I am a Franciscan friar at St Francis Friary, Leichhardt, in Sydney and I joined the Capuchin Order in 1969 when I was 22. Until then I had been a carpenter.
I think my vocation had something to do with my baptismal name. I was named after my uncle whose name was Francis. He died in the war, my mother’s only brother.
So I wanted to know about him and then St Francis. It was St Francis who humanised Christ for me.
The more I learned about the saint’s life, the more I realised that an ordinary person could become enthusiastic about Christ and live as He lived.
I was also a leader in the Young Christian Workers movement in Brisbane where I originally grew up.
It was about 1967 when our youth group had a retreat in the Capuchin monastery and I got to know the friars. So this was yet another stepping stone to the life I lead now.
When I first joined the Order I liked the Rosary more than the Divine Office, but over the years the Prayer of the Church has spoken to me profoundly at different times.
To me, it means to listen to the Holy Spirit. I am well aware of the words of St Francis: “If the graces I have received were given to someone else they would be extraordinary.”
Fortunately I live in a Capuchin community where everyone is not only intelligent but also kind and they tend to put me in my place when I say something stupid. That is the advantage of fraternity.
I came from a family that was destroyed by the war. My father was a prisoner of war under the Japanese for two years and when he returned he and my mother were really unable to put their marriage back together again.
I guess generally in those days it was somewhat unusual for people to divorce, especially amongst Catholics.
The trauma of our family breakup was, I think, when I decided that maybe God didn’t exist and I lost respect for both my parents.
Yet one night I found myself praying and I told Our Lady, “You are my spiritual mother”. Suddenly, I heard a voice say quite clearly, “You cannot love me if you do not love your own mother.” It was a bit of a shock.
I realised eventually that this also meant that I couldn’t pray the Our Father if I didn’t feel that way about my own father as well.
I needed to understand what had happened in the lives of my parents and finally I realised it was the end result of my father’s wartime experience. Through this realisation, I found my way back into my family.
Yet it was not as simple as all that. Some time after Our Lady challenged me – I was about 17 – I went and asked my mother, “What was the greatest gift you have ever been given?” In my head, I thought she was going to say, “You, son.” And I was going to say, “Fail!” Instead, my mother looked at me and said, “My life.”
I then asked her, “What is the greatest gift you have ever given anyone?” I thought she was going to tell me, “My life” but this time she said, “My love”.
I asked her why she didn’t say my life again and she said to me, “My life belongs to God”. It was a profound moment and paved the way to my future vocation.
While I was a young carpenter’s apprentice, there was a time I remember when a group of my workmates decided to ‘initiate’ somebody.
They dragged him off into a shed and put grease all over him. I was incensed. I went over and while the other workmen were looking on, I padlocked the shed.
Then I turned the hose on all of them over the top of the shed door. They started yelling that they were going to kill me when they got out of the shed.
Then the boss himself came out to see what was going on. He was a very Christian man. He just looked at me and said, “You locked them in, you let them out”. So I unlocked the shed and they all came out like a swarm of bees.
They grabbed me and were about to carry me off when the boss said, “I think you blokes had all better get back to work”.
They dropped me immediately and that was exactly what we did – we went back to work on the building. I think those guys didn’t realise they were being watched.
Later, the carpenter’s apprentice I helped asked me why I had done it. I explained my faith and the Eucharist to him.
He wasn’t Catholic but he said, “If you really believe that God comes down on the altar every day, you should go to Mass every morning.”
What had been logical to him hadn’t been logical to me. I began walking to 6am Mass every day.
After a while I started making excuses to myself about why I couldn’t go every morning, like I felt too tired.
Then a voice inside my head said, “Stop struggling against me. Learn to struggle with me”. I believed that was the Holy Spirit speaking to me.
The inner voices, which only came at crucial times in my life, taught me to listen to the external voices when God was talking to me through others, the Scriptures and the Church.
I began to write down my own personal prayers when I was about 18. I look back on those prayers now and think I was much closer to God then, but eventually I stopped writing and just spoke directly to God about everything.
My prayers may not be so profound, rather they have become simpler. I offer it up to God – the good and the bad.
That is what a priest is supposed to do – offer it up at Mass. You can say, “It’s a beautiful day” or you can say, “Lord, it’s a beautiful day!” There is a great difference.
Yes, there was a time in my life that I didn’t believe in God. I decided this at the time because I thought the world was so horrible.
Now I know that God is not beyond all that but rather painfully aware and caught up in all the mess, because he loves us so much.
But God has so much hope in our ability to overcome; because of this, our sense of hope must not be allowed to die.
St Francis also pointed out that the two great things about humanity were our ability to suffer for others and our ability to forgive each other.
That gives me great joy and hope for the future. The reality of the world is not always so nice, but good things are happening too.