Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying,
“Whom shall I send? Who will go for us?”
“Here I am,” I said. “Send me!” Isaiah 6:8
When I was twenty years old I was driving from Seton Hall University to my parents’ house in Teaneck, New Jersey on the Garden State Parkway. It was about sunset and I saw a car pulled over and a father and his son were bowed on their prayer rugs facing east and praying the Maghrib — or, sunset prayer.
I was so struck by this offering to God. It was such an image of bravery. It was 2002 (not exactly a gracious time for Islam in America) that at that very moment I said, I will dedicate the first five years of my professional life to working for the Church that has given me so much. A couple of years earlier I had a profound experience and felt what Bernard Lonergan called “startling strangeness” and simply fell in love with God, but it was at that moment when I felt like Isaiah in our first reading.
If our conversion to God is the moment we realize we are loved, then our calling to a vocation is when we realize we have to give that love away. I never imagined I would be a youth minister, a teacher, a cook, an office clerk, a fundraiser, a theater director, a blogger (Is this a blog?) and all the other roles I’ve played at Our Lady of Mount Carmel. I didn’t even know Our Lady of Mount Carmel existed. The only thing I knew about Tenafly was that it was the town where I went to summer school one year (I was an awful high school student).
I’ve been thinking about that moment a lot this past year. I’ve been thinking a lot about where I’ve come from and my initial call to service as I experience, simply, the worst year of my young life. Perhaps it would have been easier to know the world without this pain I’ve experienced. Maybe it was easier to be “a man of unclean lips, living among a people of unclean lips” (Isaiah 6:5).
I’ve been thinking about that day for months now and on this gray afternoon I realize that after all my most difficult moments, long hours, sleepless nights, after the heartbreak when a Peruvian woman offered me her child to take back and raise, after mourning with the children of bankers, after the tears of aged women kissing my hands when arriving with presents, after a hospital in Spain, after the four-year relationship went back to California because I wasn’t making time, after the texts that I wasn’t a good friend, after the missed weddings and baptisms, after June 1st, after having to change my mother, after visiting hours, after Lorazepam and morphine. I can say more than ever, better than ever, after hearing my Lord’s voice ask who will go for him, I have been proud to say, and will continue to say, “Send me.”
As Paul tells us in the Second Reading, let us be reminded of the Gospel preached to us. I am so proud to be in the eighth year of my five-year commitment. Lord, though I be a man of unclean lips, send me. Here I am. Send me.
I’ll be seeing you,
Elliot