It only took
a week or two of Mr. Holder’s European History class for me to see that this
teacher was something special. His fast paced lectures traced coherent threads
through jumbles of names and dates. He was a master of the telling quotation
and the witty aside. He even arrived to class in costume a few times. I was entranced,
convinced of some deep kinship with this man, as he was connected to so much
that was most important to me. And that was before I learned he was a priest.
He came to
class one day in a black suit and clerical collar. He’d be leaving after lunch,
he explained. One of his parishioners had died, and he needed to officiate at
the funeral. Aha! A priest. So that was why we’d spent two whole days on the
English Reformation. He served at St. Luke’s in Brownsville, he explained, and
some of the others nodded, knowing more than me. It was a little church in a
little place, and he’d been serving there for sixteen years, since just after I
was born.
I was quite
impressed. I’d been telling people I wanted to be a pastor for about a decade
by then, and I never really thought about combining this vocation with one of
my other passions. A priest and a history teacher — why not? Or a priest and a
newspaper columnist? A priest and a congressman even!? I guess I knew that
Saint Paul had worked a trade alongside all his preaching and pastoral work.
But I’d never encountered a living example before.
