Over the years, people have asked me many questions about the priesthood. There is one question that I have been asked so many times that I have developed a kind of stock answer. People ask all the time, “When did you know that you wanted to be a priest?”

“That’s simple,” I say. “fifth grade, ninth and 10th grades, sophomore year of college, and by Christmas in my second year of teaching public junior high school general music.” 

I respond that way because it is very clear to me now that it was never a single event that triggered my thinking about priesthood. Each of those years is marked by significant events and new insights into my spiritual life, my faith, and my Church.

In the fifth grade, I moved from Cub Scouts into Boy Scouts. I encountered a group of men, scout leaders and parish priests, who opened up a new world for me. I remember these four laymen, Vic Boucher, “Sonny” Lizotte, Maurice Provost, and Rene Tremblay, teaching us not only camping and the lore of the woods, but sharing with us a profound respect for creation. 

Around the night-time campfire, there were eye-opening stories. To mark our advancement through the Scouting ranks, there were elaborate Native American-themed ceremonies that rivaled the most complex liturgy I have ever experienced as an altar boy. The campfire circle was called “holy ground” and only those charged with the duty of fire-building could enter it in the daytime. They created a sense of wonder and awe.

I remember Father James Donovan, O.P., who would come to Camp Noquochoke to celebrate Mass for the troop on our weekend camping trips. I remember helping to construct an altar with logs and stones under the forest canopy of our camp-site, the Brayton Grove — acres of white pine 80 feet high planted in rows with their branches arching overhead like the vault of an expansive gothic space. I remember Father’s telling us how God is as much in this “cathedral” as he is among the great arches of our parish church, St. Anne’s in Fall River. 

Thoughts of priesthood were powerful then because of lessons that were nothing less than transcendent. Later, I would remember those days so clearly when I began Old Testament studies at the seminary and realized that our whole biblical tradition begins with a psalm of praise for all of creation. “Praise God in the firmament and in the sanctuary!” (Ps 150).

In ninth grade, I moved up into the adult choir at St. Anne’s. In a few short weeks before Christmas that year, my voice plummeted from a high soprano to bass-baritone. I had already been part of music and worship at church since I joined the boys’ choir in grade four, but now I was learning a liturgical tradition that has endured my whole life. Music was my life then and the lessons, both musical and liturgical, taught by Normand Gingras are still important to me now as a pastor.

Being active in my parish was critical for me at this time because of the trauma of moving from St. Anne’s School to the public junior high school. (Durfee High School was only grades 10-12 back then). I look back on that year in ninth grade with great pain. Classmates found out I was thinking about the priesthood and they were merciless, ridiculing me with the phrase, “the padre.” I hope I was more merciful some years later when a few of them became my parishioners.

My years in college were a time of great growth in my faith. Involvement in campus ministry allowed me to explore my faith more deeply. I began attending daily Mass where often only the priest and I were there. Retreats with “Chi-Rho,” the young adult’s ministry in the Archdiocese of Boston, helped my faith in Jesus to mature. I began to reflect on the relationship between the Jesus of the Gospel and daily life. Even though I was studying music, thoughts of priesthood returned.

In my sophomore year, I came very close to withdrawing from Lowell State College to apply to the seminary. But it was friends there and especially Dr. Robert White who convinced me to finish what I had started — a degree in music. “If you are meant to be a priest, it will happen someday,” he said. On my ordination day, this trusted mentor said to me, “I always knew you’d get here.”

After graduating from college, I began teaching in the public schools in Fall River. I also returned to be very active in my home parish of St. Anne. Liturgical music, Religious Education, and a wonderful parish-based retreat program, the St. Anne Fellowship, gave me the opportunity to use the faith that had grown so much during my college years. It became clear to me by the end of my first year of teaching public school music this would not be how I would spend my life. Parishioners, friends, and my pastor, the late Father Gabriel Blain, O.P., constantly said to me, “You should be a priest.” The thoughts of many years came flooding back until I realized that there was only one way to find out if this calling was real — enroll in the seminary and begin that time of discernment.

Looking back on these events is important for me. It helps me realize that God speaks through many seemingly unrelated events. God’s call is almost never a once-and-for-all event, but rather the succession of blessed time when significant people and events speak to us both in mysterious and in obvious ways. This process is not only important to identify where vocation comes from; it is also necessary in order to discern where God is leading. 

I know that even now there are people I’ve not met, events yet to experience, opportunities still to seize, and insights to contemplate. These are the realities that will continue to reveal God’s life-giving call to me. The call continues. My vocation is not over. 

Father Degagne is pastor of St. John Neumann Parish in East Freetown.