An Adventure Story

Why did I become a priest? It is a question to me at sixty-five about me at fifteen, but also a question from the American late 1990s about the Irish late 1940s. And quite often the question is prompted by one or more of these three inquiries.

Was I particularly pious as a boy? No, at least not in any sense of that word I knew then or have come to recognize since. I did become an altar boy at the early age of eight, but I recall that choice primarily in response, as it were, to a series of dares. Could I learn by heart the Mass responses in a Latin I did not then understand? Could I handle the thurible at Benediction so that the priest got the incense on the hot coals and I did not get the hot coals on him? Could I light the tall (very tall) candles on the high (very high) altar by stretching the lit taper one-handed above my head to connect with a wick I could not see, preferably without setting any altar linens on fire in the process? It may have been piety, but I thought of it as fun, as adventure, as seeing the inside of something mysterious, and maybe even, at eight and after, as a sort of instant adulthood.