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JEFFERSON — Jonah Lynch had no intention of becoming a priest. From about age 15, he wanted nothing to do with churches at all.<\/p>\nJEFFERSON — Jonah Lynch had no intention of becoming a priest. From about age 15, he wanted nothing to do with churches at all.<\/p>\n
God, however, had a different plan.<\/p>\n
So on Saturday, the Turner boy who grew up singing hymns in Jefferson’s St. Thomas Catholic Church was back — this time as the newly<\/p>\n
ordained Father Jonah.<\/p>\n
“This is where I grew up,” said Lynch, who celebrated Mass on Saturday for more than 100 friends and family, a brief visit before he returns to Rome. “These are the people who accompanied me in prayer the last six years of seminary.”<\/p>\n
They’re also the people, Lynch said, who knew the teenager who first questioned, then rejected, a God who could allow an evil world. Their prayers, he said, sustained his family and even himself, though he didn’t know it at the time.<\/p>\n
Lynch grew up in Turner, the oldest son of Stephen and Elise Lynch. He graduated in 1996 from Cascade High School and earned a bachelor’s degree in physics four years later at McGill University in Montreal, Canada.<\/p>\n
The sciences, Lynch believed, would teach him the truth about humanity. But he took a few philosophy courses along the way and was deeply impressed by one of his professors.<\/p>\n
The professor, a Catholic, talked with him about his questions. He didn’t provide answers, Lynch said, but he listened — listened in such a way that Lynch began to see his questions differently.<\/p>\n
Then Lynch met a priest from Siberia who had come to Montreal to raise money for an orphanage he was building there. The priest spoke Italian, which was translated into French for his presentation.<\/p>\n
Lynch spoke neither, but he responded to the intensity and purity of purpose he could see shining in the priest’s eyes.<\/p>\n
“I turned to the guy next to me and said, ‘I want to live like that,’” Lynch recalled.<\/p>\n
Even then, Lynch was wary of the church. He had a girlfriend he believed he would marry, with whom he wanted to raise a family.<\/p>\n
But when the friend sitting next to him put him in touch with a priest, Lynch agreed to a visit. And another. And as his friendship with the priests of the church began to grow, he began to feel a distance in his relationship with his girlfriend and a growing awareness that a life in the church was what he needed to be happy.<\/p>\n
It wasn’t an easy choice, he noted, just an inevitable one; as inescapable as the fate of his namesake, who also once refused God.<\/p>\n
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