a religious order at the time was neither a casual nor slapdash affair. In fact, it could be rather grueling. A young man who had hopes of doing so would have to meet first with the vocation director of the order, whose job was (at least in part) to size him up quite thoroughly. A visit from the vocation director to the candidate’s home to meet the young man’s family was frequently a part of the process. Such visits were often unannounced, catching people off guard, and completely flustering quite a few unprepared families. A candidate would not be considered without a strong recommendation from his pastor and the unqualified support of a spiritual director. In all probability Pete Groeschel’s spiritual director at the time was Fr. McCarthy, the senior curate at Immaculate Conception Church. (It is also probable that Fr. McCarthy was Pete’s informal coach in preparing for public-speaking competitions.) Pete would certainly have been able to attain a glowing recommendation from Fr. McCarthy, who thought highly of him and was doing all he could to further the young man’s vocation. And a recommendation from his pastor would have been just as forthcoming.
A few weekend visits of the candidate to the religious community’s nearest house would be a common part of the process for a potential candidate, as well, and it is almost certain that Pete made these visits to the friary on 31st Street. There he would have gotten his first glimpse of friars in their daily life and began to grasp a bit of what being a Capuchin really meant.
It should be remembered that in the early fifties religious orders could be quite selective. They had many applicants, usually more than they wanted, and they were not slow to send a candidate packing if they deemed him inappropriate. A small misstep made by a candidate or even by a member of his family could result in a polite suggestion to begin investigating another religious community. Apparently Pete Groeschel made no such missteps, and equally apparent the Capuchins he encountered in New York were reasonably sure they had found a good candidate in him. There is neither a record of any problem, nor does anyone who recalls that time in Pete’s life remember any difficulty that he encountered in entering the religious order of his choice.
So it seemed that despite his lack of knowledge of Italian cuisine, Pete Groeschel was on his way to living the life he dreamed of.
3 Hall, Belief, 53
Chapter IV
Flinging Myself Against the Sky
The Tale As Father Told It
My great aspiration was to be a priest, but it was not just to be priest; it was to live out my priesthood within a religious community—to be a friar. As I look back at my boyhood after such a great number of years, this fact gives me a kind of quiet satisfaction. It also gives me one of the many things for which I am thankful to God. So often the dreams of one’s childhood must fade, evaporating into vague and sometimes even melancholy memories. Far too frequently the harsh realities of the world eat away at the goals of one’s youth like a corrosive acid until there is nothing left of them.
Of course, as people grow up, practicality must play an ever-greater role in their lives. Please understand that I am not saying there is anything wrong with that. What is wrong is that many people assume that being practical means they must lower their expectations. They believe that they must accept less than they did when they were young enough to “dwell in possibility.” The boy who yearned to become a pilot spends his life as an accountant who stares longingly at the sky. The girl whose dream was to be a ballerina grows up to become a lawyer. Yet only when she sits in a darkened theater watching others do what she no longer has any hope of doing does she feel fully alive. Such experiences are common; they may even be the norm. Yet they produce lives that are always tinged with regret, haunted with thoughts of what might have been, of what should have been, if only things had worked out differently … properly.
I have been very greatly blessed because God has spared me all that. He gave me what I most desired, and, in so doing, He made possible a life of contentment for me. Now, this is not to say that I have lived up to the potential God gave me. Nor is it to say that I have fulfilled all or even most of the tasks that He has sent my way, either. It is certainly not to say that I have been ecstatically happy at every moment over the last eight decades. Of course not! I’ve experienced the highs and lows, the successes and failures, the wonderful surprises and crushing disappointments that everyone does. Let me tell you, I have often failed miserably, and I am painfully aware that I have let God and other people down terribly many, many times in my life. But no matter what happened, I always knew that God had permitted my dreams to become my destiny, and that is a wonderful gift. It is something for which I humbly thank our heavenly Father every day.
There is a quotation I heard or read many years ago, and I haven’t the slightest idea from where it comes. Perhaps it’s from some poem, but I’m not even sure of that. It goes like this: “I take this puppet, which is myself, and I fling him against the sky.” I like this image very much, and think it is something that every Catholic and certainly every priest and religious might consider. Those few words could be a profitable source of meditation for most of us. Let’s face it; we rarely fling ourselves against the sky in the faith-filled confidence that God will find some way to catch us. We are often too timid with our lives. Put in the most basic of terms, we usually do not have enough faith to dare anything at all, and because of this lack we permit our dreams to die or to be taken from us. We allow ourselves to become less than what God would permit us to be—perhaps less than He wants us to be. This is part of our fallen nature; it is something we must struggle against.
When I was seventeen, a day came when I had so many butterflies in my stomach they felt like a herd of hyperactive elephants. It was just ten days after my graduation from Immaculate Conception High School in Montclair, New Jersey, and it was the moment when I was to leave the only life I had ever known for a life about which I knew little. All I really understood about the Capuchins, whom I was about to join, was that they practiced the most austere form of Franciscanism that existed in the United States at that time. I realized that attempting this way of life would involve many adjustments and sacrifices for me, but I didn’t have a clue as to whether or not I’d be able to measure up as a follower of Holy Father St. Francis in the Capuchin tradition.
All these years later I can freely admit something that I wouldn’t dare have even hinted at back than: I was a nervous wreck when I was going to the novitiate and terribly homesick for a long time once I got there. I’m going to let you in on a little secret: the religious life in the early fifties was anything but warm and fuzzy; it was, in fact, often cold and impersonal. At times it seemed like something from which any sensible person should flee, and it was certainly a very stark contrast to the loving family from which I came. Yet somehow God gave me the grace I needed to fling myself against the sky and to stay, awaiting treasures to come. I like to think that He gave me the grace to live the life for which He had created me.
I find the memories of that day amazingly easy to conjure up. As I dictate these words I have in my mind a perfect picture of my pre-novitiate self, waiting at Penn Station in Newark, New Jersey. Yet it is as if that person is someone else, someone whom I observe from a very great distance, rather than myself. The young man I am now envisioning—the one I was an eternity ago—is not alone. His parents stand on either side of him, and although he doesn’t really notice it, they are closer to him than they would normally be in such a situation. They almost hover around him protectively as if trying to shield him from something. He is wearing a very well-pressed but slightly uncomfortable black suit, a crisp white shirt, and a black tie. That way of dressing was not accidental. Such was the unvarying uniform of the seminarian in those days. As I think about it today, however, I suspect that I must have looked rather funereal.
Despite the fact that I was still a month short of my eighteenth birthday I felt very grown up—a man dressed in a man’s suit and embarking on a man’s life. How wrong I was! I see clearly now
