Your identity must give firmness and a certain orientation to your personality
In the process of your priestly life, from the moment you are ordained a priest until the final moment of your life, you may go through situations that affect your identity and your personality. I’d like to make a distinction between identity and personality. Identity refers to everything that you are as a result of your life history and your principles, while “personality” is something that is shaped over time and through certain things that you experience. Your identity must give firmness and a certain orientation to your personality, since your personality is developed by the circumstances that you go through and that appear in your life. They are two essential things that as a person and as a minister of God, one must always work on, because a human being is dynamic and is constantly changing. The issue is that if you do not become aware of and work on your identity and personality, you can get carried away by things that are not your own. These can turn into being what your bishop wants or what your community wants. This can lead you to fall into great depression or life fatigue, feeling great discontent in living and in exercising the ministry.
I’d like to introduce three temptations that can affect your priestly identity and your life itself:
1. Positions: Some time ago I met some brother priests for lunch. The cell phone of one of the priests rang, and it was someone who wanted to meet us. He asked us to please introduce ourselves…
I was struck by the fact that at the time of the introductions each one gave his name and immediately the position he held: “pastor”, “vicar”, “deacon”, etc. This person only wanted to know our names and not our positions, but the position was deeply ingrained in each one of the priests who were there.
The fact that your identity is linked to a position can generate a search in your life as a priest; a kind of desire to “climb the social ladder” in priesthood or to define yourself according to the position you have. If that happens, your satisfaction in priestly and human life will no longer lie in your human progress in taking on or developing new virtues for your life or in acquiring a deeper love for the Eucharistic celebration, but rather it will be reduced to ecclesiastical positions. And there will come a point that if you do not manage to “grow in your ecclesiastical career,” you will feel frustrated and even bitter; you will feel that your life has no meaning. That is why we can see priests who are frustrated and bitter, because they did not achieve what they wanted or the position they were looking for. When your life is reduced to looking for a purple sash or being the priest of some “important parish”, it is vital to recognize that deep down in you there is a great personal and human crisis. Because not only is Jesus missing in your heart, but you are leading a meaningless life.
It is very important to work on this with your spiritual director or counselor and it is necessary to be able to talk about it, because by doing so, you can become aware of the situation and begin to look for ways to solve it.
2. Recognition: When your identity becomes tied up in the search to be recognized, a very vulnerable personality can develop in you and make you too sensitive to the comments of others. When the identity of a priest is based on certain successes achieved in the pastoral or architectural field, then his emotional or pastoral life might hang by a thread. Many times, those of us who work on evangelizing in the digital world of networks, run the risk of reducing our task to controlling how many followers or likes we have. That impoverishes your life, leading you to feel shaken up when the same people turn their backs on you or simply don’t recognize you. When your pastoral work is no longer the fruit of your prayer and Eucharistic celebration, and it simply becomes the primary element to be recognized by the hierarchy or by the people, then you can fall into “priestly populism”. This is more than becoming a priest of the people. If this happens, your priesthood takes a backseat, and you prioritize people’s satisfaction.
3. Person: When your identity is tied to a person and you become what that person wants you to be, it can bring about great pain in your life. A priest may seek to have a personality style to please a parish group or even the bishop; no longer being himself but becoming what his bishop wants him to be. It is clear that a bishop must mold the priest in his ministry; but it is difficult when he tries to change his personality and identity. There may be a certain authority or community abuse of the priest, but a priest may also leave aside his identity, just to please others.
Being the way others request or want you to be can bring your whole life to a halt, leading you to receive great blows in life. This makes you become an excellent actor following the script introduced by a person or a bishop or a community. But sooner or later, this priest will be left without a script or without a life.
These three temptations can be avoided and overcome. It requires time for reflection on the part of the priest, as well as speaking and allowing himself to be guided and accompanied by his spiritual director. Priestly life in our times requires work on our identity, so as not to hide in pastoral ideologies, or in simple empty structures.
Let us ask the Most Holy Mary to protect us from all this. Mary, Mother of priests. Pray for us!
Something good is on the way!
