On the morning of my ordination – October 2, 1988 – I woke up feeling the worse for wear. I had been out the night before, on what you could label a kind of clerical equivalent of a stag night, and I had a couple of drinks, so I concluded that what I had was a hangover. A good shower and a walk by the river would sort me out.
But they didn’t. I struggled back to the house barely able to keep my feet under me. Deep down I knew it wasn’t a hangover (nobody gets hungover on three beers!) and I began to wonder and worry. I was throwing up and sweating and trembling. I had no strength and had to get back into bed, though the ceremony was due to take place in a couple of hours and the bus full of excited family, relatives and friends was due to arrive soon.
They may have been excited but I wasn’t. I couldn’t understand what was wrong with me and why it had to happen on this of all days. My colleagues, increasingly worried, decided to get a doctor.
Three of us were being ordained that day. It was the culmination of nine long years of study and preparation, and the man who was going to do the ordaining was the recently appointed archbishop of Dublin, Dr Desmond Connell.
My family arrived at about the same time as the doctor, but it was decided not to tell them that I was ill in bed. The official story was that I was still getting ready and would be down to welcome them in a few minutes. But my family found it hard to believe. They knew that one thing I would never be is late.
Meanwhile, the doctor was unsure as to the reason for my illness. He recommended that I forget about the ordination, stating that I was not up to taking part in any kind of ceremony.
I pleaded with him and with my colleagues who were in charge to let me go ahead, that I could get through it. Reluctantly, they relented. I was given a pain-killing injection and the ceremony was postponed for an hour to give me a chance to recover.
All the while, my Redemptorist colleagues and the many others who had arrived for the big day were wondering what was really going on. Was I having last minute nerves? Was I going to back out? Still not having laid eyes on me, my family were beginning to ask the same questions.
Finally, my parents were allowed up to my room, and they helped me to get ready.
I was ordained in a chair with a basin underneath in case I needed to throw up. I never prostrated myself or knelt for the laying on of hands. The archbishop and the concelebrants came down to me, not me up to them. And I made it through to the end. I was successfully ordained, and as a result now ontologically different, even if the circumstances were unusual!
Family photographs taken, in which I looked as miserable as I felt, I went back to bed while the celebratory dinner was taking place. But I got up to make an end of dinner speech. I had spent days working on it, and no matter how ill I was, I was determined to deliver it. I love speechifying!
Then it was home to County Limerick on the bus with my family. But I felt increasingly weak and miserable. It was supposed to be a wonderful happy day – and of course it was – but I wasn’t feeling it. I just wanted to get into bed.
And that’s what I did as soon as I got home, but within the hour I was out of bed again, being rushed by my father into hospital in Limerick. Our family doctor had called in to look at me after we got home and straight away announced that I had appendicitis and needed it dealt with without delay.
“So, what do you do?” the young nursed asked me as I was being wheeled to theatre.
“I’m a priest,” I said, scarcely believing those words myself.
“Gosh, you look very young to be a priest. How long are you ordained?”
“A few hours,” I answered.
“Oh my God,” she exclaimed, or whatever was the equivalent of OMG back in 1988.
It was an extraordinary coincidence.
The next day, appendix successfully extracted and First Mass postponed, I was inundated with visits from family and friends.
“Just as well you had an appendix,” my sister said. “Otherwise, they’d all be saying you were trying to back out.”
But I have often wondered about that extraordinary coincidence, especially since I developed back pain on the very weekend 26 years later that I was due to begin my sabbatical. Another absolutely extraordinary coincidence.
Was my body trying to tell me something on the morning of October 2, 1988? Was it telling me to think again about what I was going to do? Could nerves trigger an appendix? Or was it just one of those one in a million coincidences that simply cannot be explained?
frommypulpit 