How I conceptualize the genesis of my vocation
Today, many years later, as I look back at the genesis of my vocation, I can understand two expressions that explain how God is always at work in human history and how he always manages to "pull the strings" or "makes good things happen", even in adverse situations, because God wants to lead human history along the path of salvation.
"God writes straight with crooked lines" – Known and translated into practically every language, this Portuguese expression dates back to the sixteenth century. It is used, and even abused in theology, to say that despite the crookedness of man’s ways, God always manages to get His will done. He does not need straight lines to write straight; He always writes straight even when the lines are crooked. He writes on and between the lines, leading human history to a happy ending.
"Every cloud has a silver lining" – It means much the same thing as the previous proverb. God can make good come out even from evil; nothing is impossible for God, as the Scripture says. This thought was already in St. Augustine’s mind when he called Adam's sin "Felix culpa". Adam sinned and that was bad, but God "took advantage" of it and devised a plan B in preparing the world for the sending of his Son.
Promise or grace?
It was on October 13, 1951, when my mother at the age of 35 eloped with my father, who was 13 years her junior. They got married at 3:00 a.m. in the parish church of my hometown, Loriga, in Serra da Estrela. Since Mass could not be celebrated before dawn, they left for Fatima on a pilgrimage. There, only God knows if my mother made a promise or if she asked for a grace, since she could not remember when we talked about it many years later.
She asked for the grace to have a son who would be a priest or, fearing that she could not conceive due to her advanced age, she promised that if she had children, one would become a priest. My older brother entered the Divine Word seminary in Tortosendo, Portugal, but after one year he returned home. It was not his vocation.
In those days, struggling with the Oedipus Complex, I lived with the belief that my mother did not love me, in part because she rarely demonstrated any signs of affection. She hardly ever touched me unless it was to slap me; even worse, she teased me a lot, making fun of me along with my two older brothers. And she gave me nicknames to make the whole family laugh, which I did not find it funny at all.
Today I know that my mother always loved me, but in her own way, a love that manifested itself more in deeds than in physical or verbal expressions. I also learned from my father that she suffered from not knowing how to or being able to express her affections. I saw this in the cold manner she treated my nephews, her grandchildren. But this was the darkness from which God used to call me since I was a child.
This coldness and distance contrasted greatly with the affection my teacher, Miss Soledade, had for me, who, unlike my mother, was very affectionate, especially towards me. It did not make me feel good to receive affection from someone who did not have to give it to me and not receive it from someone who should give it to me. Disgusted by such kindness, one day I kicked my teacher and I remember with regret that she cried and ended up with a nosebleed; she punished me, but she did not take revenge or stop liking me.
Kids’ stuff?
Because of my brother dropping out of seminary, my mother cried for a whole week because of the non-fulfillment of her promise or non-realization of grace. Seeing the days go by and her tears continuing to flow, I thought, in my childish mind, that this was the best opportunity to win my mother's love. It was then that I told her not to worry, that I would enter the seminary and become a priest.
My mother paid little attention to that promise, as she must have thought it was just kids’ stuff. But there are children who determine or decide what to do with their lives very early on; I was not the only one. In fact, I compare myself to another child, a Canadian who, at the same age as me, also decided what to do with the rest of his life. His name is Ryan Hreljac who, upon hearing that the main cause of death for many children in third world countries was the lack of clean, safe water, he raised funds to build a well in Africa. After the first, others followed; today, not yet 30 years old, he is a hydraulic engineer and continues to build wells in Africa.
During my school years, the promise I made to my mother was not a recurring thought, I would even say that it was forgotten, wiped from my mind. I lived a normal childhood, like a wild colt, always going on adventures with my friends. In those days, there was no patch of land that I did not know well, that I had not explored.
I remember that I used to look at my village with a certain disdain, as it is surrounded by mountains, without great horizons: I nicknamed Loriga a bowl. When I went to Portela de Arão and looked out over the vast expanse of land that overlooked Seia, Viseu and Guarda, I remember being drawn to the horizon...
In fact, this taste for adventure and the unknown world made me try to run away from home one day. In those days, I was probably fed up with my family, and the school where the teacher beat me every day. At home, my mother made fun of me, as did my older brothers, and my father was very strict, which meant I was beaten by him almost every day.
One day, before dawn, I quietly sneaked out from home to meet up with the friend with whom I was going to run away from home. We went up to the school rooftop, huddled together, awaiting the first light of day so we could set off towards that horizon...
The only problem was that my mother had heard the door creak and sent my father to make sure all the children were in bed. My father raised the alarm when he did not see me. That day happened to be the market day. He went straight to the school rooftop, called me and asked me what I was doing. I did not say anything, but he thought I had gone early to wait for the stallholders, because my parents had promised me days earlier that they would buy me some new boots at the market that day. The truth is that I was going to run away from home and my parents, to this day, never found out.
Moreover, life was hard, my family was poor. The sardines were split three ways, often at night we went to bed with only a plate of corn porridge, without sugar or milk. I remember one day, my brothers and I caught a snake with a trout inside its mouth; we killed the snake and brought the trout home, thinking we were going to eat it...
But that was not what happened, because on that very day my mother had nothing to make for the dinner that I was going to take to my father at the factory; the trout came to my mother like a great blessing.
One egg mixed with a lot of flour and a few pieces of cod was a meal for the whole family. It was not customary, but I always made a point to celebrate my birthday and that day required eating one entire egg all by myself. On one occasion, my birthday came and there were no eggs in the house. I went to check on the chickens, as I was often the one who looked after them.
I groped and felt that one hen was about to lay egg; I followed it to the haystack and it nestled down in the middle of the hay. I stayed close to it and, as it was slow to lay egg, I fell asleep and woke up when I felt something warm in my hand: it was the egg and the hen had laid it right into my hand. I hurried home and fulfilled my own birthday tradition. To this day, I still celebrate my birthday with a fried egg.
Around this time, a missionary visited our school and told us about his adventures in Africa; I was immediately captivated. I was a mediocre student and probably would not have taken the exam if my teacher, Mr. Coutinho, had not asked each one of us what we wanted to be after primary school. I was quick to answer: I wanted to be a missionary.
My teacher had been a seminarian and was a believer who never missed a Sunday Mass; when he heard my answer, he set off to place me right next to his desk. I immediately saw that, although he did not give a damn about me, he was now going to push me to prepare for the final exam in fourth grade. And so it happened, with his help I passed the final exam that gave me access to the preparatory cycle.
I knew what I wanted
After the final exam in elementary school, I rushed home from school as usual with the news that I had passed, my mother asked, "What do you want to do now?" "I want to be a missionary," was my immediate answer. My mother rejected the idea, saying, "Do you want to end up like your brother? Go in and not finish the year like he did?”,"No," I replied, "I will get to the priesthood!" I said, "Do you not remember the promise I made?" It is likely that she still remembered the promise, these are the things that mothers keep in their hearts, because the fact is that when I reminded her of the promise, she began to take my words seriously.
We immediately started looking for a seminary and contacted the old seminary where my brother had failed. There were no vacancies or the conditions and the tuition fees were too high; the same happened at the Comboni Missionaries of Viseu. Unable to find a place in these two missionary congregations, my mother asked Fr. Barreiros, the parish priest of my hometown, for help. The latter, forgetting my missionary vocation, tried to send me to the diocesan seminary in Fundão.
It was the same for my mother, but I embarrassed her when I vehemently refused to enter the diocese; my dream was to be a missionary, which she understood because apparently, she had considered this vocation in her younger days.
We reached an impasse that lasted for days, when my parish priest wanted to send me to the diocese with my mother's half-approval, but I would not give in. Finally, my parish priest relented, telling my mother that he had found a more favorable missionary congregation, the Consolata Missionaries of Fatima, with a minor seminary in Vila Nova de Poiares, near Coimbra.
Once the necessary contacts were made, I went there. I was only ten when I left home for the first time, in October. My father took me there, and the world came crashing down around me when I saw him leave. Back home I lived very independently of my parents, but they, my friends and my siblings were all I ever known.
When my father left, I felt very alone for the first time, without my family, without my friends, and I cried bitterly; this was the price I had to pay. However, the thought of leaving, of going back to the familiarity of my home, never entered my mind.
Determining factors in my vocation other than my mother
Come to think of it, there had to be other factors that contributed to the genesis of my vocation other than my mother. These factors exist and my mother was perhaps just the trigger that made me decide. Let me then list them, both the negative and the positive ones.
I was a happy child among my street group of friends; we were 3 Jorge(s), two Fernanda(s) and one Carlitos. At school, I was a poor student academically and was very unhappy there, getting beaten almost every day at a time when physical punishment was acceptable and expected in school. Many days, I skipped school, and no one would notice because I left and returned to the house at the appropriate time like someone who had been to school; but I spent the days alone in the hills.
In addition to these two negative factors, there were other positive factors that have guided my life. A missionary had come to my school and told us about Africa and his adventures there. He got us all excited with his stories about Africa, and me as I have always liked adventures and foreign lands.
My mother had been a catechist and a singer in the parish and had revealed to the family that at one point in her life she had thought of becoming a missionary.
Western movies and comics had always fascinated me because of the adventures they depicted in which the cowboy always played the role of the good guy, the savior, without asking for anything in return for himself. I was fascinated by the fact that after liberating the town from bandits, the cowboy never agreed to marry the girl who had fallen in love with him in the meantime, nor did he accept the sheriff's star offered to him by the townspeople. The movie always ended with him saying goodbye, riding west, in search of another city where justice and peace needed to be restored.
The year I was due to take the fourth and final grade of primary school, and because he considered me a bad student, Professor Coutinho put me at the back of the class, along with the students he had decided not to propose to take the national exam of the fourth grade. One fine day, however, a few months before the exam, he asked the students what they wanted to be after the fourth grade. I said I wanted to be a missionary. The teacher listened and fell silent.
The following day, when he arrived in school, he called me and changed my seat to the desk next to his desk. That meant that he was going to send me to take the exam and that he was going to push me, giving me a special preparation so that I could pass the exam, which I did. Later, I learned that he had been a seminarian.
Is this vocation mine or my mother's?
After the years at Poiares, I went to Fatima, then to Abrantes, then to Cacém, Valladolid and Madrid. I saw many of my classmates drop out of school while I did not have a single vocational crisis. I faked a crisis after finishing high school in Abrantes in order to make sure that I would remove any influence my mother had on my vocation: I convinced her that I was leaving the seminary and all summer she thought that in fact I had left; either she did not believe me or she did not make a big deal out of it....
After the summer break, I went to college in Cacém, my choice, not hers. My other crisis was artificially brought on by Fr. Darius, who convinced me that this was not the life for me; he was so convincing that I accepted it.... I spent perhaps the only night of my life in vigil and during the night I realized that it was not true, that this was really my vocation and I told him so the next day. He accepted it, so my departure did not happen.
After many vicissitudes and doubts on the part of my instructors, never on my part, at the age of 28, on May 4, 1985, a month after my birthday, I was ordained in the chapel of our seminary in Fatima by the then bishop of Guarda, Dom António dos Santos. It had all started in Fatima with my mother's promise, and everything was fulfilled in Fatima.
Today, when people ask me how my vocation came about, they expect a very different answer from the one I give them, because they think that it came about in my youth, like many people’s today, or even in adulthood. They are amazed when I tell them that at the age of six, I wanted to be what I am today.
Conclusion – The need to console my mother led me to discover my vocation as a Consolata missionary, a vocation that has given me the opportunity to bring the consolation of the Gospel to thousands of people.
Fr. Jorge Amaro, IMC
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