Until You’re Giving

“Robby, you’re never going to be happy until you’re giving.” Monsignor McDonald spoke those words to me while I was visiting with him in his office at Saint Matthew’s in Dix Hills. As you know, he had been my pastor while I was growing up in the Moriches. I came to love him during those years, so I would always visit him wherever he was assigned. He was the priest who kept me rooted in the Church well before I knew much about the history and splendor of our Catholic Faith.

Anyway, on this occasion he had just heard my confession and afterward he said to me, “Robby, you’re never going to be happy until you’re giving.” Whatever else I said that evening in confession I must have conveyed to Monsignor McDonald that I was suffering some sadness - that I was dying inside.

Like other college students, I was enthralled by the social scenes that a fake ID makes possible and weighed down in the mud of sin. Monsignor knew that. And he would challenge that adolescent boy in me all the time, saying, “Picture my face!” and “Robby, just don’t!” But this time his words seemed directed not to the boy that I was, but to the man I might yet be. I think that’s why I remember so clearly where we were standing when he said them to me.

I didn’t know exactly what to do with the words, “You’re never going to be happy until you’re giving,” but I was smart enough to know they were Monsignor McDonald’s way of teaching me what Our Lord taught His disciples, “Whoever would lose his life for My sake will find it.” I knew then that I had to find some way to give. I needed to stop thinking like a boy, as if life were all about me, and to become a man. And though I didn’t know what it would look like for me - this “giving” - I had the sense that it was the secret fount of Monsignor’s own joy, and so I was open to recognizing it, should it be proposed to me by circumstance.

And the following year, after being invited to serve in different ways (through youth ministry, music, and liturgy) I began to experience what Monsignor McDonald meant. You might say I was “happy” to learn that he was right, even gladly setting aside my degree to work in a homeless shelter before entering the seminary. Who could have seen that coming? Maybe Monsignor McDonald.

Happiness is a funny thing. It has nothing to do with success. It has to everything to do with faithfulness and love. We are happy when we are faithful, first to our humanity, which was designed to give life, and then faithful to God, from whom all life flows.

During that time I would still go to Monsignor McDonald for confession, since I still fell into similar sins through weakness and inexperience in prayer, but I found that I was sinning less often and less severely. Rather, my visits to Monsignor were more to thank him for the joy that I was finding in trusting his words. +