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Grandparents’ prayers lead Hot Springs man to ordination

Luke Womack saw joy in seminarians while studying at Seton Hall in New Jersey

Published: May 28, 2016   

By Aprille Hanson
Associate Editor

Aprille Hanson
Luke Womack, 31, blesses parishioners at St. Mary of the Springs Church in Hot Springs with incense during his diaconate ordination Mass May 19. Womack said he was happy to be ordained in his home parish.

HOT SPRINGS — From the time seminarian Luke Womack was little, his grandmother made a bold prediction: if any of her grandchildren would join religious life, it’d be him.

“So at different points in time growing up I’d have family members say when are you going into seminary?” Womack said. “ … I thought no, I’m not going to do any of that.”

Womack was holding out for the only one who could really tell him to go — God. On May 19, Womack took another step further in serving God by being ordained a transitional deacon at St. Mary Church in Hot Springs, the first ordination ever held at the parish. It is a final step before priestly ordination in 2017.

“I’m humbled, but I have the excitement of a kid on Christmas morning,” Womack told Arkansas Catholic ahead of his ordination. “You know the curiosity and the wonder and the excitement of a new experience and knowing that I’m going to be serving people.”

 

Spreading joy

Referencing Pope Francis’ apostolic exhortation “The Joy of the Gospel” in his homily, Bishop Anthony B. Taylor said Womack must be a part of the “revolution of tenderness.”

“Luke, you are already a joy-filled person. Your joy radiates. Today the Lord sends you forth to proclaim his Gospel of joy as a deacon,” Bishop Taylor said. “Pope Francis urges us to allow a spirit-filled, merciful missionary spirit to form in us a definite style of evangelization.”

That special spirit of joy is something Womack has had his whole life, his parents Larry and Madelyn said. Womack was born and raised in Hot Springs along with his twin brother Buck and younger sister, Mary Lou, who attended the ordination, along with extended family.

“It’s one of the greatest things to happen to a family,” his father said. “… Even as a young boy, he had a simple and loving answer for things. He had an insight, much like his grandfather.”

“It’s a humbling experience,” Madelyn said of her son’s ordination. “I’m excited; it’s an immense amount of emotions.”

Luke Womack said the family would spend summers visiting their grandparents, Richard Norton and Mary Margaret Womack, in Bristow, Okla., where they were very active in church life.

“Just being around that environment I think had at least some effect on me,” he said.

Though they are deceased, Larry Womack said, “They are the prayers that lifted him here.”

 

Lead me home

After studying history at Henderson State University in Arkadelphia for three years, Luke Womack, 31, transferred to St. Gregory University in Shawnee, Okla., and found that theology was “something I felt I could devote my life to.”

He graduated in 2007 and attended graduate school in Seton Hall University in South Orange, N.J.

While there, he found a sense of camaraderie among the seminarians, which lead him to understand that God was calling him too.

“I could tell they were men striving for something greater then themselves,” Womack said. “In the brokenness they had, they were striving to be holy and they had a desire to serve people.”

While his discernment was up and down, in late summer 2011, a prayer of frustration led to clarity.

“It’s time to quite running you need to do this,” he said. “… My heart was not open to serve and now that’s the only thing I want to do.”

He entered the House of Formation Nov. 1, 2011, and has since been studying at St. Meinrad Seminary in Indiana. Womack said the clinical pastoral education program he completed last summer at Baptist Health Medical Center in Little Rock had a profound effect on him because of his “extreme phobia of hospitals.”

“Being in the hospital was really, really overwhelming — people sick, dying, hurt,” Womack said. “I grew to enjoy talking to everyone, no matter if they were Catholic or not. So I’m just really excited to get to do everything” as a priest.

Womack will serve as a deacon at Christ the King Church in Little Rock this summer.

However, getting the chance to be ordained at St. Mary’s was a chance to say thank you.

“They’ve all been a part of my formation whether they know it or not,” he said.

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