Before you fill out an application, before you speak to the vocations director, before you tell anyone but God what you are considering — sit with these five questions. They won’t give you the answer. But they will reveal where your heart truly stands.
1. Am I drawn to serve, or to be seen serving?
This is the hardest question, and the most important. The diaconate is public ministry: you will vest, you will preach, you will stand in the sanctuary. For a certain kind of man, that visibility is quietly part of the attraction. Be ruthless with yourself here. Christ’s deacons are configured to the One who emptied himself (Philippians 2:7). If the hidden works of charity — the ones nobody sees or thanks you for — do not already mark your life, the altar will not create them.
2. What does my wife actually think?
Not what she says to be supportive — what she actually thinks. The Church requires a wife’s free consent before a married man can be ordained, and formation programs rightly involve wives throughout. Your vocation, if it is real, will be lived inside your marriage, not alongside it. If your wife has hesitations, those hesitations are data. Listen to them before the Church asks her to sign her name to your call.
3. Can my life absorb this — honestly?
Formation typically takes four to six years of evenings, weekends, papers, and prayer. Ministry after ordination adds homilies to prepare, baptisms to celebrate, funerals that come without warning. Look at your work, your children’s ages, your parents’ health, your finances. God does not call a man to abandon the duties of his state in life; a vocation that would wreck your family is not from him — or its timing is not.
4. Do I love the Church as she is?
Not the Church as you wish she were — the Church as she is: glorious, wounded, maddening, holy. A deacon promises respect and obedience to his bishop. He serves parishes that are messy and people who are difficult. If you are entering formation to fix the Church, to fight a faction, or to finally be listened to, you will be miserable — and so will everyone around you.
5. Is my prayer life already sustaining me?
Deacons promise to pray the Liturgy of the Hours daily, for the Church and for the world. That promise is not meant to start a prayer life; it is meant to anchor one that already exists. If daily prayer is not yet the load-bearing wall of your life, begin there — today, quietly, without an application form. The diaconate can wait. Prayer cannot.
Sitting With the Questions
Notice that none of these questions is “Am I worthy?” No one is. The men the Lord chose in Acts 6 were simply “of good repute, full of the Spirit and of wisdom” (Acts 6:3, RSV-CE) — ordinary men made extraordinary by the laying on of hands. The question is never worthiness. It is honesty: about your motives, your marriage, your limits, your love for the Church, and your prayer. Answer these five truthfully, and you will have given your vocations director — and the Holy Spirit — something real to work with.