What Magadan Teaches Fr. Michael Shields

What Magadan Teaches Fr. Michael Shields

People outside Russia usually ask me how I am doing and what I am doing in Magadan. I then give a litany of what we are doing in Magadan and at the end of the conversation I run to the nearest priest to confess the sin of exaggerating in order to look good.

One priest wrote me and asked a different question: what have I learned in Russia? This was a better and deeper question that caused me to chant a different litany. What have I learned these past years and what has Magadan taught me? Here is the answer I gave him.

I have learned to be a true spiritual father. I have fallen in love with the cross of Jesus. I have learned to be quiet and let God speak to me. I have learned to love Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament. I have learned to love and pray to Our Lady.

I have learned about the spiritual battle. I have learned that Satan is real and wants to destroy me, the Church, fatherhood, motherhood, and the family. The family is one of Satan’s favorite subjects to attack, and yet families keep struggling to be families. I have learned about real evil that destroys souls and the real good that reveals God’s face in another, especially in the poor and broken.

I have learned to love my weaknesses and to depend on God. I have learned that my strengths can lead me away from God. I have learned that I can be too independent and live as if God is my helper and not my savior.

Magadan has taught me to hope when it seems hopeless, to love when I don’t feel like it, to forgive when I am right and don’t want to forgive. I have learned that my faith is weak, and even so, miracles happen around me all the time. I have learned to embrace the cross and love the Eucharist.

I have learned that falling isn’t the hard part; the hard part is having enough humility to get up again and start over. I have learned that the Sacrament of Reconciliation is one of my greatest joys, both to receive and to give. I have learned that I love poorly but God loves perfectly.

Above all I have learned what it means to be a priest. The Mission to Magadan has taught me to really be His priest. In John 15: 1517:

“I shall not call you servants any more…I call you friends, because I have made known to you everything I have learned from my Father. You did not choose me, no, I chose you; and I commissioned you to go out and to bear fruit, fruit that will last …. What I command you is to love one another.” This is the definition of being a priest.

A priest is a friend of Jesus. I think the most important thing is to have a deep, loving, honest, and open relationship with our Savior, Jesus Christ, who is also our brother priest. Everything changes when we have this deep of a friendship with Jesus. But if we don’t have a deep personal friendship with him, it is a dead definition. And so is the priesthood.

Pope Benedict XVI said this in 2006: “Only when God is seen does life truly begin. Only when we meet the living God in Christ do we know what life is. We are not some casual and meaningless product of evolution. Each of us is the result of a thought of God. Each of us is willed, each of us is loved, each of us is necessary. There is nothing more beautiful than to be surprised by the Gospel, by the encounter with Christ. There is nothing more beautiful than to know Him and to speak to others of our friendship with Him.”

So what have I learned here in Magadan? God is a marvelous God who loves and loves and loves. Maybe these truths are for everyone to learn. What I now know is that God sent me to the city of the Gulags to get my attention, and I am so very thankful every day.

                                          

Sursa :

Magadan Catholic.Com, Newsletter din 17 Ianuarie 2014, ora 11:47 pm

Mission to Magadan, e-news January 2014