Fr. Mark Wiesner

By Father Mark Wiesner
Pastor, St. Augustine Parish, Oakland

My vocation story is not one of great drama, grand revelations and miraculous occurrences. It is one of God simply trying to get through my thick head.

I was raised in what you would probably call a typical Catholic family. Living in Concord, we went to church every Sunday and Holy Day without fail, prayed before meals, and attended weekly faith formation classes. I went to De la Salle High School and received all my sacraments at exactly the age you would expect.

And like most young Catholics, I was bored at Mass. However, I knew that as long as I lived in my parents’ home I would be going. So rather than bemoan the dullness of spending an hour each Sunday morning in church, I started to do ministry.

For mostly self-serving reasons, I began to serve as an acolyte, sing in the choir, and lector. It was not long before I began to hear from the “pillars of the church” that I would be a wonderful priest. I found that comment amusing, and while I did not know what I wanted to spend my life doing, I was fairly certain being a priest was not part of the plan.
 
When I went off to college at U.C. Davis, my faith went with me. I found myself involved with the Newman Center and continued to be part of ministry. Only now it was for the social aspect more than any other reason.

This is the seventh in a series of reflections written by priests in the Oakland Diocese as part of the observance of the Year for Priests, designated by Pope Benedict XVI.

Along the way I became good friends with my dorm RA, Ron, a Baptist. Once a week he and I would play racquetball and often our conversations would turn to our respective Christian faiths. Eventually I attended Baptist services with him, and he would come to Mass with me. As we drew near to graduation, Ron told me that he was going on a mission to Africa after graduation and was trying to learn the native language.

Something about the idea of mission, and the adventure of it, caught my imagination. I told Ron it sounded great, but that if I ever did anything like that I would need to go somewhere where English was spoken.

The next day he introduced me to a friend of his who was going to spend six weeks after graduation with an interdenominational Christian organization called “Youth with a Mission” (YWAM) at the Edinburgh Arts Festival in Scotland, performing Gospel-themed street theater. The idea captivated me, so I applied to join the YWAM program and was accepted.

My experience with YWAM was beyond anything I could have foreseen. I ended up not performing at the glamorous international arts festival, but in a very rundown area of Glasgow, speaking to strangers on the street and going door-to-door talking with people about their faith.

In the evenings, we would serve coffee, tea and sandwiches in the basement of a church to runaways, the homeless and addicts of all sorts. This was far outside my Northern California suburban comfort zone — and it was there that, for the first time in my life, my faith exploded. It leapt to life in ways that left me breathless.

In new situations and in a foreign country with nothing else to rely on, God became very real to me. Lifted from my comfortable surroundings, God was what I had to rely on. I found myself doing ministry, not to keep from getting bored or for its social aspects, but because it was truly needed and because I had gifts for it.
I found it profoundly challenging and fulfilling. It was not always fun, but it felt right and worth doing well.

When I returned home, I went to work in the family business. While I did just fine in business, after about a year I woke up one morning and realized I no longer felt the energy or sense of fulfillment I had found so life-giving and life-changing in Scotland. I knew I had to change the direction I was headed, and my best guess was that my life’s work would somehow have faith at its center.

So I began to look for other opportunities and discovered a Catholic peer youth ministry based in St. Paul called The National Evangelization Teams (NET). NET was a retreat ministry to high school students. I applied, was accepted and spent a year travelling with a team of 12 people conducting retreats for Catholic youth around the U. S. and in Australia.

Daily I was sharing my faith, and the more I shared my faith, the more it grew. It was in March of my NET year that I contacted the vocations director for the Diocese of Oakland, writing “while I am not sure I want to be a priest, priesthood may be what God wants for me. In that case, what I want really doesn’t matter much.”

Arguably my year on NET is the reason I am now serving as a priest. It was sharing my faith for a year that led me to believe I could share my faith for a lifetime. It was the year that helped me realize how being a child of God was meant to shape everything about the way I lived and understood myself.

Even with moments of insight, I was hesitant to commit my life to ordained ministry. It might be nice to say there was one crystal moment when God appeared to me, spoke divine words, and I knew in my heart my call to be a priest. That’s not how my vocation came to me.

It came to me over decades through the example of God’s people and a heart at prayer. From my parents whose support and love has never failed and gave me the foundation of faith, to the “pillars of the church,” to the unflinching support of the St Francis of Assisi community in Concord who encouraged and prayed and financed my mission experiences, through those who spoke to me in Scotland, and the staff, team and high school students on two continents whom I met through NET, and so many others, I eventually recognized God’s voice and found the courage to accept the invitation to share in the ministry of Jesus.

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