For seminarian Ben Kieler, the call toward priesthood was something he felt early, but it required a reversion to the faith, a strengthened relationship with the Lord, and time discerning in order for him to consider entering seminary.

“I felt that God was calling me to be a priest from childhood,” Kieler said. “If you asked me when I was nine or 10 years old, I would have told you that I think that God is calling me to be a priest and that's what I'm going to do.”

Despite this initial experience, he didn’t remain established in his faith. He drifted from prayer and the practice of his faith, and the priesthood began to feel like an idea so lofty it would never be achievable.  

“Through my high school years, college years, and thereafter, there just really wasn't a relationship that I had developed with the Lord. Given the fact that I wasn't praying and asking God to show me where he was calling me, I didn't feel affirmed in that vocation that I had felt when I was a kid,” said Kieler. “For a long time, I believed that I was incapable of being a priest, and that maybe I have this sense that I'm being called to it and have this desire to do it, but I don't think there's any way I could. I think at the heart of it, I just didn't have that relationship.”  

The more he dove into his job and focused on wealth and other things that the world says brings happiness, the more he began to feel the weight of hopelessness. It was then that he turned back to his roots and began to pray.

“God had to call me back,” he said. 

“The more I pursued wealth and the more I strayed away from God, the more I realized how hopeless my life was going to be without Him.”

This shift to prayer was what brought about his reversion and a renewed relationship with the Lord.

“Prayer sparked me to have this conversation with God,” he said. “Like, ‘I know I haven't had a relationship with you for years and years. Maybe I never did.’ But just asking him, ‘Would you be willing to take me back?’ I got a resounding ‘yes’ to that question.”

As he began to pray once again, it provided a shift away from his own will and he became more focused on God’s.

“He really converted my heart in a very powerful way, really consoled me, and just made it very clear that I was still His beloved child,” he said. “It really changed my heart back to desiring to do His will.”  

This change rekindled the feeling of a call he had experienced so many years earlier. He began to wonder if this feeling he had been having for two decades was still really what God wanted him to do.

“My older brother is actually a priest for the Diocese of St. Augustine, so I started talking with him about it,” Kieler recalled. “He said, ‘That's beautiful that you've decided to serve God. Let's continue to talk about it. Don't just try to do the best thing you can, try to do what God's calling you to do.’”

Rather than immediately applying to seminary, he spent a couple of years discerning if this was the path that God wanted him to take. He recalled taking that time to develop a relationship with the Lord since he had spent so long not practicing his faith.

“I went through a couple years of continual discernment, asking God and really developing that relationship, because it's not something that I had going into this new period,” he said. 

“I had to really get to know Jesus, daily reading of the Gospels was huge, going to daily Mass, and spending time with him in adoration. The more I did that, the more it became clear that he was calling me to continue discerning a call to the priesthood within seminary.”

This put him in a difficult position. He had a successful job, a girlfriend, and things in his life were going well, yet he remained unhappy. Making the decision to follow this call was not easy and taking the leap to consider seminary meant giving up what he had built, but he knew that this was what the Lord was asking of him.

“It was clear that I needed to move on from some of those things and to continue discerning within the seminary,” Kieler said. “I just realized that I was unhappy. Things were going well. But despite all that, I was a very unhappy person and knew that I needed to do something else. I didn't know what it was, but God kind of showed me and he took care of the rest.”

Any vocation is a sacrifice, but as he discovered, prayerfully listening to the call from the Lord and responding courageously allows for true freedom in doing the Lord’s will. Ben Kieler is one of 28 seminarians for the Diocese of Saint Petersburg and is in his second year at St. Vincent de Paul Regional Seminary in Boynton Beach.

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