my expenses were paid, and not to mention I played golf every day. I was truly living “the good life” in California.
After graduating as the top-ranked player on my college golf team, I came home and left dreams of professional golf aside. Why? One simple reason – I was not happy.
It was then that God entered my life in a powerful, unforgettable way: Upon returning home after graduation, my mother, inspired by the advice of a holy priest, asked me to go to confession for her birthday present. I hadn’t gone to confession in five years, but I wanted to make my mother happy. It was during that confession, in the sacrament of reconciliation, that my discontent with life and my sinful past was defeated by the radical love and mercy of Jesus Christ.
That divine encounter with Christ set my heart aflame with a desire that would lead me – three years after having put away my golf clubs – to break up with my girlfriend, leave my accounting job at KPMG, and pursue the arduous path to priesthood.
It is said that we all have a “God-shaped vacuum” in our hearts. For so many years of my youth I tried to fill that void with a golf ball, to no avail. By God’s mercy, my heart is now a refuge for the only One who could ever fill that void.
Thus, with my heart filled I joyfully answered the golfers as we finished up on the 18th green at Chateau Whistler, there is nothing I’d rather do in the whole world than to become a Catholic priest.
