My Vocation: Fr Kentigern Hagan OSB

MY VOCATION

Fr Kentigern Hagan OSB

“Don’t be a monk. Monks are not cool”

These words provide one of my few quibbles with my time travelling friend. However, if only they were the limit of the sentiments expressed by my secondary school contemporaries.

I don’t have any dramatic story of conversion which led to the development of my vocation. So too, I don’t claim to be anything special either, but my vocation was just something always there. From as young as I can remember there was a tug, undefined at first, but gradually becoming clearer.

I wasn’t overly pious growing up – I went to Mass each Sunday and Holy Day, but that was it. I suppose I was fortunate to have known and been influenced by monks from my grandparents’ parish (St Mary of the Angels, Canton, Cardiff) from the beginning. It was one of these, Fr Bernard Boyan, who had become a close family friend, who had a key role in nurturing my vocation.

I would stay with him when he moved to work in Liverpool and from there one summer he brought me to visit Ampleforth. I was thirteen years old. From the first moment of my arrival I just felt at home and that was that. Until I was accepted into the Novitiate in 1987 I would spend holidays at the Abbey, getting to know and becoming known.

Thus I return to my beginning. My last few years at school became a nightmare as contemporaries found all sorts of ways to hurl abuse at me and my family for being so utterly weird. Strangely, once I had entered the Novitiate those same characters became supportive and curious as to my life.

From this point in August 1987 my monastic life has just progressed, with a few bumps along the way. I was Simply professed in September 1988 and Solemnly Professed in August 1991.

It was perhaps here that I faced my biggest “bump”, the question over my maturity. The Feast of the Birthday of John the Baptist, and the words of the prophet Jeremiah “Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you…” helped me find my way through.

I was ordained priest in June 1998, one of six ordained by Cardinal Basil. Amongst all our families and friends gathered in the Abbey Church was the Welsh Contingent in national costume and waving flags and daffodils – much to my embarrassment.

The rest of the story is essentially a CV: four years at St Benet’s Hall studying History very badly, fifteen years teaching at Gilling, eighteen years serving the parish of Our Lady & St Chad, Kirkbymoorside with St Mary’s Helmsley and currently Warden of the Visitor Centre, Sacristan and Chaplain to St Margaret’s House.

There have been a few adventures: Fire Squad, Sports Liaison (through which I had the privilege of getting to know a number of sports personalities), redevelopment of the monastery model railway, founder of the SMA Centurions Flag American Football Squad, and my immersion in the adventures of a certain Time Lord with a Blue Box.

To end, another quotation which perhaps sums me up. “There’s no point in being grown up, if you can’t be childish sometimes.” Even though there has been some development of maturity over thirty two years of monastic life, there is still something of “Peter Pan” in me – never quite growing up.