“Go West, young man, go West!” The quote is from the days of the westward expansion of the United States. It implied that there were great future possibilities, even fortunes to be realized in the West.
Of course, for a native of New York City, it implied a really strange behavior—crossing the Hudson River to that vast wilderness that stretched from New Jersey to California!
(This, of course, is a New Yorker’s perspective. It’s just the plain truth. How odd that anyone would think to disagree!)
I was born in the Bronx, the only mainland portion of New York City.
During the years that I served as a parish priest in the South Bronx, I sometimes teased my Puerto Rican parishioners, saying, in Spanish, that I was born in the Bronx, but my parents came from the island. (If you’re from Puerto Rico, “the island” means Puerto Rico.)
It was literally the truth though that both my parents were born on the nearby island of Manhattan—as well as two of my four grandparents, and some of my great grandparents.
For most of my life, I’ve lived and worked in New York City (the Bronx and Manhattan). For part of my childhood, we lived in the adjacent city of Yonkers but only a few blocks north of the city line.
Education took me away. College meant living for most of four years in Amherst, Massachusetts; seminary meant living for most of five years in Yonkers, New York; language studies meant living for two summers in Puerto Rico; and doctoral studies in Canon Law meant living for most of three years in Rome.
About six years after my retirement, I did the unthinkable. At that late stage of my life, I risked everything! I went West! I crossed the river (the Hudson River) and moved to north-central New Jersey!
It was more civilized then I had thought!
How is living in the West? Actually, not bad at all. Living in a comfortable apartment on a high ridge, I could look across New Jersey and see the taller buildings of Manhattan against the horizon—and get there by train, bus, or car in about an hour or less.
In 1963, led by Cardinal Francis Spellman of New York, a small group of his seminarians and priests studying in Rome (myself included) were received by Pope Paul VI the day after his election.
The Holy Father greeted us as from “the capital of the world.” Beyond any doubt, it must have been his first infallible statement!
When I first began to think of becoming a priest, it was not because of any personal desire for the job—it was a consequence of a personal search for meaning and to discern the will of God.
If God wanted me to serve him as a priest (so it seemed to me after a long quest, and it wasn’t an especially attractive future for me), where and how?
For lack of any clearer indication, why not, by default, in my native place, New York City? What could be more challenging than proclaiming the Gospel by word and example in the capital of the world?
If faith and church could not flourish there, they had no future—the world was rapidly urbanizing, and New York seemed to me to be the prototype of the future.
Anyway, for better or worse, the native New Yorker became a New York archdiocesan priest. Ironically, that stay-at-home commitment led to a wide range of experiences in country and city places, in local and national involvements, and in travel and ministry all over the world.
God never ceases to surprise!
29 June 2021