Ed's story: Lose a dream, find a life

A TEENAGER named Ed Obermiller is flat on his back in the hospital. His shoulder is a mess. He can't use it at all, it hurts all the time, the doctors have tested him for this, that, and the other thing, and finally they discovered that his spine was leaking, which was slowly killing the nerves in his shoulder and arm, and so Ed is confined to bed for months.

Months.

Talk about your dark night of the soul.

And Ed's a mighty lively teenager--very fine tennis and racketball player, tuba player in the band, jack-of-all-trades at The Mergus, the best restaurant in all of Canton, Ohio. Ed's long hours at The Mergus are actually vocational training, for what he wants to do more than anything is be a chef. He's headed for the Culinary Institute of America in a year, doing his necessary year's internship this year at The Mergus.

Well, he was doing his internship until his shoulder started screaming, and now he's on his back day after week after month.

"I was a little desperate," he says quietly now. "It wasn't that I was terrified--I mean, I knew I'd walk again, I knew that--but it was a dark time. It forced me to be reflective, and that's a word that couldn't have been applied to me then.

"I'd thought about being a priest, but I thought about it like most Catholic kids--idly, poking at the thought here and there, never really facing what it might mean, the joys of it, the hard parts, the reality. I'd gone to Catholic grade school and high school, I'd gone on retreats, but I always had things to do--sports and cooking and Boys' State and the school band, everything.

"But there in bed day after day I had to stare reality in the face, and reality was that my arm would never work quite right again, which meant I couldn't be a professional cook. So as much as I loved cooking, I had to really chew on the possibility of being a priest. And I concluded that I had to pursue the urge, to see where it led me.

First it led him to the Pontifical College Josephinum in Worthington, Ohio, the diocesan seminary (and interestingly the only Vatican-sponsored seminary in the United States). There he was essentially a college guy--majoring in psychology, swimming every day, hanging out--and still trying to face the reality of what it might mean to be a priest. Then on to a year of graduate school at Mount Saint Mary's near Cincinnati, this time burrowing into theology.

Then came another epiphany moment for Ed Obermiller.

I liked what I was doing, but increasingly I realized that a diocesan life wasn't for me--I wanted a family, I wanted a band of brothers. For one thing I was used to a family--I have two sisters and a younger brother. To me it was a matter of options--I felt that if I pursued a vocation as a diocesan priest, my sole option would be working in a parish. Which is a great job, a remarkable job, a crucial job--but I wasn't quite sure at that point it was the job for me for the rest of my life.

"By then, at age 24 or so, I was sure I wanted to be a priest, but I wanted to be a priest with choices. So I picked up a copy of Vision, believe it or not, and paged through it trying to feel which of the orders was a good fit for me."

Three orders looked especially interesting to Ed: the Franciscans, the Paulists, and the Jesuits. All were in Ohio, all were service-oriented, all were communal, and so he called and wrote and talked and interviewed and visited, and he came close enough to the Society of Jesus that he had a Jesuit spiritual director during his year at Mount Saint Mary's.

Then one bright autumn day he went to visit a friend in Indiana. The friend was Jeff Cooper, who'd gone from the seminary in Ohio into the Congregation of Holy Cross seminary at the University of Notre Dame. The Holy Cross was a new order, relatively speaking - founded in 1837 in France, arriving in America in 1842 when Father Edward Sorin and seven Holy Cross brothers made their way from New York to what were then the wilds of Indiana, by the south bend of the Saint Joseph River. In America particularly the Holy Cross men focused on education--not just of the mind, as their founder Father Basil Moreau had insisted, but of the heart as well.

The stubborn and visionary Sorin had invented the University of Notre Dame, and then Saint Edward's University in Texas, and then the University of Portland in Oregon, and by 1989, when Ed Obermiller stopped in one day to see his Holy Cross friend, the order had spread across the world, teaching and running shelters for the poor and schools in North and South America, Asia, and Africa.

"I knew within days that this was the community for me," says Obermiller. "The familial feeling, the educational focus, the vitality, the vibrancy, the energy, the passion, the commitment, the humor of these men appealed to me enormously. I mean, here were brilliant men--college presidents, scholars, professors, pastors, novice masters, spiritual directors, historians, all sorts of men--and they were utterly devoted to community, to education, to work as prayer. I was hooked."

Ed joined the Congregation of Holy Cross the next year, was ordained in 1996, and since then he's been director of campus ministry at the University of Portland. He's been wildly busy in recent years--a stint as Religion Fellow in the National AIDS Policy Office in Washington, D.C., further study at the Jesuit School of Theology in Berkeley, even a year with another debilitating affliction, this time hepatitis so severe that his skin changed color and he slept 18 hours a day--but asked about the daily life of Father Ed Obermiller of the Congregation of Holy Cross, he laughs and rattles off adjectives:

"Exhausting, invigorating, humbling, gratifying, confusing, hilarious, and sometimes I think I am crazy to like this life," he says, grinning. I'm a chaplain in Villa Maria, one of our eight residence halls, and so while I don't get much sleep, what with counseling students and such, I can get my computer fixed by geniuses within minutes, and now I know that Smashing Pumpkins is a noun, not a verb.