Accountant to be ordained priest

Work life balance opens door to priesthood

By Bridget Spinks
DEACON Daniel Boyd from Bassendean, once a successful and dedicated accountant, will be among the five deacons to be ordained for the Perth Archdiocese in St Mary’s Cathedral on 4 March.
He had aspirations to the priesthood as a 10 year old altar server but when other opportunities arose, these faded into the background, he said. He soon built a very successful career working for two major accounting firms and invested most of his time and effort into his job.
“Career success is directly attributable to effort and working in a very competitive industry, work becomes the be all and end all. But there’s a point when you realise that you need life balance,” he said.
He started reappraising his priorities in his late 20s. He said he realised that there was time for career, friends and Church.
“Not that I didn’t devote significant effort to my career but other things came into my life, such as that reconnection with the Church,” he said.
Daniel had struggled with his faith and ‘organised religion’ in his late teens and for ten years afterward he lapsed into the practice of coming to Mass at Christmas and Easter. During this time he said he saw God but not the Church as part of his life. “Now I don’t think there’s a difference: faith and Church are synonymous,” he said. “The Church really does foster and nurture that faith that’s within and helps to express faith in the community in which we live,” he said.
The loss of his father when he was 21, and later the loss of his mother when he was 35, as well as the friendship of Fr Alex Morahan were pivotal in leading him back to the Church, he said.
“There was that wonderful sense of coming home,” he said of his return to the parish he attended as a child, St Joseph’s in Bassendean.
“Fr Alex was a constant in my early faith journey. Even in my 30s he was still our parish priest and he was such a calming, reassuring influence.”
When he returned to Church, Daniel said he was worried about how his departure and return would be perceived.
“But the welcome was great. It really gave me a deep sense of peace and calm. I don’t feel as though I ever lost my faith in God. I think I lost faith in the Church, which seems strange for someone about to be ordained,” he said.
Since his return to the Church, he has found his faith restored, renewed and reinvigorated. “My faith has gone from strength to strength. The Church is the place that fosters and nurtures us in those difficult moments. I don’t think the spark goes out. I never lost my faith; I always believed in God,” he said, adding that his calling returned when he had restored his work/life balance. “But Our Lord’s very patient, he just keeps inviting us to get closer and closer. In the years after my mother died, I was very actively involved in St Joseph’s, Bassendean. The more I got involved, the stronger the calling got,” he said.
Daniel resigned from work at the end of 2003. In 2004, he started helping to run the parish. As well as attending daily Mass and contributing to parish life as an acolyte and reader, Daniel would spend at least half of every day around the parish doing lots of different things. He was on the parish council, wrote the rosters and helped Glendalough parish priest Fr Doug Harris establish Perpetual Eucharistic Adoration at Bassendean.
In 2005, he entered St Charles’ Seminary. “That year before I went into the seminary crystallised in my mind and heart that this was a call from God,” he said. When a good friend’s brother passed away in early 2004, Daniel was able to help the family prepare for their brother’s funeral but was dissatisfied with his efforts. “I felt that if I was ordained I could have done more to help them,” he said.
“It was a really clear sign that Our Lord was calling me to come follow Him. From that point, I put all my trust in God. I surrendered my will at that stage.”
Even thought he hadn’t as yet been accepted into the seminary, Daniel knew that that’s what he wanted to do. “Everything from my life made sense. Everything had been pointing towards this,” he said.
The only thing in the back of his mind was an anxiety he had about the time he had left the Church. Then he read an article in The Record about three priests, two of whom had stopped practising their faith as teens. They had returned to the Church and had gone on to be ordained as priests.
“That last anxiety just evaporated,” he said. At this point, Daniel didn’t have any doubts about his vocation. “I’d stepped out into the deep: sold my house, left my career behind and I had told all the people I’d worked with that my plan was to go to the seminary. 2004 was really to test the vocation for myself,” he said. Once in the seminary, Daniel has never questioned his desire to follow God: that desire always felt strong, he said. At the end of every year he would housesit interstate, gain experience working in a parish and use the time to reflect on whether he was responding as God was calling him. “I always made the choice to come back. But I think we should always be asking ourselves, ‘Am I doing what I think God is calling me to do? And secondly, ‘Is this how I want to respond to that call?’”