I want to share the story of our brand new priest

Answering the call | A former Eugene man faces the challenges of the priesthood
By Randi Bjornstad

The Register-Guard Appeared in print: Sunday, Nov 29, 2009

It was baptism time at noon on a recent Saturday, and about 150 people — proud parents and godparents, squirming infants and young children all dressed to the nines in snow-white outfits, and their relatives and friends — filed into the pews at St. Joseph Catholic Church in downtown Salem.

Whole families greeted each other with handshakes and kisses. Cell phones captured tiny portraits as video cameras recorded the hubbub. Father David Jaspers — the only blond head in a mass of black hair and dark brown eyes — moved among them, clapping a young father on the shoulder in greeting, shaking hands with a white-suited 6-year-old named Steven, touching a smiling baby on the cheek.

From a side room, the young priest brought out the props he needed for the ceremony: a lectern, the baptismal font filled with holy water, a basket of certificates for each of the 11 children about to be welcomed into the church family. Finally, he carried out a tall white baptismal candle and lit it, then disappeared into the room again to trade his black suit for a long white robe called an “alb,” topped by a pale gold stole and tied at the waist with a plaited white “cincture.”

Back again and standing before them in his vestments, Jaspers began to speak — in Spanish. He performs a Spanish-language baptism ceremony nearly every Saturday, he says, consecrating anywhere from 10 to 30 little ones per service. At least two of the masses he celebrates each week at St. Joseph also are in Spanish, often drawing as many as a thousand Hispanic worshippers to each service.

Jaspers, who grew up in Eugene and graduated from the Roman Catholic-run Marist High School in 1995, officially became a priest on June 13 and soon after got the call to serve at St. Joseph as parochial vicar, no doubt largely because of his English-Spanish bilingual skills.

“I took Spanish for three years at Marist, and I learned all the Spanish grammar there, but I couldn’t talk worth a hoot — I didn’t do the homework,” Jaspers confesses. But during his sophomore year at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma — “There were no Catholic schools in the Northwest for football,” he says — he studied in Spain “and fell in love with the culture and language.”

He attended St. Paul’s Catholic School through eighth grade, spent a year at Sheldon High School and then switched to Marist, where in addition to track and baseketball, he played center and linebacker on the football team and won a spot on the all-state team.

“At that time, I really wanted to be a principal or a history teacher,” Jaspers recalls. “I saw a public broadcasting show about the principal at an inner city school, and I really wanted to do that. I wanted to affect people’s lives, especially kids.”

Once in college, the pull between Spanish and history was strong — always with the idea of teaching in the background — but Spanish won out when he attended another study abroad program in Costa Rica.

All the while, the thought of the priesthood was incubating somewhere in the back of his mind. “Going to a Lutheran school was good in many ways, because as a religious minority I had to embrace that identity and really figure out what it meant to me,” Jaspers says. “I belonged to a Bible study group, but we changed the name to Christian Fellowship — we talked mostly about girls — but because of my being Catholic, the issue of celibacy came up, and I had to really think about that.”

He concluded that if he was intended to marry and live a layman’s life, “God would provide the woman, and if that didn’t happen, was I supposed to be a priest? I was clearly moving toward a decision at that point. It’s a significant decision, and I was already dealing with it.”

Studying in Spain deepened his love of Catholic culture. “I would see the statues of saints — some of them I’d never heard of — and I would ask them to pray for me according to their special virtues.”

Not that he was living a monastic existence.

“I was praying a lot and going to mass, but I would meet a friend and go to mass and then we’d go dancing,” he says. “Sometimes I’d get together with friends, and we’d meet at 1 a.m. somewhere and go out — I never got up before noon, but there was a late mass on Sundays, and I never missed it the whole time I was there.”

He also spent considerable time with Spanish priests, talking about seminary and the priesthood and his fears about pursuing that way of life.

“There was one priest, Don Rafael, that I talked with especially, and I said I didn’t know about it because I really liked the idea of waking up next to someone. And he said he did, too, but he would make the same choice again. All the priests I met there seemed to enjoy their priesthood — they were happy.”

After graduation, he got a job offer teaching in a Catholic school in Kentucky but decided he wasn’t ready. Instead, he went to South America to volunteer in a Catholic parish in Peru.

“I had been talking a little bit about the priesthood at that point, but I was nowhere near ready to make that decision,” Jaspers says. “But it was a really powerful experience. The priest knew I was ‘discerning,’ ” — soul-searching about joining the clergy — “and he introduced me as a ‘priest-seminarian.’ That opened the door to doing lay work with more credibility,” he says. “About a quarter of the people called me ‘Father,’ even though I explained I was not a priest.”

He spent those months working among “the poorest of the poor,” Jaspers says. “Nearly all of them had dirt floors, and many of them had no chair to offer when I visited them.”

His roles in Peru included social worker, tour guide and English teacher. He set up a computer lab, led prayer services, sang in the choir and played on a neighborhood basketball team.

The greatest lesson he learned in Peru, and one that helped propel him toward the priesthood, was the “true meaning of compassion.”

Even as a “broke student with $20,000 in student loans,” at first he wanted to give to everyone he met who had a need, “but I realized that was not realistic,” Jaspers said. “So then, it became really easy to say ‘no,’ but of course a cold heart was no good either. So I learned that there will always be physical and spiritual poverty, that it hurts that you are not always able to help but that you must still feel deeply moved for those in need.”

Even after entering the Mount Angel Seminary, where he spent seven years preparing for the priesthood, Jaspers continued to wrestle with his doubts about his calling.

“It was mostly not a question of ‘yes’ or ‘no’ but, ‘Am I ready?’ ” he says. “But I always told myself, if God didn’t want me to be a priest, he would close that door. So I kept on, because I didn’t want to quit and then live my life wondering if I was supposed to do this.”

In his third year of theological studies, the equivalent of earning a degree in philosophy, Jaspers realized “that God had not closed the door, and all I had to do is choose to walk through it. And then I realized I was totally free to make that decision — to do it or not — and having that total freedom made me want to do it even more.”

He became ordained as a deacon, “the point at which you take the vow of celibacy, prayer and obedience,” he says, and 14 months later completed his education and became a priest.

It’s a tough job, often starting early in the morning and ending late at night, because a priest is pretty much everything to his flock, “which means it’s tough to write a job description,” Jaspers says. On his day off, he often leaves Salem entirely. “At first I was so exhausted that I found it suddenly would be 1 p.m., and I had done absolutely nothing,” so sometimes he goes back to Mount Angel to work on an icon he started painting, travels to Portland to meet friends, hikes or plays the guitar or drives to Eugene to visit his family.

He enjoys taking confessions — “The neat part is being the voice of God’s mercy and compassion,” he says — and he clearly enjoys ministering to his parishioners, especially the children.

During the baptism, he led the congregation through the musical chants in a strong baritone voice. He asked questions of the parents about their commitment to raising their children in the Catholic faith, and when they answered shyly at first, he repeated “Si o no” — yes or no — three times until they were happily shouting their affirmative response.

Asking each set of parents their child’s name, he made the sign of the cross on the children’s foreheads. When it came time to anoint them with holy water, he soothed the apprehensive, even letting one toddler dabble his fingers in the water to reassure himself and kissed a little girl on top of her head. All 11 received the sacrament without a wail.

At the end of the service, he used the large baptismal candle to light the smaller ones the parents had brought for their children. and when they all held them high in the air and Jaspers told them their children had received “the light of Christ,” the response was loud and clear: “Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia.”

Afterward, he posed for pictures with the families or chatted until the last had left the church.

“The sacraments are the places where we most concretely come in contact with God’s love,” Jaspers says. “A baptism is a pretty stinking awesome example of that love.”

He’s been a full-fledged priest for only five months, and he’s still learning — “I’m not working too much with kids; right now I just have to learn how to be a parish priest,” he says — but all in all, things are going well.

“I’m very solid in my decision,” Jaspers says. “It’s not always a piece of cake to do, but I’m happy.”