Being a Deacon
When God decided to make you and me, he did the same thing that he had done when he made every human being. He embraced each one of us like a mother would bundle up a beloved child about to go out into the cold for the very first time. And like a parent might slip a little identification note into a child’s pocket, just in case he or she should get lost, God put a little tiny piece of himself inside of each of us. That little piece of God inside of you and me is our immortal soul; life is the journey of our soul back home to its loving Creator.
God sends each of us into our journey with a special plan. It is our calling in life, our vocation; it is the road that we are meant to travel on our journey back home to God. The Holy Spirit is always there to guide us on our journey; to tap us on the shoulder and point the way whenever we get a little lost; to help us discern which way to go when we reach a fork in the road; to help us get back up when we fall down.
My life journey has been very blessed. My vocation has three dimensions: I am a husband, a father, and a deacon. My wife and I were high school sweethearts. We will soon celebrate our 53rd anniversary of marriage. God blessed us with each other and by sending us children and grandchildren to love and nurture.
In 1984 I felt the Holy Spirit tapping me on the shoulder, inviting me to serve God and my brothers and sisters as a deacon. After eight years of discernment and formation, I received the sacrament of Holy Orders and was ordained a permanent deacon for the Archdiocese of Newark in 1992.
A deacon’s call is to be a servant. The archetype, the role model, for all deacons is Jesus washing the feet of his disciples at the Last Supper. We are all called to comfort and to serve, to minister to, and primarily to love all those souls whom we meet along the road of life – especially those most lost, hurting, and disenfranchised.
The book of Acts tells the story of the Apostles choosing seven people to take care of the social welfare needs of the community and to carry the gospel into the marketplaces and the trenches of society. Tradition holds that these were the first deacons. Saint Stephen was one of those seven. He was also the Church’s first martyr. He was stoned to death while preaching in the city square. Perhaps the best-known deacon in history is Saint Francis of Assisi.
Somewhere in the Middle Ages the Church did away with the role of deacon as a permanent state in life and made the diaconate a transitional step on the way to priesthood. But in the late 1940s, a group of priests, who had been imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp during WWII, discerned the need to bring back the role of deacon as it was originally intended — to carry the gospel and the ministry of loving service into the prisons, the hospitals, the marketplaces and the fringes of our world. They petitioned the Pope to restore the ordained ministry of the permanent deacon.
The Second Vatican Council restored the permanent diaconate in the mid 1960s and opened it to married as well as single men.
But what is it that deacons do? While you may see the deacon assisting and preaching at Mass, or administering the sacrament of Baptism, or officiating at weddings, the real thrust of the deacon’s life is still service — loving service to people who are disenfranchised, who live on the fringes of society; people who need someone to come along, scoop them up and bring them into the healing presence of Jesus.
Deacons have jobs and support themselves and their families. We also minister in prisons, hospitals, shelters, parishes, factories and offices. Being a deacon is a 24/7 vocation — we are called to loving service at every moment and in every corner of our lives.
I have been privileged to be involved in a number of ministries over the years. Working as a team with my wife and many of our parishioners, we have served homeless people living on the streets of New York City. I developed a youth ministry to teenagers around the martial arts, called Holy Spirit TaeKwonDo; led a support group for people suffering with depression and anxiety; and ministered to teenagers in juvenile detention. Today I volunteer as a chaplain in psychiatric hospitals.
It is a special joy for me, as a married man and as a father to perform weddings and baptize children, because I know firsthand the joys, responsibilities and challenges of marriage and parenthood. I come to these sacraments not just as a representative of the Church but also as a fellow traveller.
The greatest blessing that God gave me was when I met and fell in love with my wife. The next greatest blessing was the privilege of being a father and raising our children. And without question after my wife and children my greatest blessing was my vocation to serve the Lord as a deacon.
There is a hymn we occasionally sing at Mass that sums up why I became a deacon. The words are as follows:
Lord, you are my shepherd,
you are my friend,
I want to follow you always,
just to follow my friend.
Because the Lord is My Shepherd
© 1985, Christopher Walker.OCP
Deacon Lex Ferrauiola