The roving religion writer for the Washington Post, Christy McKerney, popped by Our Lady of Divine Mercy in Massachusetts the other day, and had a memorable encounter with a young seminarian:

Only Brother Andrew Davy, a 26-year-old American University graduate in philosophy, lingers to talk with me about faith.

Brother Davy, who lives in Washington, D.C., is young and in love with his calling. He is in love with the Trinitarian God; in love with the rituals that have tied him to Catholicism his whole life; in love with his faith.

“It’s trust in God,” says Brother Davy, trying to explain his charismatic Catholic’s view of faith, “the Trinitarian God: The Father, Son and the Holy Spirit.”

Davy’s friend and superior Father Anthony Gramlich, the 35-year-old rector at the National Shrine of the Divine Mercy, would explain faith this way: “Faith is believing in something, maybe that we cannot always rationalize. That doesn’t mean that faith is not rational. … You can’t point to God, but he’s there. You can’t point to love. It’s a metaphysical reality, but we know that love exists. We do take a lot of things on faith actually, more than we think.”

Brother Davy has been taking things on faith his whole life.

He was raised Catholic and has about him the innocence of a man who has never felt scorned or abandoned by his divinity. “I grew up at an early age…of really experiencing faith as something alive and dynamic,” he tells me. “It was like the very air that you breathe — everything.”

With one more year of seminary left, Davy has taken vows of poverty, chastity and obedience. He is ready to dedicate his life to the Lord.

No great tragedy has pushed him toward this decision to enter the priesthood.

His real relationship with God — the point that he said he really knew within his heart that God loved him — began in ninth grade when he had trouble making friends and adjusting to a new school.

“I had gone through kind of a difficult first year, or first semester, and really kind of got to a point of just kind of crying out to the Lord, saying, ‘Lord, I feel like I’m kinda at the bottom’,” Brother Davy remembers. “I found there was a point for myself that I was recalling just that child’s song, ‘Jesus loves me, this I know,’ just very, very basic. … It was almost like the Lord just kinda just touched me and that song became very real in my heart, that I was loved by God and it wasn’t just an intellectual ascent.”

There’s more at the link, and it’s well worth reading.