Rev Jean-Sébastien Géry: finding joy in God’s ‘mysterious ways’

Approaching his ordination to the priesthood at St Patrick’s Cathedral on Saturday 21 September, transitional deacon Rev Jean-Sébastien Géry feels ‘a deep sense of joy’.

As he makes his final preparations—including arrangements for his parents’ upcoming visit from Mauritius—he looks forward to sharing this joy. ‘I’m grateful that God is answering the deepest desire of my heart,’ he says, ‘because I always wanted to be happy. I always wanted to be a joyful man.’

Coming to faith

Born and raised in Mauritius, in a musical family, Jean-Sébastien says he owes a particular debt to his grandmother, a ‘very prayerful’ woman.

‘My parents were working during the day in the government, and at night they were playing music in a restaurant,’ he explains, ‘so I ended up spending most of my childhood with my grandmother.’

She laid the foundations of his faith, teaching him how to pray the Our Father, the Hail Mary and the Rosary, and encouraging him to go to Mass every Sunday. ‘Ask the Holy Spirit to guide you,’ she told him, among other ‘little gems’ she passed on.

His faith was also shaped by his older siblings, Christopher and Valerie, who taught him ‘how to share’. And at his Catholic school, he was often cast as Jesus in the short plays the students prepared and performed in the parish as part of their catechism classes. ‘I ended up having to live up to my character,’ he says with a smile.

He also looked up to the parish priest, ‘a beautiful man’, and when Jean-Sébastien sometimes felt lonely or troubled, he was deeply grateful for the ‘many words of comfort’ he heard at Mass.

It was an act of faith to say to Jesus, ‘I don’t know what I’m going to do in my life. I’ll just give it to you.’

Not surprisingly, music also played a huge part in Jean-Sébastien’s upbringing, especially in his teens. Travelling by bus for two hours after school to study music at Mauritius’ national conservatory, he often didn’t arrive home until after 7pm.

‘I didn’t have a smartphone back then’, he explains, so those hours on the bus were a ‘good time of reflection’.

‘That’s where I asked myself many times on those trips back home, “What’s the meaning of life? What’s the purpose of life?”’

He enjoyed mathematics and design at school, and with the encouragement of his design teacher, he achieved good results. This love of design would eventually lead him to Australia, but when he finished school, he didn’t have a clear sense of his path.

What I was asking from God was ‘Give me wisdom.’ That was the first thing I was looking for, and I’m still looking for it!

On the day he got his school certificate, he had what he now recognises as a significant ‘conversion’ experience. Wanting to celebrate his results, he looked for somewhere he could go to Mass and give thanks to God. The only Mass he could find that Friday evening was hosted by a charismatic group.

Going along for the first time, he was ‘impressed by the sense of community’. People knew each other. They hugged each other and sang a lot. One song in particular touched him, tapping into his sense of uncertainty about the future.

‘I remember the feeling was a feeling of [being] lost in those years. And in the homily, the priest said, “Give your present, your past and your future to God. Trust. Surrender to Jesus.”

‘And that word surrender I’d never heard in the Catholic liturgy. So it was about giving up everything to Jesus,’ he recalls. ‘It was an act of faith to say to Jesus, “You know what? I don’t know what I’m going to do in my life. I’ll just give it to you.”

‘I was touched by the Word of God,’ he says. ‘I experienced a sense of security, and then I started to ask myself, “Okay, who is Jesus?” On that day I started to read the Bible … What I was asking from God was “Give me wisdom.” That was the first thing I was looking for, and I’m still looking for it!’

At 17, realising that God speaks to us through our history, he ‘became attentive to the movement of the Spirit’ in his life. At a silent retreat, he learnt to listen more closely. He also found a spiritual director, which, he says, ‘was very, very important in my discernment’. A number of his friends also said they thought he had a vocation to the priesthood.

Encouraged by these experiences and his growing interest in theology, he applied for the seminary in Mauritius, thinking, ‘I don’t know what to do in my life’ but ‘I like Jesus; Jesus loves me.’

The vocations director, however, advised him to continue his tertiary education. That very afternoon, he enrolled in a graphic design degree at the university in Mauritius.

In hindsight, Jean-Sébastien can see that the vocation director’s decision ‘was very wise. I was too young, and I [applied to the seminary] for the wrong reason.’ But while ‘the call of God comes and goes,’ he says, ‘it never fades away; it keeps calling.’

Coming to Melbourne

By 2015, Jean-Sébastien was planning a trip to Melbourne for the wedding of his sister Valerie, who’d arrived here years earlier to take up a music scholarship. She suggested to Jean-Sébastien that he take the opportunity to enrol in a two-year diploma in product design at RMIT.

Faced with the daunting prospect of adapting to a new country and culture, he asked his spiritual director for tips on how to cope and keep growing in his faith.

‘He said two things,’ Jean-Sébastien recalls: find a spiritual director, and ‘a Christian alone is a lost Christian’, so find a community where you can pray together.

On arriving in Australia, though, the weekend hospitality jobs he found to support himself financially made it difficult to find a Catholic community, as they often met while he was working. And he had no idea where to find a spiritual director, since his English wasn’t good enough at the time to engage in meaningful spiritual conversations.

But when the priest who was supposed to celebrate his sister’s wedding had to swap with someone else, Jean-Sébastien discovered that the new priest, Fr Richard Rosse, was Mauritian and could speak Creole. They arranged to catch up, and Fr Richard became Jean-Sébastien’s spiritual director in Australia.

That’s when I started to experience the Church, to experience community, to experience the love of God when we are vulnerable. It was very good for my soul.

Then, one night, while working in a pub, he recognised a woman he’d seen reading at St Francis’ Church, where he’d been to Mass. When he asked her if the parish had a youth group, she said they didn’t, but they did have a Monday afternoon prayer group, which Jean-Sébastien could go to after his classes. They also served a meal, which was ‘even more attractive’ since he wouldn’t have to cook or spend money on food.

So instead of the youth group he’d been looking for, he found himself among a group of elderly people, many of them homeless or lonely.

‘At first it was hard to be there, but after the second week I found that I’m not much different from them,’ he says. ‘I myself in many ways was homeless. I was in search [of a community]. And that’s when I started to experience the Church, to experience community, to experience the love of God when we are vulnerable. So that was very good for my soul.’

He was struck when a woman from the community said to him, ‘God calls us in mysterious ways.’ It helped him see his time at St Francis’ as another important step in his journey.

Coming to a decision

Jean-Sébastien also started attending Six30 Holy Hour at St Patrick’s Cathedral. One evening after adoration, a priest offered him a lift home to Croydon.

On the long drive, he asked the priest why he had entered the seminary? ‘He just said, “I gave it a go,” Jean-Sébastien recalls.

Adopting this attitude of ‘giving it a go’, he decided to apply again for the seminary, this time in Melbourne.

It wasn’t an easy decision, he says. ‘It was a big commitment for my life … a great act of faith.’ But he believes God was putting people in his path to encourage him.

Fr Richard, his spiritual director, for instance, suggested to him that maybe he was called to the priesthood, even though Jean-Sébastien had not told him about his previous application to the seminary in Mauritius. It was an affirmation, he says, prompting him to open his eyes and ‘stop denying’.

If you give it a go, you won’t lose much. You will gain more.

Other affirmations came from more surprising sources.

Among his friends at RMIT, for example, there was ‘this beautiful girl’, who said to him, ‘My grandma will love you so much.’ When he asked her why, she said, ‘Because she will be like, “Oh, you’re such a prayerful guy. Your words are very deep.”’

He was attracted to the girl, so this affirmation of his call was ‘bittersweet’. But the fact that someone who was ‘not a churchy person’ observed those qualities in him made her words, in a sense, ‘even more precious’, showing him that even someone outside the church could experience something of God’s depth through him.

Working night shifts, he would travel home on the ‘Night Rider’ bus. Again, these long bus trips gave him time to reflect on his life. Sometimes he cried from exhaustion, contemplating the 20-minute walk at the end of the bus journey to his house in the freezing cold at 4.30am. ‘I didn’t have the Kathmandu [jacket] at that time—I couldn’t afford it—so it was hard.’

But through all these struggles, he felt cared for in the Church. He realised, ‘If you give it a go, you won’t lose much. You will gain more.’

Coming to the seminary

During his time at Corpus Christi College, the diocesan seminary for Victoria and Tasmania, he has experienced the ‘most beautiful moments. There are beautiful men here, beautiful brothers. And we have beautiful sisters, [among] the staff.’

He says he discovers himself and becomes more confident through the other seminarians. ‘I see myself through their eyes, or … how they treat me. And I see what I can offer.’

I’m grateful that God has listened to my prayer. I feel I’m a happy man, a deeply joyful man, and I just want to share that joy.

He particularly appreciates their times of prayer each morning. ‘It looks the same every day, but there’s a beauty when we’re all struggling together to wake up early. We’re all in this together, and that strengthens the mind,’ he says.

As a priest, he hopes to be someone trustworthy, someone who brings people together. Pointing out that ‘Jesus chose twelve people’, he is grateful to the many friends who have helped and encouraged him along the way, including women and people of all ages. His niece shows him how to be playful, he says, and ‘how to be vulnerable’.

‘I was worried that becoming a priest [and] saying yes to this journey would make me lonely and unhappy,’ he admits, but instead he has found joy. ‘I’m grateful that God has listened to my prayer. I feel I’m a happy man, a deeply joyful man, and I just want to share that joy.’