Living the faith p1 - Military Transition - Success Stories - Military Career - Civilian Job - Military Times Edge

If you want to hear God laugh, the old saying goes, tell him your plans.

Andrew Morkunas had everything all planned out. After four years of seminary, he and seven men who had become brothers to him would be ordained in June as Catholic priests. But then he took that last ski run. He never knew what hit him. One moment he was sailing down the mountain, the next he was getting loaded onto a ski patrol stretcher.

Morkunas was relieved to find out that the blow that knocked him unconscious wasn’t serious. But, doctors told him, an MRI had revealed something far more troubling. A tumor the size of a golf ball was growing deep inside the very center of his brain. While not life threatening, untreated it would soon engulf an artery, perhaps causing seizures, and require radiation treatment.

“I was getting ready for the most important year of my life and, honestly, my immediate reaction was ‘why me?’”

Fair question for a man who was about to devote his life to God. In his final year of seminary training to become a Catholic priest, the idea of surgeons drilling into his skull and reaching in between the two hemispheres of his brain to cut away the tumor was terrifying.

“I became extremely depressed,” he says, even questioning his calling to priesthood.

Something missing

Morkunas always knew he wanted more out of life.

After 13 years in uniform and a promotion to major, Morkunas had become a good planner. The Army had been good to him. Tours to the Pacific Northwest, Texas and Germany had each been great in their own ways.

“I was young and single and living, shall we say, the good life,” he says. But he knew he wanted more.

He figured maybe that meant settling down, buying a house, making more money — perhaps even getting married. So he made new plans. He resigned from the Army and leveraged his top-level security clearance for a high-paying job in IT. He bought the house, a boat, a new car. And yet, there was still that sense of emptiness. Something was missing.

Although he had been raised in faith, the son of German immigrants who came to America through Ellis Island, Morkunas had stopped attending church back in the Army. “I hadn’t renounced my faith, but I wasn’t living it either,” he says.

Community of faith

And then he went to visit his sister, a devoted Catholic, and her family in Ohio. There he was amazed to discover what he’d been yearning for.

“When I saw the example they were living — not just going to Mass, but actually living their faith — I was inspired. I realized what I had been missing all those years.”

It wasn’t long before Morkunas was not only attending services faithfully, but also realigning his entire life.

Even as his civilian career was taking off, Morkunas found himself getting more and more involved in the community of faith, taking Bible classes and then volunteering to teach them.

Contingency plans

Now, his sense of emptiness was being filled with a new sense of calling.

So, after selling just about everything he owned and putting the rest in storage, he entered Blessed John XXIII National Seminary — which specializes in training “second career” priests — in the Boston suburbs.

“I put things in storage because even when you’re discerning God’s call, prudence is still a virtue. In the military we’d call it a contingency plan,” he says.

Father drill sergeant

In seminary, Morkunas found he had to unlearn some of his old military habits.

“They don’t call it priest training — it’s formation — forming the whole man in the image of Christ,” he says. “I was advised that I was too rigid and controlling in my approach. I had to work on relaxing my demeanor. No one wants to confess their sins to the drill sergeant. They need a father figure who can comfort them.”

While it was perhaps his greatest test of faith, looking back he realizes the brain tumor was part of his priestly formation as well.

The surgery went well and he was out of the hospital within a few days, but leaking spinal fluid sent him back for about another week.

“There was a lot of pain, and I really wrestled with depression,” he says. “I never would have been able to get through the ordeal without the support of the priests and my friends at seminary.”

New plans

He realizes that without the accident there’s no telling how long it would have taken to find out about the tumor and how much more serious it could have become.

“Everything that happens in our lives happens for a purpose,” he says. “I believed that even when I wasn’t practicing my faith. I call it my toolbox. There are skills and experiences that you can pull out to use later on. Nothing is ever wasted with God.”

Now, he says, his toolbox includes a much deeper appreciation of suffering and empathy for those who struggle with fear.

Morkunas was ordained Aug. 29. Participating at the ordination were the seven men he was supposed to be ordained with in June.

As far as his contingency plans, he’s going to clear out that storage shed now.

“I put my full faith and trust and confidence in God, that he will provide,” he says. Besides, he adds, “The vocation I’m in now, the retirement benefits are eternal.”