In 1949 when I was 15 years of age, I was starting my last year at a boarding school in Letterkenny, Co. Donegal, Ireland. Every night we had three or four hours of study in a communal study hall where you are not allowed to do anything except study. The last period of study was usually between 9:00 and 10:00 pm.
By this age, I was quite used to priests as I had been an altar boy since 8 years of age, and professors at that boarding school (St. Eunan's College) were diocesan priests. During that last study-period missonary priests from places like Africa were allowed to address us in order to foster vocations. It had never occurred to me, despite my wide experience with diocesan priests, to think about becoming one. They were much too much part of the wallpaper in growing up in Roman Catholic Ireland.
But those missionary priests were something else. And, what profoundly caught my imagination were those missionary priests who came from monastic orders. What struck me very forcibly is that religion insofar as it was incarnated in people like those speakers was the most exciting form of life I could imagine (I adored my father, but it never occurred to me to be a bank manager like him).
At the age of 15 the constitutive religious experience for me was that God seemed to have the most exciting game in town. I never used the language of giving up everything for God or anything else that would fit in standard vocational language. It was simply and emphatically that religion seemed to my adolescent judgment to be the most exciting focus for my life.
After 50 years, that is still the same for me.What was constitutive for me at 15 years of age is still constitutive for me at 72. I still find religion, with all its good points and all its bad points, to be the most exciting concentration that I can imagine for my life.
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