Rev. Richard J. Huelsman, SJ

I think my vocation began one summer evening when I was lying alone in the bottom of a drifting canoe. I was vacationing at the cabin of a high school friend on a little lake 150 miles north of Toronto. It was the summer of 1941, between my junior and senior years of high school. I can remember so clearly looking up at the stars, with the water gently lapping the sides of the canoe, and saying to myself, "What am I doing here?"

Well, not much else happened to promote my vocational thinking between high school and early college. I had thought of joining the Jesuits because I had admired some of them, but the decision was slow to mature.

Another factor that entered into my thinking was a certain emptiness and meaninglessness that I experienced in the life I was leading. For example, I can well remember coming home from a dance or a show or a basketball game with my friends, putting the car in the garage, walking back to the house, and looking up at the stars on a cold winter night and saying to myself: "Well, yes, it was all very nice - this dance or game or whatever. Great friends and a good time. But is this all there is to life?"

I also tried various jobs in the summer between semesters in college - jobs like factory work and farm work - but they, too left me much the same as Bono of the rock group U2: "I still haven't found what I'm looking for." This impression was further reinforced by another experience. A certain family of an acquaintance who very much liked the Jesuits gave me and a few friends the use of their cabin on Lake Erie. I will never forget walking along the beach early one morning and discovering the body of a man that had washed up on the beach. Apparently he had fallen off a tanker during the winter. It was an ugly sight: his body was all bloated and his eyes were popping out. Again, I said: "There must be more to life than this."

So on Sept. 12, 1943 I joined the Jesuits - and a transforming difference seemed to permeate my life. Now the least little task around the novitiate (as things were in those days) such as washing dishes, sweeping stairs or serving meals seemed charged with meaning and purpose. The tasks were being done for Someone who loved us so much and whose work I was furthering even though in such hidden ways, and I was doing it in the company of fellow Jesuits whom I both liked and admired. So joining the Jesuits turned out to be the best decision I ever made. When I add the thought of all the retreats and courses in prayer that I experienced and offered to others; the opportunities for hospital-visiting, the ways in which I was able to help youth, laypersons, religious sisters, and other priests - what a life it has been (and still is)! Besides that, all my physical needs and room and board are cared for.

Modern Jesuits also receive whatever training they need in such areas as advanced study and word-processing to add to their apostolic effectiveness. And so it all adds up to coming to my old age and knowing the most satisfying feeling in the world: my life was not wasted; my one and only chance to "be a success" before God was not wasted. That feeling is priceless.

In addition there were two other special moments of grace on my journey. One was this: In college, I was majoring in Chemistry. During my freshman year, in the springtime, I contracted a strep infection and had to miss a few classes. When I got back, my Instructor (Father Fred Miller, a man I greatly admired) had placed Easter Eggs in my Chemistry lab-drawer. It may not seem like much, but it said to me loudly and clearly that he cared about me. I thought: if the Jesuits are like this, I'd like to be one. Another moment of grace came when I first read Shelley's poem "Ozymandias". (I liked poetry even as a youth) Here it is:

I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stands in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lips, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing besides remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sand stretch far away.

All of this resonated in my soul (as it had done in the soul of St. Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits.) Why serve a King who can perish and is soon forgotten? Why not work for the King who lives forever and who will reward me with everlasting life and joy such as no earthly person can give.

So - putting it all together - that is why I am a Jesuit, supported and loved by so many brothers in Christ. This was the best decision I ever made. Someone somewhere has written: "What a life! And it is yours, O Jesuit Priest of Jesus Christ!"

Dear God, how can I ever thank you enough for calling me to share your love with so many people, with whom I will be living forever and ever?

Fr. Richard Huelsman, S.J. originally entered the Chicago Province but is currently a member of the Detroit Province.

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