The Augustinian Recollect Joseph Shonibare (Lewisham, London, England, 1971) has celebrated during this 2024 his 25 years of priestly ordination with his family in England, with his companions of ordination in Spain and with the people of God in Cuba. This is his testimony of sincere gratitude.
Why did I want to celebrate the 25 years of my priestly ordination with my family, with my fellow ordination members, with the people of God whom I serve in Cuba? Because it is right and necessary to give thanks, always and everywhere.
How can I repay the Lord for all the great good done for me?
I will raise the cup of salvation and call on the name of the Lord.
I will pay my vows to the Lord in the presence of all his people.
To celebrate is to remember, and to remember is to give thanks. This memoir is intended to be a praise to God because he has been good, he has pampered and responded to this creature, a sinner who loves him and tries to serve his people with love and respect.
With this thanksgiving I want to renew my commitment to serve among his people. I have had in mind my parents, both now deceased: Christopher and Adeola. But I also want to make present all those who suffer in the world today, especially the victims of wars and conflicts, catastrophes and injustices.
The Lord has been good to me. I was called as a young man born in England, in a family of five brothers. From the age of 3 to 18 I was educated in Nigeria, the land of my parents and whose culture and sense of life runs through my blood.
At the age of 19, I began to be aware of my religious vocation, and I professed as a member of the Augustinian Recollects at the age of 21. I continued my religious and priestly formation in Spain, with shared life, experiences and learning with brothers from many other countries.
The Lord granted me the good fortune of being chosen and ordained as a priest for the Church on October 9, 1999, together with an Irish companion, also an Augustinian Recollect, Hugh Corrigan.
On that memorable day, surrounded by our brothers in the religious community, family and friends, we committed ourselves to the faithful celebration of the sacraments of the Church, especially the Eucharist; we promised to care for the faithful people that God entrusted to our care; we prostrated ourselves on the ground and offered our lives as a holocaust.
The bishop placed his hands on our heads and we were consecrated priests forever. Our hands were specially anointed to offer the sacrifice of the new and eternal covenant, being unworthy of that gift and present.
The Lord did me the good of beginning my ministry in an Augustinian-Recollect parish in London dedicated to the 40 English martyrs who gave their lives to maintain their faith against civil power between 1535 and 1679. In that Parish I served for four years and took my first steps as a priest, discovering how delightful it is to serve the people of God.
The Lord did me the good of sending me later, for another four years, as a parish priest to the south of England, to Devon, where I discovered the people and the small Catholic communities in that rural area. I drank a lot of tea and was blessed as a pastor because I was able to get to know and accompany, home by home, the sheep of the flock.
In 2007, after eight years of priesthood and 35 years of life, in response to a personal request, my religious community gave me the gift of being able to serve in the mission of the Augustinian Recollects in Sierra Leone, a country that at that time was still recovering from the effects of the civil war.
I changed country, continent and reality. I lived my priesthood and my ministerial service as a paterfamilias, guiding so many children and adolescents who struggle for a future different from that of their parents through education.
I lived many moments of joy, but also many others of helplessness in the face of life and death situations of so many people who daily and at any time asked for our help, in the midst of a hostile world in which poverty mercilessly struck every family, without distinction.
After seven years of what I consider a fruitful African mission in Kamalo, God did me the favor of listening to my request to continue my service in a different place, the Brazilian Amazon, another continent, another reality, another world.
There He gave me the opportunity to renew and discover other aspects of the priestly ministry. The pastor must smell like his sheep, he tells Pope Francis, sharing his joys and sorrows up close. In Brazil I discovered that God can use unworthy instruments, like me, to console and strengthen his people. God truly loves his people.
I spent eight years in the Amazon, one in Manaus, with a pastoral and social configuration more like a big city, and seven in Pauini, in a place isolated from the rest of the world and where the communities of faith are separated by hours by boat and kilometers of jungle, only accessible by river navigation.
But once again God was kind enough to listen to my request. On July 4, 2022, I received a letter from the prior general of the Augustinian Recollects, on whom this mission depends, sending me to Cuba. And a song that I had learned in my years of formation in Spain immediately came to my mind: “What a detail, Lord, you have had with me!”.
I already knew that it was not easy to find milk, eggs or meat here! But something in me led me, and I don’t know why, to want to serve the people here. And here I am, for two years, in Cuba.
The situation is very challenging, but for those of us who live here, feeling hope is intimately linked to believing in God the Father, who continues to manifest himself through his “anawin”, his humble ones. As a people we walk and resist, we share the hope that never disappoints and that becomes a message of salvation in the face of those who, despite propaganda, do not improve the lives of the people.
What have I learned from being a priest for 25 years? I would like to highlight at least two lessons among many others: the first, that it is a privilege to serve the people. The slightest examination of conscience reminds each priest that, as the opening prayer says, “without any merit on my part, you have chosen me.” We are made of clay, we do not deserve to be priests: there are people who are more holy, intelligent, balanced, patient and creative than me and they are not priests!
What does this mean? Simple: I must live my priesthood with extreme humility and respect for God, knowing that it is God who chose this clay, as the second reading says, “to show that the treasure we carry is divine, beyond us.”
The second lesson I highlight from those learned as a priest is similar and can be summed up with this: in relation to people, priests are more loved than we imagine and more forgiven than we deserve.
We see this about being loved especially when you change mission and the person you least expect, when saying goodbye, reminds you how you have helped him. Suddenly, he tells you about your qualities or good works in a way that you did not expect, you were not even aware that there was that certain admiration or gratitude in the interlocutor.
And we are forgiven because the faithful people of God… put up with us! They put up with our very different idiosyncrasies, they put up with our weaknesses and continue to call us “father”, they put up with our apathetic or sad days and encourage us, they stimulate us to live our commitment. They see Christ the shepherd in us.
To live this 25th anniversary of priestly ordination with depth, I propose to commit myself before you with enthusiasm and realism to always serve the faithful people of God. Also to celebrate by remembering that sign present in so many sacristies around the world: as if it were my first mass, my only mass and my last mass.
Thank you everybody. Thank you God. You have already heard the summary of all this:
How can I repay the Lord for all the great good done for me?
I will raise the cup of salvation and call on the name of the Lord.
I will pay my vows to the Lord in the presence of all his people.