Called from the outfield to be a Priest

From prospect to priest: Grant Desme leaves the A's, becomes a monk and tries to find his peace

Thu, Sep 27, 2012

Frater Matthew (formerly Grant) Desme (L) participates in a ceremony on All Souls' Day. (Rick Belcher/St. Michael's …SILVERADO, Calif. – On the morning Grant Desme ceased to exist, he was at peace. He spent years searching for serenity, convinced it was coming soon, next, now. It never did. Life was a blaring stereo, and he had become numb to its noise. The sound finally abated when he arrived here. He believed God muted it.

So on Christmas Eve two years ago he and seven other men marched into the church at St. Michael's Abbey and readied for a transition the church considered spiritual death. Grant Desme would go by another name. His plainclothes would become a head-to-toe white habit. For the next two years, he would commit to the dual life of a priest-in-training and a monk in the Norbertine Order. The naming ceremony bound him to the virtues of chastity, poverty and obedience.

To determine his new name, Desme submitted three choices from which St. Michael's abbot and spiritual leader, the Rt. Rev. Eugene J. Hayes, would choose. Desme liked Paul, Louis and Moses. None sounded right. Neither did Desme's second round of choices. On his vestition day, he knelt before the Father Abbot Eugene, who handed him a copy of the rule of St. Augustine.
"And in our order," he said, "you will be called Matthew."
Sometime after the ceremony, Frater Matthew Desme approached Father Abbot Eugene. For the rest of his life, people would call him Matthew. He wanted to know why.
"He said it struck him because [Saint Matthew] was a rich tax collector," Frater Matthew says, "and I was a rich baseball player."

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