In your fifteen years of priesthood,” I asked, “have you ever felt like you have enough experience in what you do?”
He laughed. Not a loud laugh—the kind of “are you joking?” laugh.
“There is no priest that has ever stepped at the altar without a book. Every Mass is new. No Mass can be duplicated. Every Mass is live and now. No priest has been in Church long enough to feel like he doesn’t need to prepare.”
He raised a finger.
“It is contemplated that there’s no emergency Mass. Every Mass is planned. Every priest should sit beforehand and prepare.”
I smiled. I know of times we attend Mass and almost swear a priest was under prepared. That was just a thought that came to my mind—and like he was reading me, he said: “Even priests have bad days. They have things going on.”
I smiled because that was a good way of overriding my unfair thought.
And in that moment, I thought: Priests are surrounded by many people. But could they be a lonely people?
He confirmed it.
“Yes, we are lonely. But never alone.”
He revealed that what gives him comfort is the everyday ritual that every Catholic priest—secular or religious—performs, regardless of where he is in the world.
“Priests have to sing the Psalms every day. It’s a training. It’s the unifying factor in priesthood. The fact that every priest will sing a particular Psalm makes you feel like you are not alone.”
He paused, then added, “Priesthood can be so lonely. Sometimes even our own siblings forget us. They assume we have God.”
He laughed, but it was a hollow laugh.
That was a very heartbreaking honesty but is that the human cost of vocation?
Only a fellow priest had called him that day, he said, just to say hi and find out if he was okay.
That got me thinking: Could we be assuming that our priests are doing okay—when deep down, they are struggling?
He even revealed that some priests are now engaging in drugs and other unpleasant activities because of loneliness.
I asked why they would be lonely even in parishes where there is more than one priest around.
He leaned forward.
“I have heard a priest in a parish say—’We are not joined in this parish by matrimony.’ ”
What does that mean? I asked.
“That is to say—you do your thing, I do mine. That tells you priesthood is actually a personal responsibility. How you decide to live and behave is up to you. No one follows you up. You can easily lose yourself if you are not careful.”
I asked him what he does to ensure he is not derailed from his calling.
He said, like any disciplined human being, he has a routine that he follows to the letter.
And then he told me something that caught me completely off guard.
“In all my years, I have always done my own laundry.”
I found that mind-blowing. I thought, as a priest, everything should be done for you. But it turns out he is very particular about how certain clothes and shoes are cleaned.
We had talked about him and his humanity. Now I wanted to know about what he carries into the world.
“What’s the one piece of advice that you give most often?” I asked. “And what’s the story behind it?”
He went silent for a while.
“I don’t know if I’m obsessed with God’s providence,” he said slowly. “I keep telling people not to worry—that God will provide. And sometimes I am worried that they will feel like I am not empathetic enough. Like I don’t understand their struggles.”
He paused.
“However, up to today, as a priest who has served for fifteen years, I still believe it with every ounce of my breath. Even as a seminarian—and even before—I have never worried that I am going to lack.”
Is this the faith that God talks about? I asked myself. Because in our lives, it is easier said than done. And what he said challenged me.
Then he told me one of the many stories behind the advice he gives all the time.
“I joined a seminary that was more than 500 kilometers from where I was brought up,” he began. “And during that time, there were no modern ways of sending money like there are today.”
He had sent a letter to his father, notifying him that the holidays were coming and he needed transport money to come home. His father sent him one thousand Kenya shillings—which was a lot of money back then. Ha!
He says it was a lot because he had done simple, quick maths in his head. He even had some pocket money to take him through the holidays back home.
Then, two days before the closing day, he was walking along a pedestrian path near a general hospital close to the seminary. He had visited the post office the previous day and picked up the envelope from his father—the envelope that had his fare.
There was a woman on the other side of the hospital fence. She had a bowl, like beggars on the streets, and she was uncontrollably crying and begging. She was asking passersby to help her clear her child’s hospital bill so they could be discharged.
He looked at the woman. He couldn’t ignore her.
He only had the one thousand shillings—just one note. With just two days to the seminary break.
He shook his head, laughed, and said: “Without even thinking, I reached into my inner jacket pocket and gave her the note.”
That was a moment of sacrifice, unplanned, pure, costly. He continues.
The note was so precious, he said, it had to be with him all the time—hidden.
We both laughed.
Then there was a solemn silence between us.
“For the two following days,” he continued, “I kept asking myself how I would get home. How foolish could I be?”
But he strengthened himself with his mantra: God will provide.
“Seminarians are very poor” he said. That struck me. I have encountered and interacted with a few seminarians, but I have never thought of them that way. Maybe I should have always offered them something whenever we met. Sorry, guys.
On closing day, he woke up early as usual, packed, and went for Mass.
His only prayer that day was: “God, I trust in Your providence.”
Unfortunately, sometimes God doesn’t answer immediately.
He smirked.
“I sat at the gate of the seminary for an hour, thinking and stressed. And at that point, I honestly saw myself as a very foolish man. How could I have given that woman all my money? I even questioned if she could have put something on me to give her all I had.”
We laughed again. So much that we had to take a break—almost derailed by stories of how sometimes people on the streets are drugged, mugged, or duped into giving all they have.
“So, what did you eventually do?” I asked, bringing him back to his story.
He hesitated, almost asking where? —then said: “Yes… yes…”
He revealed that while seated at the gate of the seminary, a priest from a neighboring diocese at home was driving out. He rolled down his window just to say hi.
He had been called by his bishop, he said. That’s where he was headed.
“I almost jumped with excitement,” the priest said. “I knew he wouldn’t drop me all the way to my hometown for sure—but it was better closer home than where I was.” The answer had come not immediately but perfectly.
Without telling him his predicament, he entered the priest’s car. But inside his heart, there was a hallelujah song of a prayer answered.
“God did not only offer me a lift as an answer,” he said, “but He gave me convenience and comfort.”
He reached for the paper towel on the table and wiped his eyes.
In that moment, it hit me what that memory meant to him. It wasn’t just a memory. No wonder it is his mantra that God is the provider.
He continued: “Later after the long journey, when we reached the priest’s town where I was to be dropped, the priest reached into his wallet and gave me one thousand Kenya shillings.”
He had a broad smile as he said that.
“That story,” he said, “is one of the loudest confirmations in my life that God is, without doubt, the sole provider in the midst of all the struggles of this life.”
I was looking for a way to end this conversation—not because it wasn’t important, but because the more we dived, the more questions were running through my head.
“In your interactions with Christians,” I asked, “do you feel like we live in the doubt of ‘God is the provider’?”
Without hesitation, he said: “Yes. And not only the Christians.”
He paused.
“Even us the priests. A priest can go through the seminary, but the seminary doesn’t go through him. A priest can go through all the teachings at the seminary, all the sermons, and all the individual lessons that God has offered him—and still miss the point, like any other person, because doubt is in the human nature. But God’s grace carries us.”
He leaned forward and looked at me.
“Do you know some people go to the seminary out of curiosity? Even in some countries, governments have sent their security personnel to the seminary. And for some of them, it has become a blessing in disguise. They become priests.”
He laughed.
“Priesthood was designed to be like the Garden of Eden.”
I looked at him with curiosity.
“How so?”
“The Lord has provided,” he said firmly. “God has promised the priests that they are in the Garden of Eden. But who are we? We have involved ourselves in business ventures.”
He paused.
“Like me—keeping cows.”
We laughed again so hard. I didn’t see that coming.
I couldn’t help but ask myself:
Is that a moment of doubt in the human nature of a priest?
Was his story just an isolated case?
Is that how God works?
Do we even trust in His providence—or are we just too careful, always taking care of tomorrow, which is not our responsibility but God’s?
Or are we just carried away by the rush of this life, and we don’t get time to just sit and in retrospect see that God has always been the provider?
This conversation clearly left me with more questions than I had for him.
With that, I asked:
“What is the doubt or question that you have learned to live with—or even befriend?”
He went silent. I had caught him off guard with this. His eyes drifted somewhere past me. Then he looked at me and said,
“That the church hasn’t revealed everything to us,” he said. “The priests”
I didn’t speak, I waited
Then he told me of a story. A sensitive one. Of a certain Bishop – a man who had given his entire life to church-who on his deathbed, with his last breaths, lamented that the church had lied to him.
I didn’t ask what lie. I didn’t need to. The weight of it was enough.
He let the silence settle between us. The he said something that felt like both a closing and an opening.
“There are things we carry,” he said softly, “that we were never told we would have to carry.”
He smiled- a gentle sad knowing smile.
“But that story”, he said, “belongs to another priest”.
And with that I knew another door had opened but it was not for me to walk through. It was for another priest to enter, to sit across me and share what he has carried.
Do I?…..Do you have a doubt or doubts you have had to live with or befriend?
The conversation wasn’t ending. It was simply passing the baton.
To another priest. To another table. To another story waiting to be told.
That’s our next story.
-KB
The witness continues….
