Philip Johnson: ‘I can’t live like I’m dead already’

Philip Johnson sounds more serious than most lads fresh out of the navy. There’s an air of steely purpose about him and an absence of frivolity. But then Philip is an unusual 24-year-old. While he was pondering a vocation to the priesthood – “the greatest thing that can be offered”, he says – he received news that would concentrate anyone’s mind. On October 15 2008 doctors told him he had 18 months to live.

Philip was serving as a gunnery officer on a US Navy cruiser stationed in Richmond, Virginia, in May 2008 when he started to experience nocturnal fits or seizures.

“I went to the doctor,” Philip tells me, “and told him what was happening. He thought it was a sleep problem – sleep paralysis – and I didn’t have anything to worry about. But it kept happening, about once a month.”

Philip was asleep when the seizures happened, so he couldn’t describe them to the doctor. One night, while their ship was on deployment in Bahrain, a fellow officer actually saw Philip having one of the seizures. It was then that the medics decided to give Philip an MRI scan. It confirmed their fears: Philip had a tumour in his brain and it was, he says, “a huge mass”. In January 2009 he underwent exploratory surgery. A biopsy revealed that the tumour was cancerous, malignant and more aggressive than the doctors had thought. It is too big to operate on without severely damaging cognitive function. So the treatment plan is to try to slow its growth by the body-ravaging means of radiation, five days a week, and chemotherapy. On a scale of one to four, with four being the fastest-growing, they graded Philip’s cancer as 3.3. Average life after diagnosis of a cancer of that severity, they said, is 18 to 24 months.

“They sat me down and told me that,” Philip says. “It was really hard at first. I went right to the chapel and cried for a little bit. But, really, the more I prayed about it and the more I thought about it, I really accepted it. I thought: if I do die from this, at least I know. If this is the thing that kills me, and of course I believe in miracles, if I do die from this at least I know and I’ve got time to prepare. I’ve been able to change things in my life and live a better life.”

As he talks, Philip strikes me as extraordinarily serene. Did he feel angry when he heard the diagnosis? “I thought: why is this happening to me? But I wasn’t angry. I was very peaceful about it. I really don’t know why.”

Did it shake his faith? “It didn’t, no. If anything, it made it stronger. We pray the rosary every day for a good death but it doesn’t mean a good death at 80 years necessarily. A lot of people don’t know when that’s going to be. I might know. When you’re 24 you never think about death. You try to realise that you’re going to die but you go to sleep every night and you expect to wake up in the morning. You have so much time on earth but I know that I may not have that much. It really does change your outlook.” The surgery “wasn’t great”, he says, but adds: “I am calm. God’s given me a lot of grace.”

His family are made up of one brother and his mother, who was received into the Church last year, and father, a committed cradle Catholic.

“I’m sure they’re trying to be strong for me,” he says. “I don’t have children myself so I can’t imagine how hard it is to see your own child suffer and maybe to lose them. But they’re also very faithful.”

Philip Gerard Johnson went to naval academy in 2002, straight after high school, graduating after four years. In high school he “wasn’t particularly devout”, though as a child he used to like dressing up as a priest. Nowadays he is one of that burgeoning number of young Catholics who have grown to love the Extraordinary Form of the Mass.

It was while Philip was a sophomore, aged 19, that he started hearing a call to the priesthood. “Nobody’s born a priest,” he says: “It’s a decision you have to follow.” Like many young men, though, Philip had other things on his mind.

“I met a young Catholic girl and decided that perhaps I was called to marriage. I was very young and I put the priesthood on hold. I courted this girl for about two years and I still felt called to the priesthood by that time. We spoke about vocation. She knew about my attraction to the priesthood. It’s part of discernment I think, like visiting the seminary is part of discernment, spending time with priests is part of discernment, but I think over time it becomes apparent what’s deep in your heart.

“I would be at Mass with her – we’d go to Mass all the time and I felt like I should be at the altar, I didn’t feel like I should be at the pews with the family. I identified with the priest. It was something that wouldn’t go away. My spiritual director calls it the ‘still small voice in your heart’. It’s just something that’s always with you, the calling in your heart, the priesthood.”

This period sounds like a time of uncertainty and discomfort. Philip’s girlfriend was convinced that her vocation was to marriage – she did go on to marry and is still friends with Philip – while Philip thought his was to the priesthood.

“I had to be honest and we had to go our separate ways,” he says. But Philip was still “torn”, as he says, “lukewarm” in his discernment, in a way many young seminarians may recognise. He was acutely mindful of the sacrifice that every priest must make.

“When you’re with priests you’re very sure you want to be a priest, you’re very open about it with them, but then you see a beautiful girl after Mass and by that point you’re only just thinking about a vocation, but probably not! I think once I decided to stop courting and to actually follow it, it became public that I was becoming a priest, and it became a lot easier. The first step is to have people know about it, not to have it hidden from you. A lot of people are ashamed of it and I guess I was too.”

Philip is undergoing a medical discharge from the navy. His diocese, Raleigh in North Carolina, is supporting his application to seminary When he talks of the future, a note of gentle defiance creeps in. “If it’s God’s will that I become a priest then I’ll become a priest, and as Bishop Burbidge [of Raleigh, a strong supporter] has told me, even though the doctors aren’t giving me much time to live, it’s an act of faith to be doing this. I can’t live as if I’m dead already. Miracles happen all the time.”

Philip writes an inspiring

blog “In caritate non ficta”. And he has nourished his devotion to St Bernadette by helping at Lourdes and visiting her convent at Nevers. A friend in the Vatican arranged for Philip’s name to be entered into the prayer book that sits on the Pope’s prayer kneeler. What does

Philip pray for? “I pray to get better so that I can be a priest for many years. My main prayer is that I can conform my will to God’s will. A lot of times our wishes aren’t the same as what God wills and we have to conform our minds to what God wants. We don’t know what God wants always. Perhaps I won’t understand in this life why all these things are happening to me. God wills it for some reason.”

Of course he worries about his illness and the treatment is gruelling, but, he says again, he doesn’t get angry. Rather, he feels overwhelmed. “So many things have hit me all at once.

So many things to worry about. I don’t know what’s going to happen in the future. I don’t know if I’ll be able to go to the seminary and be a priest. The saddest part is not being able to fulfil that. The biggest sadness… I dream about being a priest. It’s such an amazing thing, to offer Holy Mass, to absolve sins. The saddest thing is not being able to do that but at the same time, it may not be God’s will.”

It felt like a privilege to talk to a person with such a fervent faith. The thought of the afterlife, Philip says, is “more real” now. “I want heaven. When I was younger I wanted to go to heaven because I didn’t want to go to hell. I now desire to go to heaven. I want to be with God. I think Pope Benedict said when you believe in eternity, when you have that hope… that’s why it’s hard to be sad.

“I can imagine that when you don’t believe in God and you don’t believe in an afterlife but the only thing you believe in is what’s here on earth, it would be crushing news but you come to realise that material things don’t matter. In heaven you’re constantly in the presence of God. It’s like one big Mass. You’re happy just because you’re with God.”

Philip in civvies and below in his US Navy uniform: “If I do die from this at least I know and I’ve got time to prepare”.

This article first appeared in the print edition of The Catholic Herald (22/5/09)

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