September 17, 2014
Around the front end of my mid-20s, I started struggling with time and its tendency to move forward. It was around then that I realized what a grand size check young Stuart had written for 20-something Stuart. It was a check I couldn’t seem to cash.
The boyhood dreams I had for myself, I realize now, were not only grand but convoluted. If we compile them, I suppose I’d imagined myself an Indiana Jones-type adventuring writer/drummer/songwriter priest. I think the concept comes across best if we look at all of those things as though it were a real occupation. In some versions I dreamed of myself touring, playing shows all over the country. I don’t know where that put the priesthood bit. In some versions I pictured myself adventuring a lot (I never concerned myself with where or why), but I thought I’d still spend a good deal of time at home on my houseboat. Yeah, that’s right: my houseboat. Emphases differed, but the package more or less remained the same.
Life is hard. (And I’m aware that this is could largely be read as a “first-world problem” kind of hard, but that’s another discussion.) It’s not only that a few of several options need to be chosen, but often the options you want are utterly unworkable or unrealistic for one human life. In that sense, they’re not options at all. My dream of being an Indiana Jones-type fellow has an essence, but not an existence. It has been painful to feel what I had long dreamed of, in a sense, die.
I say “in a sense” because it is not a complete death. It’s more of a transformation. Part of my dreamed-up job description clearly hints at my love of travel and adventure. Well, since I entered the Paulist Novitiate in 2011 I have lived, learned and ministered in Washington, D.C.; Austin; Boston; New York City; and now Columbus, Ohio. I have visited plenty of other places in between – all because of this vocation. As for the adventure: that is my favorite word for what all of this has been. I get a lot of opportunities to try something for the first time. I get to experience a lot of unknowns. I also get to experience a lot of beauty in the midst of struggle. It is a saga. A quest. It is the adventure of a lifetime.
Writer? Yes, I suppose I am doing that as I type, aren’t I? Drummer? Funny you should mention that; in a short while I’ll be playing along to my favorite Foo Fighters album. Songwriter? Yes, I still do that too. I have a little portable recording setup, and my guitarist friend and I are going to release something soon of my old band, SWSO (Stuart Wilson-Smith Orchestra).
Is it convoluted? Unfocused? Maybe it is a little right now, sure. I have a lot of interests, and I don’t know where they will all fit yet in terms of my future life as a priest and Paulist. But I can live with that because it will develop as I develop, form as I am formed.
God has use for my dreams and my gifts, even if that doesn’t wind up looking how I once imagined it would. I trust, as our Paulist vocation director put it in a recent post, that “nothing goes to waste.”