A 23-year-old seminarian in New Jersey, Edmund Luciano, (that’s him in the middle on the left, with his sister and his cousin) just had a heart transplant, and it sounds like he’s doing remarkably well:

Luciano knows only that the heart donor was a 12-year-old boy, according to the agreement with the sharing network. “The donor’s family knows more about me than I know about them,” he said. “I was told (by the sharing network) that the grandmother was greatly comforted by the fact that I am studying to be a priest.” He explained that the recipient is encouraged to write a letter to the family when he or she is ready to do so. “(The donor’s family) chooses whenever they are ready to write back or to make contact with the recipient. Otherwise they remain anonymous,” he said.

“It has definitely been a mystical experience for me to think that there was a family in that much of their own tragedy that was able to respond to the needs of someone else, that they had enough love. … How could I not want to meet people who can love that much? So there is hope to one day meet them.”

“Because I was praying to John Paul II, I have kind of named him ‘Paul’ when I think of him and pray for him,” Luciano said of his donor. Calling him “the donor,” he added, seems too cold. “I have his heart. It is a little more personal than that.”

“Reading through the Liturgy of the Hours and the scriptures,” he said, “many things that were once metaphors are not metaphors to me anymore. You’re in a whole new place when you have literally spent time with death and your life is given back to you.”

We are all clay, in the Potter’s hands. I can only imagine how this extraordinary young life is being shaped, and re-shaped, day by day, and what remarkable work he has yet to do, with another young heart guiding him on, every beat a blessing and a hope. Pray for him, and with him.

Photo: The Catholic Spirit