When the Catholic church ordains a priest, it is expected he will be a priest forever. So there is little or no preparation for employment in the outside world if a priest decides to leave his calling or is forced out because of circumstances that are unacceptable to his bishop and/or parishioners. That's the situation the former Father Jonathan found himself in as he walked the streets of San Francisco one cold January day wondering how he would get his next meal or a place to sleep.
Jonathan had been a respected priest in a large Colorado city for many years until the disease of alcoholism took control of his life. The local bishop began sending him to cloistered monasteries for months at a time, then to a series of alcohol rehabs. But nothing worked. The priest just couldn't seem to stay sober or avoid creating embarrassing situations in the parish.
As a last resort, he was sent to see a psychiatrist, who put him through a battery of psychological tests. The priest was told he had a lot of problems that psychiatry couldn't help. When asked what he should do, he was told, “The picture is very grim. If you don't stop drinking, you will drift to a level in society where eventually you will have to be taken care of. You will then live out your life in a helpless state until you die-probably a violent death.”
Jonathan, now in his early fifties, refused to accept the psychiatrist's diagnosis. He was determined that no such thing would happen to him. But he did nothing to change his way of life and continued drinking. After creating one too many unacceptable situations, the bishop had no choice but to dismiss him from the priesthood and send him out into a world with which he was ill prepared to cope.
Through a help-wanted ad he found at a local Salvation Army station, he wound up with a job in a smelly meat packing plant. Out of shame, he concealed his identity as an ex-priest from his fellow workers and others he came across. Shortly after being hired, the plant foreman pulled him aside to talk to him about his drinking. He expressed concern that Jonathan might cause an accident or injure himself on the job. The foreman suggested that Jonathan go to Alcoholics Anonymous, or he'd have to let him go. Little did the ex-priest know at the time that the foreman was a member of AA himself.
Jonathan had attended some AA meetings in the past only because he was forced to each time he left a rehab. While he felt it was beneath his priestly dignity at the time, now he was fearful of being fired, losing what little he had, and fulfilling the psychiatrist's grim prediction. So he went.
One of the foundations of AA's spiritual program is “rigorous honesty,” so little by little, when asked about his background, Jonathan would let people in the meeting rooms know he had once been a Catholic priest. He expected them to be shocked, but they weren't. They simply smiled and encouraged him to keep coming. Some, however, wondered why such a well-educated man was working in a meat packing plant.
Soon the ex-priest had an AA sponsor and was practicing the program's Twelve Steps of recovery. One night after a meeting, he told his sponsor he'd like to leave the meat packing plant but didn't know what else he should try.
“If you keep turning your will and your life over to the care of your Higher Power,” his sponsor replied, “I'm sure God will show you what He wants you to do when the time comes. In the meantime, He's giving you everything you need.”
At this point, Jonathan was still struggling with his relationship with God because of all the guilt he still felt inside. He had once felt secure about his calling to be a priest. Now he wasn't sure what God wanted him to do. So he simply followed his sponsor's advice since doing so had kept him sober for some time now.
The former priest became a regular member of the Friday night meeting held at the city's Harbor Light Center. He enjoyed the camaraderie of an all-men gathering, where they could talk more openly about their character defects and shortcomings. After he was sober almost a year, the group elected him program chairman. His job was to get speakers from other AA groups in the area to share their recovery stories at Harbor Light Center.
One night, a middle-aged woman showed up at the group, not realizing it was a men-only meeting. As chairman, and still being rather new, Jonathan suggested to the others that they let her stay. It also happened to be a night when the outside speaker didn't show up and the group decided that he should share his recovery story. He reluctantly agreed. By now the revelation of his former priesthood was no problem. Even the lone woman at the meeting didn't seem surprised.
However, after the meeting she approached Jonathan and asked for his phone number. She said there was something important concerning the field of addiction that she wished to discuss with him privately.
The woman called him the following day, asking the ex-priest if he would be interested in working as a professional in the field of alcoholism and drug addiction. She was on the board of an organization that ran recovery homes for alcoholics and said her director would like to speak with him, if he was interested. Suddenly his sponsor's words came back to him-that somehow God would let him know when to leave the packing plant for something more meaningful on his path of sobriety.
He and the director met the following week. They had only spoken a few minutes when Jonathan knew that the job being offered to him as an assistant director would be a perfect fit. He would have a chance to share not only his recovery but also the renewed spiritual life he found in AA with others trying to climb out of the rubble into a new way of living sober. He accepted the job, and less than two years later, when the director retired, he accepted the position to run the organization.
One night as the former priest was walking home from a meeting that had focused on AA's Fourth Step of recovery-“Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves”-something struck him. It was something he realized his Higher Power had been trying to show him since that first day he walked into an AA meeting room.
He was initially turned off by the way people talked so casually about “miracles.” They cheapened the word, in his estimation, by calling things miracles that, to him, were mere coincidences. Perhaps it was his religious training, because for Jonathan, a miracle had to be something grand-the sun stands still in the sky, the Red Sea is parted, or at the very least, someone is inexplicably cured of a deadly disease. Here AA members were talking about miracles as though they were acorns dropping from trees.
As he paused that evening and stared up at the star-filled sky, he realized they were right and he was wrong. He thought about the dozens of miracles that had already taken place in his life which he had pushed aside as simply coincidences.
He thought about the psychiatrist who predicted his demise, the plant foreman who just happened to be in AA and forced him to go, a caring sponsor who helped him understand how God speaks to us, the loss of false pride that once kept him from talking about his former priesthood, the woman who showed up at his group the night the speaker didn't come and he had to share his own recovery story, her happening to be on the board of a recovery organization that led to him now carrying God's and AA's message of hope to hundreds who were once like himself.
Today Jonathan continues to quote the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous that says in early recovery, men and women will look upon some things as coincidences, but that in time, they will come to recognize them as quiet miracles that God is working in their lives.