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Come and See

A Norbertine Seminarian's Vocation Story

BY JARED KUEBLER

Jesse Guerena was born in Spokane, Washington, the youngest of three boys, but moved to the San Diego area when he was five years old. While growing up in Oceanside, he attended a circuit of private schools -- Saint Mary Star of the Sea in Oceanside, Beautiful Savior in Carlsbad, Sierra Madre Academy in San Marcos, Saint Augustine in San Diego -- before ending up at Saint Michael's Preparatory High School in Orange County for his junior and senior years. The school, in the town of Silverado, is run by the Norbertine Fathers whose abbey sits on the same campus. "I bounced around a little bit," he says with a chuckle.

Jesse graduated from Saint Michael's in 2001, but he never left that small cluster of buildings that sits secluded in the chaparral foothills of Orange County. On August 28th of this year he will renew his three-year temporary vows and begin his sixth year of study towards the priesthood. He no longer goes by the name Jesse. Like all the confreres of Saint Michael's Abbey, he was given a religious name by the abbot when he was clothed as a novice. The young man everyone knew by the name "Jesse" has symbolically died to the world and is now called Frater (Latin for brother) Simon.

Frater Simon first remembers thinking about the priesthood as a ten year-old serving Mass at Saint Mary Star of the Sea. "There was a Franciscan priest put there for a while, Father Umberto Zanetti, and he mentioned a number of times to myself and my brothers that one of us was going to become a priest, and I always thought that was going to be me."

This interpretation of Father Zanetti's prophecy was a process of elimination. "My two older brothers," Frater Simon remembers, "weren't very interested in being priests; they weren't at all interested actually."

But there was something unique about Frater Simon's ambitions. "I have always had a desire to give to others, to help others as much as I can.... That's something just kind of engrained into me. My mom, her side of the family, everybody basically does some sort of work for community service. It's all pretty much selfless work."

Frater Simon credits his mother's tireless work as a psychiatric nurse for passing on an attitude of self-sacrifice to her three sons. "My two brothers are both going into fields now where they have a mentality that they give for the sake of the common good at their own expense. I always had that as well, but what I wanted to give was more spiritual. I think early on in life I kind of realized the transience of this world and the fleetingness of temporal things, and I wanted to give the spiritual things that would last. So I always considered the priesthood as the best way to communicate goods to people."

If the theoretical goodness of the priesthood was immediately apparent to Frater Simon, taking the practical steps to attain that good was another story. "I always had a conviction that it was what I was supposed to do, that I was supposed to be a priest, but at times in high school I didn't want that. I very much wanted to get married. That was pretty much forefront in my mind."

One of the catalysts toward realizing his vocation was Father Gabriel, the headmaster of Saint Michael's school. "You know, frequently, especially in high school," Frater Simon remembers, "I think people kept asking me what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. Finally [Father Gabriel] asked me what God wanted me to do with my life. I had never thought about it from that perspective before."

Though Father Gabriel convinced him that the only thing necessary was to follow God's will, Frater Simon was somehow able to convince himself that his own plans were already aligned with God's will. He was surprised when the vocations director of the abbey asked him whether he would like to make a "come and see" visit during the Easter Triduum of his senior year. "Apparently he doesn't ask people to make 'come and see' visits -- ever. But he asked me, and I said 'Fine, sure.' So I came more out of the fact that I didn't want to say no. I felt obliged. It was a great honor. At this point I was definitely trying to dismiss the thought of a vocation. I had been accepted to Thomas Aquinas College. I was pretty certain I was going there.

"I went on this 'come and see' visit for the Easter Triduum and it blew my mind. It was magnificent. At the end of it, Easter Sunday, I was in the Church praying. I said to God, 'If it be possible let this cup pass from me.' You know I really didn't want to be there. At that very moment Frater Ambrose appeared at my side and tapped me on the shoulder and handed me a holy card of Saint Norbert. He said, 'I'll be praying for you a lot in the next few months.' And at that point I knew that it was my vocation to be in this community, that this was God's will in the concrete for me."

Frater Simon says he identifies with his namesake, Simon of Cyrene "in the sense that he was chosen. It could have been anybody there that was chosen to do what he did, but he was the one that God asked to do that.... You know, it says that he was compelled to serve God -- it definitely doesn't sound like he wanted to do it. He was just chosen and forced to do what he did."

Despite his Easter revelation, Frater Simon says he was plagued with doubts during the months leading up to his entrance in August. "I could tell the devil made it very difficult for me to enter." His family, his friends at high school, even the abbot of another abbey tried to dissuade him from entering, at least immediately. "They didn't think that I would be able to make it. Apparently I didn't display to them what it takes to be a religious or priest," he says with a bashful smile.

Nevertheless, Frater Simon stuck to his decision by proposing a sort of Pascal's wager with himself. Erring on the side of God, he bet, would be safer than the opposite. "I figured I could give it a shot, and I would have time to discern that. I would have superiors and spiritual directors who would guide me through that and help me to recognize whether I had a vocation. I think it's a risk that more people should take."

Frater Simon is taking that risk now and serving God with the men who, when he was a student, impressed him as "all full of joy ... men who have given up so much and yet who are so happy." He has been learning from them ever since "what it is to sacrifice yourself for the sake of the Church and the salvation of souls."

In September he will begin the first of three years studying theology at the Angelicum in Rome, after which, God willing, he will return to Silverado to take his final vows and eventually be ordained to the priesthood.

For now, he has no idea what particular apostolic work he will be assigned by the abbot, but he says he carries with him a contemplative awareness of the brevity of this life that enables him to form a general outlook towards his future life as a priest. "Pretty soon we'll all be dead," he remembers Frater Ambrose once remarking. "It was pretty funny when he said it, but if you consider it, at the same time he was serious. Before you know it we'll all be dead. If you consider how short this life is in comparison to all eternity then it seems that we ought to spend every moment and every act of our will directed towards saving souls, you know, getting people to heaven, dragging as many people with us as we possibly can."

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