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Fr. Tim Hipskind, SJ

The idea of being a priest did not enter my head until I was 27 years old. It's not that I had some big conversion at 27 either. I was fairly active as a lay person in the church by then and presumed I would continue to serve God in that capacity. So in my vocation story, the early chapters are really about lay ministry, and I suppose the very first chapter really has to be about a time when I really did not want to have anything to do with the church.

My parents were both very active as lay persons in the church. My father had gone to high school seminary and both served in various leadership roles at our parish, in the Cursillo movement, and other church related programs. I did not find their "encouragement" (Read, "they me made do it.") very helpful, and as soon as I could I got far away from church.

But something drew me back, and even before I was out of undergraduate, I began to find things about the church that really attracted me. Mainly, I began to get involved in community service projects, and later retreats until, when I got to a parish which had neither, I began to organize them myself. I suppose part of the reason that I never considered religious life at this time was the fact that I was engaged to be married, but even after it was clear that that engagement was a mistake, I continued to think only of working in the church as a lay person.

As I got more and more involved, I befriended a man who "happened" to be the diocesan vocation director. I suppose I was attracted to him because his philosophy of vocation was that everyone has a vocation.

I found myself intrigued by that notion, and as I began to do the discernment exercises that he was feeding me, I began to find myself less and less interested in the Engineering work that I was doing and more and more interested in the work I was doing at the parish and for the Diocesan Young Adult Ministry Taskforce of which I was a member. I remember staring the Bible which I had carried to work in my briefcase. I used the computers at work (which were equipped with this great new invention called "word processing programs!!!") to write and compose many of the documents I was using in my church work. As I stared at the Bible, I began to realize just how much more attractive the church work was, how truly rewarding and fulfilling it was. My Engineering work paled in comparison.

I even took a year off from my Engineering career to work for the church full-time. It was a wonderful year, but I finished the year thinking that I still wanted to find a better mix of my Engineering work and my faith.

As a result of the discernment exercises he offered me, I began to put together a fairly detailed description of the type of work and the lifestyle that I felt called to. Interestingly enough the idea of priesthood or religious life still had not occurred to me. At one point the notion of studying theology and philosophy had appealed to me but that did not go anywhere.

It was during an interview with the owner of a small construction company that things began to move me toward the Jesuits. Near the end of the interview, the man told me, "I don't think you should work for this company, I think you should be a priest." Well the comment made me extremely mad at the time because I frequently encountered the prejudice that anyone who entertained holy thoughts needed to get out of secular life and into religious life, or vice-versa, if you were a lay person you could not know anything about the spiritual life. That night, however, the comment came back to me and all of a sudden a kind of sense of profound peace came over me. "I could do that" I thought.

All of a sudden, all the pieces of the puzzle began to fall into place and I felt a kind of wave of energy that ended up carrying me all the way to the novitiate. In retrospect, it seems like it would have been good to slow down and sort through some of the things that were rushing me headlong into the Society (the time between the interview with the construction company manager and my entrance was less than eight months), but I am not sure that I could have done it any other way.

Another part of my story is the fact that, when I entered, I was not clear about whether I felt called to be a priest or a brother. All I knew was that I wanted to be a Jesuit and that seemed like enough to the vocation director.

My sense of call to the priesthood came only after being in the Jesuits for about seven years. I was working in campus ministry at a university and was attending a weekly Thursday night mass with a group of students who lived on the same floor where I was living as a kind of chaplain. One time the priest asked me to prepare some reflection to offer during the homily time. As I began to prepare these, I realized that what I was preparing would not be good for the students at all, and so I began to rewrite them in a way that would. I was so captivated by this occurrence: by close contact with the students I had come to know enough about their spirituality that I had a sense of what God might be wanting to speak to them and God was using me as a mouthpiece. This sense was encouraged by the fact that I got positive feedback from the students and from other people with whom I worked that.

It took me a long time to be able to articulate what was the feedback that I was hearing, but finally the year before my ordination I realize what I was hearing. People seemed to be saying, "We want you to tell the story this time." All my life, in different places and from different people, I had been hearing the Christian story. Some people did not tell the story as much with words as with actions, but I was getting the message. As I was meeting with and talking with people in spiritual setting, I began to draw on this rich treasure chest of experience and wisdom. It shaped what I said and the questions I would ask, etc. Well, as I began to share I began to get positive feedback and feel that people were pushing me forward to "share the story."

I continue to learn new dimensions to the story and find more depths to parts I had visited before. All of it seems to be calling to more and more immersion in the story and the Jesuits provides an excellent vehicle for me to do just that.

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