About this time Hannah started to visit me once a week. She was praying for me to be a charismatic, but I was having none of it. However I did become friendly with others in the prayer group, and they invited me to join them on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land.

During this time a number of priests were leaving the priesthood and the religious life. I began to feel sorry for myself. One day I rang my superior and told him I was leaving. He said I was to go to my sister’s home and in a couple of days he would visit me there. I remember feeling very sad when I booked a one way ticket at the railway station. It was not unusual for me to visit my sister. When I arrived at her home I was made welcome. I often visited but on this occasion she was not to know I had come for keeps. That night she and I with her husband and one of their sons were sitting drinking and talking, when suddenly I began to cry. This was a great embarrassment because I come from a very working class background where men don’t cry. I hurriedly went upstairs to be alone and my sister followed me. She sat on my bed and I don’t know what she said or even if she said anything. I got into bed and slept soundly. The next morning I woke up, completely “healed”. I got dressed, had breakfast and returned to my parish. My community didn’t know that I had left the day before and I have never told them. I am sure it was prayer, other people’s prayer that brought me back.

Sometime after this I was moved to another parish and I lost touch with my charismatic friends. After eighteen years I returned to the parish where I had first met Hannah. She was dead now, although she was not an old woman when she died. May she rest in peace. After some time I began to notice a young man who frequented the church for private prayer. I asked him to visit me. He came and he told me that he considered everything as rubbish compared with knowing Christ (cf Philippians 3.7). He talked to me about the charismatic movement. I told him it was like candy floss, not substance. He didn’t agree. We agreed on the primacy of the bible but also we agreed on the importance of the teaching of the Fathers, the Doctors of the Church, the Magisterium, the Cathechism of the Church, Carmelite, Dominican, Franciscan spiritualities etc.

I noticed a change in my preaching

I began popping into charismatic prayer meetings just to see what was going on. I began to notice a change in my preaching, I spoke much more often about what God had done and is doing in our lives. I had been a good mediocre priest but now I was being changed.

Looking back I liken my meeting with the young man to the story of the woman at the well where the Samaritan woman goes off to tell the townspeople about Jesus, and they later tell her that “now we believe not because of what you said, but because we have heard him for ourselves” (John 4.42).

To cut a longer story short, I now pray in tongues with the best of them. And that is why I know Hannah must be laughing.