Vocation Stories

It's all about finding the hidden treasure....

My vocation's journey has its own beauty and simplicity.

It all began in God's heart. God's says "Before you were in your mother's womb I consecrated you" (Jer1:5). This became clear to me little by little.

During my first year of college, I had so much drifted away from the church, for various reasons, that I soon stopped considering myself Catholic. However, early into my sophomore year, while studying abroad, I had a sort of spiritual crisis.

Elias's room contains not much more than old prayer books with frayed pages, statues, bread wrappers and a hat-remnants of his simple life here. I'm sitting at Brother Elias's desk in his damp, abandoned hermitage.

My friends from college have never questioned my choice of a small community with its artless buildings and endless responsibilities. People who have met me after I entered Holy Cross Abbey, who know me less as a friend and more as the persona masking my responsibilities, do wonder.

I am Brother Hieu Pham in Vina, California. I was born and grew up in a large family in central Viet Nam, the fourth of seven children.

To me the "monastic vocation story" is a simply the continuation of "the conversion story", the response of a soul to the patient invitation of Our God and Father to return to the embrace of His Majestic Love and Joy. My own particular version of the timeless story has proceeded in this way:

It was an unexpected family reconciliation that stunned me and brought me back into the church, from my own personal "Siberia." The Hound of Heaven knew exactly what he was doing when he led me song-in-heart to St Patrick's to give thanks for it.