Where is God calling you to be?  This is the question that twelve young men came closer to answering this past weekend.  The Province of St. Martin de Porres held its Spring Dominican Experience Weekend (DEW) at St. Albert the Great Priory in Irving, Texas.  The DEW allows men who are discerning a call to Dominican life to come and see life as a friar preacher.

God calls men from all walks of life to serve him as ordained priests and brothers.  The men were physics and philosophy students, campus ministers, computer scientists, and lawyers.  But they all came together under the guidance of the Holy Spirit to find out more about where God is calling them to be.  The motto of the Province of St. Martin de Porres is “A New Birth in Hope,” and these men are signs of great hope for the Catholic Church in the southern United States.

As the weekend progressed; as we explored the pillars of Dominican life, prayed the divine office, shared common meals and our experiences, there was a sense of excitement and joy.  These men are on a journey that I was on just a few years ago.  I remember my own DEW; meeting the other discerning men, praying with twenty or so other people, and coming away with a lot to think about.  I remember asking myself, what is the next step in my journey, in my quest to learn where God is calling me to be?

The answer for me came over the next months and ultimately I did see that God was calling me to be a Dominican friar.  At the end of the weekend one of the discerning men said that he was a bit sad to leave, he felt at home, but he was also invigorated by the experience and the call that he felt growing stronger.