Brother Frank

That day in the sixth grade that we each had to stand up one by one and tell everyone in the class what we wanted to be when we grew up was a weird day for me.

When it was my time to stand up I didn’t know what I was going to say. It just came out. “Uh, I think I want to be a brain surgeon,” I said.

Why did I say that? What a goof! I think I said it because no one else had said it and it sounded pretty neat. Anyway, after I sat down I remember saying to myself, “Brain surgeon? You don’t want to be a brain surgeon!”

The rest of the day was weird because all I did was think about what I wanted to be. It was a mystery, and I didn’t have a clue.

That night, I asked Jesus to give me a clue.

I have always liked talking to Jesus. Talking to Him in prayers and getting that feeling of being right next to Him. Talking to Him deep inside my head.

Brain surgeon? I didn’t get that clue. The clue I got from Jesus in my prayer that night was this: “Let’s keeping talking about what you might do with your life.”

So, we did keeping talking about it. All the time. While I was in high school and while I was in college.

It was in my junior year of college when I went on a retreat with our Newman Center prayer group that my clue finally solved the mystery of what to do with my life.

We were praying at night in the chapel of the monastery where we were having the retreat. In the soft light from the candles and in the total silence of our individual prayers, I thought about what it would mean to follow God in a life that was totally about prayer. Who lived a life like that?

Duh! It was right in front of me: the priests and brothers at the monastery where we were having our retreat lived that life. As I watched the intensity of their prayer that night, I knew right then that I was being called to that same intensity.

I started making monthly visits to the monastery on my own. Each visit, I met with the abbot and we talked about all aspects of my life, especially my prayer life. We talked about what a person gives up and what a person gets when he or she enters into a life devoted to prayer.

When I entered the monastery after graduating from college, I felt a calm confidence that this was the right time for me to let go of the life I had been living. It was the right time for me to begin a life of intense prayer and to live that life in a community of priests and brothers and their lay associates.

My life of prayer is just one of the possibilities of having a life in which you put yourself at the service of God and others. All around the world, men who belong to the religious orders in the Catholic Church are serving God and their communities in so many different ways: they grow food and build things, and they share those skills with others; they teach; they minister to Native Americans on our Arizona Reservations; and they are astronomers with the Vatican Observatory right here in the Diocese of Tucson.

The clue that Jesus gave me back when I was in the sixth grade was to keep talking with Him about what I might do with my life.

He has the same clue for you.

Keep talking with Him.

You can find out more about my life as a Brother by getting in touch with Sister Rina Cappellazzo at the Diocese of Tucson. Give her a call at 520-838-2524, e-mail her at srrc@diocesetucson.org or visit her Web page here.