For the Sake of Others
Although we may not know the path for ourselves, the desire to know it is itself worthy.
By Nathan Beacom
Fr. John Acrea has been a priest for sixty years. Many of those years have been spent with young people, and today he works at the same high school where he began teaching and counseling students in 1962 (he shakes his head ruefully whenever that decade comes up, but he’s loved each chapter). His has been a long faithfulness, faithfulness to a call that came to him, not in thunder or lightning or through mystical experience, but through what seems to have been a quiet, practical process. It was a call that was drawing him to serve the needs of people he had never met and could not imagine, one that would place him at the right place and right time in ways he could never have designed.
John Acrea was born in Missouri Valley, Iowa, a small town, as you might imagine, near the Missouri River. It is nestled in the Loess Hills that run the length of the western side of the state. These formations are the result of prehistoric winds that collected Loess from miles around and piled them up into the beautiful hills we see today. Contrary to the vision of flatness that typifies outsider stereotypes of the state, Missouri Valley is nestled in a lovely, wooded hill country. John grew up on a farm outside of town, but his parents, he says, were “pretty faithful . . . they were pretty much into it, you know. Had us say our prayers every night.” They always drove into town for mass and a weekly religious education class, and that was just a part of life.
The idea of priesthood first occurred to him in junior high, just as a thought, but then, “well . . . I hit puberty I guess would be the way to say it, and then you gotta rethink priesthood. I basically just forgot about it until senior year of high school.” He got to know a young guy in the town who had entered the seminary, and his example made the path seem like a real, viable option. Like many young people who take the idea of vocation seriously, he struggled to know which direction was right: priesthood or family life?
“Don’t try superstition,” Father Acrea advises those discerning their path in life. “Most of us try that first,” he laughs, “but it doesn’t work.” And he should know, having observed these many decades of young people looking for their own paths. Throughout his priestly service at the high school, he would continue his education in graduate programs over the summer, gaining competency in counseling and further educational credentials. Across his career, he has also been a pastor, a director of vocations for the Diocese of Des Moines, and spiritual director at the seminary of Saint John Vianney in St. Paul, Minnesota.
I didn’t know why I was called when I was called. After being a priest for twenty years, or thirty, or sixty, what you find out is that God was thinking ahead of you, and the people I was called for, I didn’t know yet.
The young John Acrea, faced with a fork in the vocational road at the end of high school, decided to place his own future in the hands of fate. He applied to two colleges, Loras College, a Catholic school in Iowa, and the University of Northern Iowa. He decided he would go with whichever school offered him the best scholarship. “I thought, you know, well this’ll be simple. If I get a scholarship to Loras, that means I’m supposed to be a priest and if I get a scholarship to UNI, then I’m not.” Well, wouldn’t you know it, the two letters came back with exactly equivalent scholarships, “to the penny.”
He ended up just going to Loras in case seminary was right, though he didn’t enter right away. His description of his discernment process is “well, I just decided to go for it, and . . . well I liked it, and I stayed that year and the next year and the next year and . . . became a priest. That’s the story. It’s a lot more anguishing than it sounds like, though, because when you drop a letter in the mailbox to sign up for the priesthood, it’s kind of scary, you know. I remember that ten minutes fairly clearly. Going up the steps to the post office. I didn’t really have a lot of difficulty staying in seminary once I began, though, I liked the studies, teaching, and visiting the hospitals.”
I asked him a bit further about his process of discerning his vocation. How does it work, and how did it work for him? “Well, like I said, you try superstition first, or a lot of people do, and then you find out, well, that doesn’t work. Then you just begin to think about a lot of things. I didn’t know why I was called when I was called. After being a priest for twenty years, or thirty, or sixty, what you find out is that God was thinking ahead of you, and the people I was called for, I didn’t know yet. But then when I think back, I think gee whiz, maybe out of God’s knowledge he said ‘I’m gonna need you.’ You get high flying ideas about your vocation when you’re trying to figure it out, but you really won’t know until later, when you look back. And that works very strangely sometimes.” For Father Acrea, the past six decades have found him, not by his will, pushed into the right place and time to be of service, like those instances where he has bumped into a random stranger happening to look for reconciliation or been a place of wise counsel and understanding for a struggling young person.
“You know you have lots to think about, when you think about vocation. What is it gonna be like, am I going to like it? The thing to do is just say ‘well, I’m gonna try it and just get it out of my system.’ So, one way or another. I won’t have to be worrying about whether I answered my call or not. I’ve talked to a number of people, adults in middle age, who feel they missed their vocations. Not that they aren’t happy, but they feel they’ve missed their call.”
This, it strikes me, is a cornerstone of vocational discernment, the chief thing is to give a damn.
I asked Father what he had learned from working with young people across six decades. How had they changed? Did they approach vocations differently now than in decades past? “I did have a few years where I was at parishes, but then I went back to the high school. The sixties were over, and it was wonderful. eighty to eighty-nine were good years.” In the nineties he served as vocation director for the diocese and then worked at the seminary in Minnesota until he got old enough that he feared somebody would have to go collect his stuff from up there if he died. He moved back to Iowa to retire, but finds himself busier now than when he was working. “I go to the high school, help out parishes, say mass as Simpson college . . . and when you’re older,” he laughs “you spend about half the day at the doctor’s every day.”
“Today the kids are asking a lot of questions, and that’s good. And more of them go to mass now. You used to only get seven, now you get a 150 sometimes.” I asked him if counseling students was different now than in years past: “No, I think the problems are basically the same. I think there’s a certain openness to talking about things that there wasn’t in the old days. The other thing that’s new is social media is driving kids crazy. It screws up their minds. They think they don’t have what it takes. They’re not happy, they’re not beautiful, they don’t have this, they don’t have that.” I asked whether that makes it harder for kids to listen to what they’re being called to, or does it make them more hungry for a more meaningful life? “I think that’s right. A more meaningful way of life. Because it’s pretty empty otherwise. And then you try to fill it with social media, which is made to be addictive. It used to be noisy after class in the hallway. Now they exit the classroom and they just quietly look down at their phones.”
“The thing is, with the priesthood, if you get to love people, and they love you back, then that’s all you need in life. It’s as simple as that. I remember thanking God after I once spent a night with an old woman dying in the hospital, with all her family telling her how much they loved her and how good she was to them. And I was driving home the next morning and the sun was coming up and I thought: It’s good to be a priest, you know.”
Before speaking with Father Acrea, I asked a few young priests in the diocese how he had impacted their lives. The first of them, Father Max, spoke about Acrea’s fatherly nature, about how he always took the route of gentleness and mercy as a counselor and spiritual advisor. That example, Max said, communicated to him the mercy and gentleness of Jesus, and inspired his own desire to spread mercy and forgiveness as a priest. The second priest, Father Reed, described Father Acrea’s reaction when he was just starting to consider the idea of priesthood. Acrea responded with a typically frank simplicity “thank God you actually give a damn.” This, it strikes me, is a cornerstone of vocational discernment, the chief thing is to give a damn. Desiring to do what one is called to do might be called the beginning of grace. Although we may not know the path for ourselves, the desire to know it is itself worthy, and we may be confident that the good work begun in us will be brought to completion.
Nathan Beacom is a writer and the director of the Lyceum Movement in Des Moines, Iowa.