My father Joseph Charles Neu was born in July 1940, the second of eight
children to a rice farmer in Hamshire, Texas. Dad milked the cow every morning
and helped harvest rice every summer. He learned his prayers kneeling on the
truck floorboards as his father drove home on country roads after late nights
playing shuffleboard at the bar. He learned his religion in a small Catholic
church, where the priest had long bony fingers with which he would flick the
ears of misbehaving altar boys who messed up the Latin. Joe was good natured,
warm, and gregarious. He entered the Navy in 1958 and became a pharmacist’s
mate, work that he would continue in civilian life. He also got himself into
the kinds of trouble farm boys and sailors usually do. He told us he and his brother
Billy once tried to drown each other in the rice paddies, and another time he
and friends accidentally sunk a man’s boat.
Nevertheless, he kept confessing his sins on Saturday
and attending Mass on Sunday, right up until 1970. Dad never came to terms with
the loosening of morals in the 1960s and afterwards, and the revolution in
Catholic life brought by the Second Vatican Council disturbed him greatly. When
I tried to explain once in my youthful fervor that the Church’s teachings never
changed, he winced and without looking up replied, “Well, they changed on me.”
Shortly after the introduction of Paul VI’s new missal, one of those young
priests, so excited to be looking at everyone in the pews while saying Mass,
told him in confession that something he confessed “wasn’t a sin anymore.” Dad
was no saint, but he knew what sin was, and he knew he had committed it. If the
priests who had taken away his childhood religion were not even going to
chastise him for doing wrong anymore, what was the point? He left the church
that Saturday and rarely went back.
The journey home would take the rest of my father’s
life. In 1984, Joe married Amy, a nurse and former employee at his Bellaire,
Texas, pharmacy fourteen years his junior. She was Catholic and insisted that
her children would go to church on Sunday, so Dad started attending weekly Mass
as well. I was born the following year, and my brother Joshua the year after
that. I recall sometimes playing sick to try to get out of attending Mass, but
Dad had made a promise to Mom, and he kept it and made us keep it too. I only
stayed home if I was running a fever and throwing up. In grade school we moved
from the Houston area to Fredericksburg, a small German-settled town and
popular weekend getaway for Texas urbanites.
During my senior year of high school and then in
college, my own Catholic faith deepened, and I began strongly considering the
priesthood. My sophomore year, I told my parents. My mother was encouraging;
Dad was not. He had been an active Catholic, yes, but he still resented the
changes of the 1960s. The recent revelations of clerical sexual abuse added
another dimension; he did not want people to think his children were freaks or
perverts. But most of all, Dad was the consummate family man. He was the natural
leader among his siblings, interested in genealogy, and reached out to
relatives to keep them informed of his researches. That it was his eldest son
considering a celibate life struck him hard, since I took after him in many of
these respects. By this time he also had an inkling that Josh might consider
the priesthood as well. The possibility that both of his sons would become
priests, with no little Neus to carry on the family name, clearly dismayed him.
All of this came out during the summer before my junior
year and then again at the Christmas break. Dad and I would play rounds at the
local golf course, rounds that were more about talking things through than
working on our averages. By the end of the year, it seemed we were at an
impasse. My father was not ready to accept a son in the priesthood. I had come
to believe more strongly that this was my vocation, but it pained me to
disappoint a man I loved so much.
“Some providences are like Hebrew letters,” said John
Flavel, the seventeenth-century Puritan divine; “they must be read backwards.”
Flavel was right about this, but most of us desire to know our path forward
before we embark upon it. “Let us walk simply in the path where a merciful
providence leads us,” wrote Blessed Antoine-Frédéric Ozanam in a letter,
“content to see the stone on which we are to step, without wanting to see at
once and completely the windings of the road.” This I refused to do, and it led
me to make the most callous remark of my life. My brother Joshua and I were
driving around on errands during our Thanksgiving vacation, considering the
situation, when I hit upon a potential, if undesirable, resolution. “This will
sound bad and I don’t actually want it to happen,” I hedged, trying to soften
it. “But if Dad died before we became priests, it would almost be easier on
everyone.” It is painful to describe the glance with which he replied, but its
meaning was unmistakable.
The weekend of New Year’s Day, Josh and I assisted in
running a high-school retreat. Unlike prior youth retreats at the parish, this
one involved a number of traditional practices, including the rosary, morning
and evening prayer, and learning the Salve Regina in Latin. The kids seemed to enjoy it. Dad met us at the parish after
Sunday Mass. We went home, had lunch, and I packed up to return to college for
the spring semester. As I backed out of the driveway and started down the road,
my father waved and smiled from the front porch until I was no longer in sight.
A few weeks later, I made my usual weekend phone call home. Dad talked about
his recent round at the golf course and how he and Mom had celebrated their
anniversary.
The next day after lunch, a sense of uneasiness came
over me, and my studies were unfocused. That afternoon I received a call from
our college secretary asking whether I had spoken to my parents, but she didn’t
explain. I called Mom, who said she was at the hospital and that Dad was not
well. Somehow, she got off the phone without breaking down. About ten minutes
later his sister and her husband came to my apartment to tell me in person that
my father Joseph had had a massive heart attack on the second hole of the golf
course and died in the hospital. He was sixty-five.
My uncle drove me home that night, where I spent the
evening talking to Mom and waiting for Josh to arrive. It turns out that Dad
had lived long enough for Mom to meet him at the hospital. Mom said she knew
when she entered the room that he was not going to make it. She made a light
joke, upon which he smiled and then grimaced through the pain. He never opened
his eyes, but he asked her to give a last message to his sons. Then, she left
the room for a moment. The nurse reported that after she left, Dad turned away
and said, “We can go now,” and the electrocardiogram went flat. He never
revived.
The message? Dad wanted me to know that if it was what I
wanted, he was fine with my becoming a priest. During the last month, Dad had
heard from several parents of children at the retreat about what it had meant
to them. It seems that he understood what being a priest of the Church could
mean in a kind of pastoral dimension, and that he was at peace with it. Mom
said she had encouraged Dad to tell me over the phone, but he planned to wait
for spring break.
My father had made a journey of more than thirty years
down “the windings of the road,” from rejecting the Church and Her priesthood
to joyfully accepting the possibility of his sons entering it at his death.
That unknown sin of 1970, that felix culpa, led my father down a hard road, but one that ultimately brought him to
see the goodness in God and the Church.
The night we buried Dad, I went to bed convinced I was
going to become a priest. I went back to school the next week and dropped one
of my engineering classes, anticipating I would not need it. But I carried the
pain of my father’s death with me, and it needed an outlet. It happened that
semester that I was sharing a weekly hour of adoration at the Catholic chapel
with a young woman from school. For the first three or four weeks, I spent half
the time at adoration just sobbing and telling her about my father, whom she
had never known. After several weeks, it became clear that we had developed
feelings for each other. I broke off the budding relationship shortly before
Easter, thinking I was still destined for the priesthood, but almost
immediately I regretted it.
That summer I went home to think through my vocation in
earnest, while she went to Spain for a summer abroad. I visited with my local
bishop and vocations director, and also talked to a psychologist, a Catholic
whom I trusted. Ultimately, I realized that my love of family life and
relationships was more than a trait I shared with my late father. About a week
before starting my senior year, I called the girl and suggested that we go to
dinner. We were engaged the following summer and are currently expecting our
fourth child.
My father’s death was providential. Before he passed, I
was convinced that I had a priestly vocation. Had he lived until spring break,
I would likely have been confirmed in that understanding. Instead, his death in
January led me to the deepening of my relationship with the woman who would
become my wife.
But providence was not done working through the death of
my father. For that is also the nature of providence—the winding road sometimes
carries us back to old familiar territory. While I turned towards marriage, my
brother Joshua looked instead to the priesthood. He was in part encouraged by
that deathbed message from my father. Joshua entered the seminary after completing
college and then went to the North American College in Rome to complete his
studies. As is customary for the Rome-bound seminarians, he was ordained a
deacon at Saint Peter’s Basilica.
For the ordination, my wife and I traveled to Rome with
more than a dozen extended family members. We even had the joy of sharing the
news of my wife’s first pregnancy over dinner that week. Included in the group
was Dad’s oldest brother, Billy, the one he tried to drown in the rice dikes
all those years ago. Billy had not had the easiest life and had not been to
Mass in some time, but the trip to Rome for the ordination left a deep
impression on him. When he got home, he went to confession for the first time
in a long, long while. And then he started going to Mass again. He grumbled to
his sisters about having to get up every Sunday, but he did.
And then, about a month or two after his return to the
sacraments, Billy died. The Church teaches us that while we can never know with
certainty in this life where we or others end up after death, we can have a
firm hope in God’s providence that those who die in Her bosom will see God in
heaven. Uncle Billy lived his last few months in the Church, and my hope in his
salvation is very firm indeed. In Dad’s last words and blessing, he helped set
in motion his son’s priestly vocation, which would, in turn, also save his
brother.
Providence, Saint Thomas tells us, is in the ordering of
creation to an end, especially to its final end. Events and actions lead
creation toward that final end. Our marriages and religious vocations and our
participation in the life of the sacraments are our own cooperation with that
providence, working out God’s grace in our lives. God can take all things, even
death, and use them in furtherance of the goal that we might all join Him in
Heaven.
The mystery of life is that we cannot see this worked
out all at once, but only slowly and with recollection of God’s blessings in
our lives. We may neither anticipate it, as I tried to do, nor be passive in
the face of it. Rather, we must walk the windings of the road, content only to
see the next stone that God has placed in our path, and trust Him to lay that
road to our salvation.
Jake Neu is a patent
attorney in Nashville, Tennessee.