He spent fifteen years of his priesthood hoping to sing a song that he never got to sing. We will get into that.
It’s one of those bright Monday afternoons that make you forget its just the beginning of a week, and I’m sitting across from a young priest in his early forties. Well, young here is relative. To millennials like me and our parents,40 is young, to a Gen Z it’s old.
·He tells me he was ordained fifteen years ago.
Fifteen years. I turn that over in my mind quietly and think wow!
I ask him to describe the moment he knew — really knew — that priesthood was his calling. He doesn’t answer right away. He holds his chin and looks up at the sky the way someone does when they’re searching for something true, not just something to say. We had a beautiful sky that day. And that made this conversation even more lighter.
Then, after a silence thick enough to hold, he smiles and looks straight at me.
“Mine,” he says, “was an Aha moment.”
I lean in. Curiosity is a quiet fuel.
Then he tells me that he was among the top students in his high school. A young boy in the village that dreamed of law. Unfortunately he missed the cut by just a few points. He could have been accepted to a private university, he says, but his mother couldn’t afford it. Then came a letter from The University of Nairobi. Teaching degree. Two years away. It wasn’t law. It wasn’t now. It wasn’t what he had imagined.
Two years. Just… waiting?
“What’s a good Catholic boy to do?” he says, shrugging with a grin. “So I said, let me join the seminary in the meantime and see what happens.”
We both laugh. Mine is startled. His is knowing.
I don’t say what I’m thinking. That it sounds less like a calling and more like a come-we-stay vocation. You know the Let’s move in and see what happens kinda thing? But I keep that to myself. I’m not here to judge.
He reads my face anyway. And laughs.
But then his laughter settles, and something shifts behind his eyes. They grow quieter. His eyes stopped moving, the way eyes do when something is no longer performing a memory but actually inside it.
“And that,” he says, “was my Aha moment.” He says it with the weight of someone who has said it before and still means it every time. “God has a way of speaking to us . He made me realize I didn’t join the seminary just to try and that God’s plans sometimes sound like a Plan B but that was where He was calling me to be. In His vineyard.” He adds
I push a little further. The story is breathing now — I can feel it.
“Was there anything you admired about priests? Something that made you want to become one?”
He takes a bite of nyama choma that we had ordered and was already at the table, waves at the waiter.
“Raw chilli,” he requests.
If you know, you know. A true Kenyan truth-telling spice.
He clears his throat.
“I admired the singing of the preface.”
My face must have gone blank because he looked at me with the gentle patience of someone who has learned not to assume. He knew i didn’t get that.
He explains, maybe quietly wondering how Catholic I actually am. “That it’s the moment when the priest sings, The Lord be with you… That call and response, that melody rising through the church” He had sat in the pews as a boy and watched it happen, and something in him had reached toward it. “That is what i admired in priests”. he says
He lets the wish hang in the air between us.
“And guess what?” he says, a slow smile returning. “In my fifteen years as a priest… I have never once sung the preface.”
Why?
His laughter comes suddenly, freely. “Because I later discovered… I don’t have the voice!”
We laughed together for longer than the joke deserved. And that’s how I knew it wasn’t really about the joke its about a man who gave everything to a calling and somewhere inside it quietly buried a song. And laughed about it. The kind of laugh that doesn’t come from someone bitter but someone who has made peace. In that moment I thought, what in life was my preface? And have I made peace with it? What about you?
And then finally I saw him. Not the collar. Not the title. Not sermons and ceremony of fifteen years of priesthood . Just a man carrying the weight of life like the rest of us.
He reached over and poured me the fruit juice that had been sitting quietly between us, like a third presence at the table.
That small kindness swung the door open wider.
To confessions.
To him as a confessor.
To him as a penitent.
To secrets.
To the man who listens to other people’s sins — and carries his own.
But that…
that is a story for next time.
The witness continues.
