Now a Father to All

As his wife, Patricia, lay dying of brain cancer, Bruce Baker confided in her that he wanted to become a Roman Catholic priest.

Patricia, who had been his heart’s companion for 28 years, wasn’t surprised.

Even as they raised their eight children in Woodland Hills, Patricia knew that Baker had always longed, in his words, “to find a way to be God’s man.”

On Jan. 30--almost nine years after the death of his wife--Baker was ordained at St. Mel Catholic Church in Woodland Hills.

It was the church where the Bakers had worshiped, the church where most of their children were baptized and confirmed, and the church where a broken-hearted Baker and his children had gathered in 1990 to mourn the death of Patricia Baker at the age of 50.

This is Bruce Baker’s first Easter as a priest, and the season’s promise of renewal and rebirth is reflected in his story. In the space of a few decades, Baker has been husband, father, filmmaker, businessman, deacon, widower, Carmelite friar and now Carmelite priest.

Holy Orders is a sacrament, and Baker’s ordination was a solemn event. The air was perfumed with incense, the church packed with people who had known Baker as family man and deacon. Perhaps because ordinations are so rare in the 1990s, more than 30 priests joined in the rite.

But, for all its traditional solemnity, there was something very personal about this ordination as well. As the 57-year-old candidate entered the church, a kilted bagpiper preceded him, playing “Amazing Grace.” The music of the piper, Baker says, “touches something in me. It’s primordial. It haunts me.”

Waiting for the ordination to begin, Baker sat in a pew surrounded by all eight of his children and three grandchildren, who fidgeted quietly. His 82-year-old father-in-law, John Vogt Jr., had flown in from Louisiana to share in Baker’s remarkable transition from one life to another. It was Baker’s 38th wedding anniversary.

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“God has worked in Bruce’s life in extraordinary ways,” Gerald Wilkerson, auxiliary bishop for the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, told the congregation shortly after ordaining Baker. “He’s known life and love. He’s known death and suffering.”

The direction that Baker’s life has taken is unusual but not unprecedented. More and more older men--many of them widowers--are being accepted for ordination by a church that once disdained them.

In the 1950s, seminaries were crowded, and men older than 24 were rarely accepted. But that changed in the early 1960s, as men began to leave the priesthood and vocations dried up.

Twenty thousand American priests have forsaken their vocations since the 1960s, and seminary enrollment plunged 85% between 1966 and 1991, according to Georgetown University’s Center for Research in the Apostolate. Older candidates look increasingly attractive to an American church that projects that it will have only 21,000 parish priests by 2005. Those priests will serve a Catholic population of 74 million, up from 45 million in 1966, in large part because of immigration from Latin America.

Baker is also an example of an all but universal phenomenon--one that transcends any single religious denomination. In his early 50s, Baker felt the desire that overwhelms almost any thoughtful person in middle age: to abandon the trivial and create a better self.

Life as a Carmelite priest was Baker’s answer to the urgent challenges of midlife, or as Baker articulates them: “How do I live my life in relationship to ultimate questions? How do I live my life in relationship to God, however I define God?”

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Baker’s first clerical models were not even Catholic.

They were the three Episcopal priests in his family, an uncle and two cousins, says Baker, who first had thoughts of becoming a priest in junior high.

But Baker put that dream aside and married Patricia in 1961. Born Episcopalian, he converted to Catholicism, Patricia’s faith, the following year. After Baylor University, set on a career in filmmaking, he got a job making commercials for a Dallas ad agency.

Then, in 1965, the young couple packed up 2-year-old Ashley and the baby, Meredith, and drove to Los Angeles.

As the bishop recounted at Baker’s ordination, when the young family arrived here, “He got on the freeway and drove until he found something he could afford. In those days, it was Woodland Hills. Today it would be halfway to San Francisco.”

Baker became senior filmmaker for the Franciscan Order’s movie studio in downtown L.A. Although, Baker says, “the desire to be a priest always stayed with me,” he concentrated on his marriage and supporting his growing family. He was also ordained a diocesan deacon in 1982. Unlike a priest, a deacon can’t say Mass, give absolution or anoint the sick. But a creative deacon can minister in his own way. Baker found many ways to serve God and his fellow congregants at St. Mel, including co-founding a men’s club that still meets two Saturday mornings a month.

In the early 1970s, Baker started his own film production company. “That was a real faith walk,” he says of the decision to go into business for himself.

It was a stressful time for Baker and his wife. He had given up the security of a regular paycheck and was sometimes away on location for four weeks at a time, leaving Patricia to parent alone. But the need for more money had become increasingly pressing as the children grew. The Bakers not only had a lot of mouths to feed, they also had a lot of minds to educate.

All the children graduated from college, including the prestigious institutions West Point, Smith and UCLA. Two are currently at Harvard Business School.

Few things are more seductive than the entertainment industry, and Baker inevitably made contacts in the business.

“I flirted with it,” Baker says, when asked if he was ever tempted by Hollywood. “I had opportunities, but I couldn’t commit wholly to it.”

Baker finally left the film business in 1982 to become president and CEO of Pachmayr Ltd., a sporting-goods firm based in Monrovia.

One day in 1989, Patricia Baker was having lunch with her sister when she began to choke. For 12 hours, she couldn’t speak. Fourteen months later, Patricia Baker’s devastated family was celebrating her Mass of Resurrection.

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Although spirituality was a constant thread for Baker, he lived an active, even worldly life. As a sporting-goods executive, he even hunted big game several times in Africa (something one of his sons reveals, not Baker).

“I passed on the elephant, but I killed everything else,” including three lions, Baker admits.

Born and raised in Louisiana, where hunting is customary, not controversial, Baker thinks the culling of game animals by a few paying Westerners probably has a positive impact on African ecology. But, he says, “I came to a point in my life when I couldn’t kill any more, even though my conscience wasn’t stricken when I did it.”

After Patricia’s death, Baker was increasingly drawn to the idea of becoming a Carmelite (he had worked with a Carmelite priest on a video project and alongside several Carmelites at St. Mel).

Founded in the Holy Land around AD 1200, the Order of the Brothers of the Blessed Virgin Mary of Mount Carmel is one of what Baker describes as “active contemplatives,” spiritual brothers who have separate rooms or cells (the first Carmelites each had their own cave in the side of a ravine) but come together to eat, pray and celebrate the sacraments. The order has about 3,000 members worldwide.

For Baker, one of the major attractions of the Carmelites was the promise of community.

For decades, Baker’s house (and its small, kidney-shaped pool) had been filled with his children and their friends. There were always 15 or 20 people at Sunday dinner, he recalls, and he knew he didn’t want to live alone or with one other person as most parish priests do.

But there was a catch. More and more older men are realizing they have a vocation, and at least four Catholic seminaries in the United States train them. But Baker knew that the Carmelites have a cutoff age and normally do not accept men older than 38. His Carmelite friends encouraged him to apply even though he was 52.

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Today, the Baker children see the joy becoming a Carmelite priest has brought their father, and know that he did the right thing. But, Baker recalls, “In the beginning it was difficult for my children. After losing their mother, I think they felt they were losing me.”

Thirty-one-year-old John Baker, now director of development for the Norris Cancer Center at USC, took his father’s decision in stride.

“I kind of saw it coming,” John says. “I remember he took me out to dinner and popped the news to me. I wasn’t at all surprised. He supported me when I made a lot of iffy decisions, and this was my turn to support him when he made a very good decision.”

The ordination brought tears to the Baker children’s eyes, as they remembered their mother. But it is clearly a comfort to them to see their father well and happy after so many hard, sad years.

“I read somewhere that the people who live the longest have four or five transitions or careers,” says Paul Baker, 27, who studies finance at Harvard Business School. If his father continues to reinvent himself, Paul only half-jokes, his father “will be living to 120.”

As a Carmelite, Baker took vows of poverty, chastity and obedience. He says that he misses nothing of his old life, that celibacy is not a special burden. The real human need is for warmth and affection, he argues.

“I’ve found that very deep friendships satisfy your need for intimacy,” he says.

Baker admits that he initially missed the physical contact--the frequent hugging, for instance--that had been a given in his life before studying for the priesthood. As a new seminarian, he had no deep friendships within the community, although he has them now.

“When I first went into the seminary, I really felt that sense of being touch-deprived.”

At the time Patricia Baker fell ill, the Bakers were already planning for a new phase in their lives. All but two of the children had started college or careers. They could see ahead to a time with fewer financial demands, more emotional energy, more discretionary time. They would be able to travel together.

“We had just come into that point in our lives when we were no longer so stressed,” he recalls. “I think we looked forward to a time when we could be more present to each other.

“She’s always present to me in a sense,” says Baker, who included a prayer for his late wife in the first Mass he celebrated at St. Mel. “There’s hardly a day that goes by that I don’t think about her and pray for her. And I still dream about her.”

But, Baker says, he loves his new life as a Carmelite and a priest. Where he once wore his wedding ring, he now wears a “covenant ring” symbolizing his commitment to God.

Baker now lives in a Carmelite “house of studies” in Washington, D.C. He just finished his thesis--on conjugal spirituality and sexuality. And in June he will go to Niagara Falls, Ontario, where he will serve as a spiritual director, conducting retreats and helping people scrutinize their lives.

As a Carmelite, Baker has chucked the burdensome possessions and banal choices that crowd so many people’s lives.

“At one time I had six cars parked in my driveway,” he recalls. “The vows are really freedom in that sense.”

Others recognize that among the precious things the priesthood has given Baker are meaningful work and a community, “a wonderful sense that I don’t have to do it myself any more.” A lay person came up to Baker after his first Mass and said: “I envy you. You’ve found a safe harbor.”

Ordination changed Baker in some profound way, he believes.

“Something has shifted in me, and I don’t know what it is. I can’t articulate it yet. Part of it is a great sense of responsibility. Part of it is a sense of being loved by God.”

The day after his ordination, Baker woke up and realized, “I’m a priest! I’m a priest, after all these years. . . . To be God’s man, that’s what I always wanted to be.”