Archbishop Cushley is celebrating 40 years as a priest.
He spoke at the annual National Pilgrimage in Carfin yesterday about his vocation and the importance of being open to God's will.
Watch here. Transcript below.
My dear friends,
It’s a great pleasure to join you here at Carfin Grotto on the happy occasion of our national pilgrimage, traditionally in honour of Saint Margaret and Saint John Ogilvie.
Bishop Joseph Toal also asked me if I would preside and preach today, as this year marks 40 years in the priesthood for me, and I’m honoured to be able to do this in my home diocese of Motherwell.
As some of you may know, I served six years in Motherwell Diocese as an assistant priest and as a chaplain in our high schools. Six years.
Meantime, I have now served 12 years in the Archdiocese of Saint Andrew & Edinburgh. But don’t worry: I feel very much at home in both east and west…!
My vocation, my calling to the priesthood, takes me back 50 years to 1975 and to something very simple: being persuaded by a teenage friend to go on a school trip to Rome.
Like this year, 1975 was a jubilee year and so my school, Holy Cross in Hamilton, went on a pilgrimage that took us to Rome, so that I found myself standing in Saint Peter’s Square on Easter Sunday in 1975, being blessed in a full and jubilant square with 100,000 other people by Pope Paul VI now Pope Saint Paul VI.
Sometime after that I went to speak to my mother and father about a growing idea that I had, that perhaps I should go to Blairs to test a vocation to the priesthood.
They agreed to this, perhaps a wee bit reluctantly at first, but for the next 10 years I was in training and, in 1985 I was ordained to the priesthood after four years in Blairs and six years in the Scots College in Rome.
Importantly, back then I can remember thinking, “Well I’m prepared to give myself to being a priest, but there are one or two things I don’t really want to have to do.
As I’m going to be a priest of Motherwell Diocese, I won’t be going to the missions, I won’t be working in other dioceses in Scotland, I won’t need to travel far, and I will always be a 20-minute car ride from my mum and dad’s house.
Little by little, however, I began to realise that the Lord had other plans for me. I began to realise that what I thought was my vocation to the priesthood turned out to be the Lord’s vocation to the priesthood. And think about it for a minute.
When you hear the words “my vocation” you can think of it in two ways. It’s either something that belongs to me because it’s my vocation, or it’s the Lord’s call to me, and in that sense it is my vocation.
In other words, what the Lord is calling me to do. Sure, the latter way of seeing it was something I understood in theory, but the transition from the first version of “my vocation” to the second version of “my vocation” has taken place in me over these last 40 years. And it came slowly but surely.
I came to realise in a very real and concrete way that my vocation was not my vocation at all.
It was the Lord’s calling to me, and it was the Lord’s work. And so, predictably, inevitably, the Lord’s calling to me has taken me to all sorts of places I never ever dreamed of going to as a man, as a missionary, or as a priest.
It took me to seven countries in Africa, two in Europe and one in America.
It took me places where I had to learn the language, it took me into danger, it took me into meeting people who are now among my dearest friends, it took me away my father before he died, and it took me to some of the most wonderful, important and formative experiences of my life.
Answering the call of Jesus Christ has been a most wonderful adventure, and I can recommend it to anyone who has heard even just the bat squeak of a call, whether you’re a young man or young woman.
I have made my best friends and my lifelong friends. I have been very happy and fulfilled as a man and as a priest, and I continue to be so with God’s good grace and his Spirit accompanying me, in spite of my limited gift-of-self.
God asked for more; he did so gently and gradually, and he made my vocation to serve him into something better: he made it into his vocation to serve him.
The readings that we have just heard are those for today, the 23rd Sunday of the year (Year C).
They are a surprise and a coincidence, and they serve my purpose very well, because they describe how to know the will God and what it is to do the will of God.
The first reading, from the book of Wisdom, has the tagline, “Who can discern the will of God?” In other words, how can we come to know the will of God? What is its importance for us?”
This is something so central to discipleship, that you don’t really trouble about it too much when you’re young, when your life is an unwritten page.
But over forty years of priesthood, I have learned that I’m not in fact in charge.
A lot of it isn’t up to me.
I have learned that I really do not have the agency that I thought I did when I was first ordained.
Back then, I thought at least some of it was up to me and the rest up to the Lord. Sure, I had promised to be celibate; I had promised obedience to my Bishop; I had promised to pray the Liturgy of the Hours every day.
Those would be the main challenges, I thought, but I also thought that the rest would largely be up to me. I would go wherever my Bishop sent me and I would do my best to be cheerful about it.
I had no wish to serve in the missions, I had no desire to work in dioceses beyond Motherwell, and I was quite content here in Lanarkshire. So far so good then.
But that all changed only six years after starting to work in the parishes here and, when I was asked out the blue to work for the pope and the Holy See abroad, all of these rather soft but definite red lines of mine started to dissolve.
I did end up working in mission countries; I did end up working in dangerous places away from Scotland; I also ended up learning a lot about the local Catholic churches, about the wonderful family that the Catholic Church is throughout the world, about the profound communion and charity that we all share with each other throughout the world, in communion with the Successor of Saint Peter and the See of Rome.
All those things that I never expected to have to do or especially wanted to do, one by one the Lord asked me to do them.
I learned the hard way something that we say in the Our Father every single day, something at the heart of what we need as a disciple of Jesus of Nazareth.
We must endeavour to find the will of God for us and to embrace it willingly and lovingly.
Without thinking about it, every time we say the Our Father, we say “Thy will be done” - we usually don’t give it a second thought, but it is at the very heart of what it means to be a disciple, and what it means to be a priest of Jesus Christ.
So, when I pray nowadays, I find myself often noticing that part of the Our Father.
I find myself saying, “Lord, let you will be done”. I find myself endeavouring to want what the Lord wants.
Of course, I don’t always know what it is the Lord wants of me, but I try to put myself at the disposal of the Lord, so that I will do His will, and in doing so that I will be happy, that I will be blessed, and that others will be blessed too.
The gospel reading has a similar, if rather stronger, version of that message. Jesus, speaking to all his disciples, says “Anyone who does not hate father or mother or brother or sister is not worthy of me.
Anyone who does not hate his life is not worthy of me”. These are strong words, and they show us clearly the blue water, the real distance that we need to put between what we want and what the Lord wants for us.
As the famous playwright Robert Bolt nearly says in one of his plays, we can want what we want, but we don’t always get what we want.
In other words, we might be better learning to want what it is that God wants for us and find out happiness in fulfilling His will.
The good news is that the Lord is patient with us. It took me a long, long time to see that: not just to be cheerfully obedient, not just to be happily celibate, not just to say my prayers. All of these are absolutely essential and wonderfully liberating and preparative for the life of a priest in today’s world.
But to find a way to embrace the Lord’s will for you and to embrace it willingly is perhaps one of the most important lessons I’ve ever learned and that I would want for all of you as well.
If we wish to be the Lord’s disciples, we may have to be ready to give up an awful lot. Of course, it may never happen.
But as our Lord says in the last line of today’s gospel, unless we are prepared to let it all go, we cannot be His disciples.
Or, to flip it round and put it more positively, we must endeavour, every day, in our prayers in our actions, to find the will of God for us and to embrace it willingly and lovingly whenever the call comes and wherever it leads us.
Thanks for listening and God bless you all!
