Optic-Changing Moments: One Friar’s Reflection on Experiences that Formed My Heart

Optic-Changing Moments:

One Friar’s Reflection on Experiences that Formed My Heart

When I look back across the landscape of my life, I can clearly see that my understanding of the world, and of my own vocation, was not shaped in classrooms, lecture halls, or formal training programs. My “formation” has unfolded instead through encounters: moments when the lens through which I saw life was forever altered. These were not gentle nudges but seismic shifts, optic-changing experiences that redirected the trajectory of my ministry, my spirituality, and my understanding of human suffering and grace.

Some of these moments came early, almost before I had words to describe them. As a college student at Mount Saint Mary’s, Emmitsburg, Maryland, in the early 1980s, I often traveled with Sister Roberta Sobus, DC, performing “windshield surveys” of impoverished communities near Emmitsburg. Together, we visited neglected, poor, and isolated rural and mountainous regions nearby, where residents faced challenges reminiscent of those found in Appalachia. We would quietly observe the structures of daily life: dilapidated homes, signs of generational poverty, unspoken resilience, and then follow these surveys with wellness checks and visits. Something in me awakened in those years: an awareness that ministry begins with seeing, and that seeing requires slowing down enough to let another person’s reality unsettle your own.

That lesson was driven even deeper in 1983, when, as a young diocesan seminarian intern, I had the opportunity during both summer and winter college recesses to live and work alongside Father Joseph Muth, pastor of St. Ann Church in Baltimore. The parish, largely African American, was located in the challenged inner-city neighborhood known as East Baltimore Midway.

In December of that year, I was profoundly shaken when I witnessed the murder of nineteen-year-old Maurice Sturdivant in an alley adjacent to the St. Ann’s rectory, just outside my window. Violence seen on a television screen remains abstract; violence unfolding before one’s ears and eyes hardens into memory. I still recall the overwhelming helplessness and the shock that such tragedy could erupt so close to a place meant to be sanctuary. That moment stripped away whatever naïveté I may have carried and etched into me a lasting conviction: authentic ministry must meet people precisely where life breaks open.

In the summer of 1991, as a student-friar, I was given the extraordinary opportunity to live for three months in a leprosy camp in Ghana, West Africa. There, I lived under the supervision and mentorship of Brother Vincent Vivian, OFM Conv., a man I admired beyond words. Those months became one of the most transformative periods of my life.

I arrived in Ghana as a Franciscan seminarian on missionary internship; I left with a radically transformed understanding of human dignity. The residents of the camp were among the most marginalized people on earth, yet they lived with a depth of faith, humor, and communal strength I had never before encountered. In their suffering, I experienced a profound grace—a living revelation of the Incarnation itself: that God is not found apart from human fragility but intimately present within it. That summer has never stopped shaping who I am and how I understand ministry.

A few years later, as a newly ordained priest at Most Holy Trinity Church in Brooklyn, New York, I found myself presiding at a steady stream of funerals for young people who had died from AIDS—often complicated by addictions. The grief of their parents and families was raw, complex, and at times suffocating. These were funerals not only for lives cut short, but for relationships burdened with guilt, misunderstandings, and unresolved pain. Standing at the altar in those moments, I learned that priesthood is not about having answers. It is about staying present in the unbearable. Those families taught me that mercy must precede judgment, and that compassion is often the only bridge strong enough to carry a grieving parent across the chasm of loss.

During those same years, I underwent what I often call my “front parlor seminary”.  The rectory parlor became the classroom where real pastoral formation happened. People came with their wounds, doubts, complicated relationships, and moral struggles, and I quickly discovered that no manual existed for these encounters. I learned to listen, to receive, and to take seriously the unpolished honesty of human beings struggling to find their way. In truth, the lessons I absorbed in those front parlors have accompanied me far longer than any theological concept from my formal training.

Then came 1998, and with it the overdose death of Michael Johnson, a 28-year-old parishioner in Brooklyn whose life had been marked by addiction, hardship, and despite it all an unmistakable yearning for God. I had known him for years. His death pierced me in a way few others had. It made addiction no longer an abstract pastoral challenge but an open wound I carried with me. Michael’s death forced me to confront not only the limits of my ministry but the limits of my own heart: how deeply I could care, and how helpless I could feel.

My years in Central America from 1998 to 2000 exposed me to another dimension of human suffering, one rooted in systemic poverty and political instability. Walking through rural villages in Honduras, encountering people who lived with almost nothing yet gave generously from what little they had, I realized how skewed my understanding of wealth and need had been. These travels did not just expand my worldview; they destabilized it, making room for a more authentic compassion.

Years later, in 2008, a moment of profound calm in the Basilica of the Annunciation in the Holy Land City of Nazareth drew me into a surprising experience of the Incarnation—not as doctrine, but as presence. Kneeling in that sacred space, I felt the mystery of God-made-flesh settle into my bones in a way that no theological text had ever accomplished.

In 2014, my visit to the Auschwitz Concentration Camp in Poland brought me face-to-face with human evil stripped of all illusion. Walking those grounds, seeing the remnants of so many extinguished lives, I found myself standing in silent confrontation with the capacity of humanity both to destroy and to endure. Auschwitz was not merely a historical visit: it was a spiritual reckoning.

Beginning in 2015, my ministry among the homeless and drug-addicted community in East Baltimore while Pastor of the sister parishes of St. Ann and St. Wenceslaus continued this lifelong education of the heart. Those men and women: imperfect, wounded, often dismissed by society, revealed to me the face of Christ in ways that remain indescribable. Their stories carried both devastation and hope and getting to know them and serving them taught me that the Gospel becomes credible only when it is lived in proximity to the suffering.

In more recent years, another unexpected classroom of the heart has emerged for me: the confessional.  For the past three years, I have served as a confessor at the Shrine of Saint Anthony in Howard County, Maryland. On most days, I sit quietly in that confessional and listen as people entrust me with the most vulnerable corners of their lives. I hear heartaches, perceived weaknesses, addictions that shackle, anger that erodes peace, resentments that linger for decades, and the quiet, persistent ache of those who doubt God’s love or feel unworthy of it.

There are moments when I want to weep with them, moments when the weight of their suffering is palpable. And yet, I count it among the greatest privileges as a priest to be able to speak words of mercy into that space, to assure them, sometimes more than once, sometimes gently, sometimes firmly, that God loves them more than they could ever possibly imagine. Often, I leave the confessional convinced that lives have changed on both sides of the screen: theirs, for having dared to speak; and mine, for having been allowed into that sacred, hidden place. These encounters continue to reshape my heart, reminding me that grace flows most powerfully through honesty, humility, and the courage to begin again.

When I trace all of my most optic-changing life experiences together, they form a kind of spiritual mosaic: unique tiles arranged by providence, each one reshaping how I see the world and how I understand my vocation. They remind me that conversion is not a single moment but a lifelong unfolding. My Christian faith, my Franciscan identity and my priesthood, such as they are, have been sculpted by these encounters: by the poor, the dying, the addicted, the grieving, the forgotten, the sorrowful, the repentant, and the holy. They have been my teachers.

And through them all, a single truth has become clearer with time:

Grace is found not by avoiding the wounds of the world, but by daring to look directly at them, and discovering Christ already there.

Lord Jesus, you entered our world to teach us how to see: how to notice the forgotten, honor the wounded, and recognize your presence in every human story. Open our eyes again today. Turn our wounds into wisdom, our encounters into compassion, and our lives into instruments of your peace. Amen.