 |
| The priest is the pontifex, that is, the one who builds the bridge between God and man. |
Twenty-five years ago, I met young Lawrence Swink on the day he arrived to be accepted by the Cardinal Archbishop to become a seminarian for the Archdiocese of Washington. As part of my work as secretary, I had set up the appointment and brought him and the other candidate up to the outer office, then took each of them individually in to meet with the boss and receive the good word.
He looked sharp in his grey suit and tie, the uniform he wore in those days before the collar and cassock. He was confident and eager, but not without a certain trepidation that any reasonable person would have before being ushered into the inner sanctum of such a lofty personage, one who was about to deliver a judgment and set out a future course. I tried to be reassuring and encouraging, as I remembered well what he was experiencing.
Nine years earlier, I had been in the same position in the same offices when a different secretary led me in to see a different Cardinal Archbishop, who then warmly welcomed me to the program and explained to which seminary he had assigned me. There was another man with me that day, similarly in suit and tie and similarly embarking on the path to priesthood: a young Dan Leary, someone of whom you may have heard in more recent days.
Five years after accepting him to the program, the same Cardinal Archbishop ordained him a priest of Jesus Christ at the basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception. I saw that all happen, too; in fact, I had a very good seat. I smiled at the memory of the eager young man in suit and tie and had every confidence that our time of working together was just beginning. Little did I know just how together our working would one day be!
This week in the kitchen we now share, Father Swink showed me a photo he had just received on his phone. It was from the first baptism he performed as a priest at Saint Mary of the Mills Church in Laurel, which was his first assignment. I immediately recognized the two sets of parents, if not the radiant infants they happily held. Both families are now regulars at Sunday Mass here, and while the babies are now grown tall as we are, the parents, like Father Swink, still look exactly like they did in the photo. Pretty much, anyway.
A lot changes in twenty years, but most of it is circumstantial rather than essential. Father Swink is still baptizing – he had two baptisms just this weekend – and still doing the work of priesthood with all the gusto he can muster. He is still very much the same person he was when I met him that morning in 2001; most of what has changed stems from that other morning in 2006 when the hands of the bishop and the grace of Holy Order configured him to the person of Jesus Christ, the sovereign High Priest. Grace builds on nature, and what an edifice stands on that foundation.
It is good to look back over the years and see what has changed, and what has not. God’s grace continues to surge through the priestly ministry and person of Father Swink, eliminating any distance in time or space between us and the saving power of Christ’s passion, death, resurrection, and ascension. Twenty years is but the blink of an eye compared to that distance, but two decades of such daily work is worth marking with gratitude and joy.
We are both still the same guys who first met that earlier day, with one of the few notable changes being that now he sees me every morning, and I him, and very often at least one of us and sometimes both are not nearly as well dressed.
Monsignor Smith
