Mist covered the countryside as the newly appointed priest searched for the village of Ars. At its boundary, a shepherd boy named Antoine pointed through the mist saying, “There is Ars.” Fr Jean-Marie Vianney replied, “My young friend, you have shown me the way to Ars; I will show you the way to heaven.” Immediately, the new curé knelt and prayed.
He did not know what awaited him. Ars was a forgotten village, marked by religious indifference and moral decline. Yet Ars was more than a place on the map. It was the place of Vianney’s calling: the people he was to love, the duties he was to fulfil, and even the cross from which he would sometimes be tempted to flee.
Every vocation has an Ars clouded in mist. There is the Ars outside us: the parish, marriage, family, ministry, workplace, or responsibility entrusted to us. And there is the interior Ars: the mist of inadequacy, disappointment, fear and uncertainty through which we ask, “Lord, is this truly where you want me?”
Vianney was not a man who always felt certain. He struggled, wanted at times to run, yet chose to remain.
He struggled academically and was judged by some incapable of priesthood. Yet one priest recognised beneath his limitations a soul capable of holiness. He later suffered calumny and opposition from fellow clergy, while responsibility for souls weighed heavily upon him: “If on my arrival at Ars I had foreseen all that I was to suffer there, I should have died on the spot.”
His fear was real, but so was his fidelity. And that is holiness! Holiness is not the absence of an interior battle but faithfulness within it. Three times Vianney tried to leave Ars.
The first time, one thought stopped him: was not the conversion of one soul worth more than all the prayers he might offer in solitude?
The second time, exhausted after illness, he reached his childhood home, only to say eight days later, “let us go back to Ars.”
On his final attempt, his parishioners rang the church bells and blocked the road. He wept and immediately returned to the confessional.
Vianney tried to leave Ars, but he never abandoned Ars. When weakness drew him towards the road, prayer, love, and obedience brought him back.
At night, a lamp would flicker from the presbytery to the church. Before the tabernacle he prayed: “My God, grant me the conversion of my parish. I am willing to suffer all my life… only let my people be converted.” He celebrated Mass reverently, kept vigils, prayed the Divine Office when exhausted, and spent most of his day in the confessional. Even when worn out, he visited the sick and dying.
Through all this, Vianney became a living image of the watchful servant in the Gospel: not someone who never grows tired or afraid, but someone whom the Master finds still loving what has been placed into his hands.
Vianney did not merely endure the Cross. He sought the grace to love there. “There are two ways of suffering,” he taught, “to suffer with love, and to suffer without love.”
This gives particular force to his famous words about priests: “the priesthood is the love of the heart of Jesus.” That heart, pierced upon the Cross, is love that remains, intercedes, forgives, and gives itself for souls.
For clergy, then, our Ars may be the ministry we would rather avoid, an emergency call when we finally have time to ourselves, a difficult conversation or confession, or prayer when the heart feels empty.
Fidelity often means choosing the harder good, not because exhaustion is holy, but because love is not measured by comfort.
And that applies, in different ways, to every vocation. For the married, Ars may be commitment chosen again when affection feels distant. For parents, it may mean remaining watchful in prayer when a child drifts. For the single person, it may mean carrying loneliness without closing the heart to grace.
Sometimes the mist returns over our own Ars, and we start to wonder whether we have misunderstood God’s will. Vianney teaches us that fidelity does not always mean feeling certain. It means choosing to remain while uncertain.
If you are standing at the boundary of your own Ars right now, and the road ahead is hidden, do not flee! Kneel there like Vianney! Because Ars is not only the place of struggle, it is also the place of transformation.
That indifferent village became a place of conversion. The forgotten parish became a road to heaven. And the priest who entered the mist feeling inadequate became the patron saint of parish priests.
Dominic Altakchy is a Deacon of the Maronite Eparchy of Australia, New Zealand and Oceania.
