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Fr. Mark Andrews, SJ

As strange as it may sound, I think my Jesuit vocation began with the influence of the Marist Brothers, the religious order that taught me in high school. At an age when many teenage boys are looking for heroes beyond their father, I encountered highly capable men who sacrificed a great deal in order to provide us with a wonderful school environment, and who seemed to enjoy being with one another, sharing talents and prayer, possessions and laughter. I wanted to be like them, and in 1970, just barely 18 years old, I entered the Brothers' early formation program.

In those next few years of community life and mentorship, I felt both challenged and loved, enough of each that I began to face certain things in my life, problems and questions and fears, which I had studiously avoided earlier. It was a salutary experience to fall flat on my face doing practice teaching during my senior year of college, because it underlined with a big red pen how much I needed to grow up, before I could be a credible minister to others. With sadness but a real sense that God was giving me a nudge, I left the Brothers at graduation time.

As you might imagine, a callow young man with a B.A. in Theology was not a very salable commodity in the economic doldrums of 1974, but over the next seven years I managed to make my way in the world, in fields as diverse as personnel management and real estate appraisal. I liked feeling competent and having my own apartment and car, although I also began to realize that I would never enjoy the business world the way that my brother did.

The years of searching and uncertainty had also deepened my prayer life, and along with the attraction to religious life (which had never gone away) I became more interested in sacramental ministry. In God's providence, I began meeting

Jesuits through the parish and prayer group I belonged to. I found many of them quite impressive, but I had a hard time putting myself in the same picture with them. I knew that they went in for long years of schooling, and (at age 27!) 1 thought I was too old to begin that process. Also, I knew that many of them were involved in educational work, and I believed that my failure at practice teaching had permanently closed the door on that possibility. One day, when walking up Sheridan Road on the north side of Chicago, I was half praying, half musing on my future, saying to myself: "Well, I'm certainly interested in reentering religious life, but not with the Jesuits. The Jesuits are not a part of my plan." As soon as those words had formed in my mind, I heard a voice say to me quite clearly: "Who says this is your plan?" In my shock, I looked around to see who had said that. It had not been my voice, and I saw that no one was near me on the street. That mysterious moment began a process of self-surrender that (in one way) ended two and a half years later, when I entered Loyola House novitiate; in another way, the process continues today.

Thomas Merton once wrote that people embark upon a religious vocation expecting to make great sacrifices, and end up making sacrifices that they could never have predicted. This has certainly been true of my twenty-plus years in the Society, but I wouldn't trade a single minute of it for anything in the world. It took some muscular encouragement from a Provincial, Bob Wild, to get me back into a high school classroom; once there, eleven years after my crash-and-burn, I realized that I was finally ready to reclaim a dream. After several happy years of teaching, I was asked to become Novice Director, a job for which I felt unprepared, and which taught me to trust that the Holy Spirit would give me the insights or words that I needed, exactly at the moment that I needed them. And, just when I thought I'd be heading back to high school work, I was asked to consider full-time retreat ministry. I confess that it took me a number of weeks to pry my fingers off of "my plan," but having finally said yes, I find that God is here, richly so.

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