WORDS Michael Griffith

Difficulties have beset Dan Strickland since his early teens, but all of them have brought him closer to God.

It’s not often that the Royal Automobile Club Magazine changes peoples’ lives, but it changed Dan Strickland’s.

At 18, Dan Strickland was a dental student who was questioning his priorities. During this difficult time he read an article in an RAC magazine about six children from Medjugorje, a little town in Bosnia-Herzegovina. The children claimed that Mary was appearing to them on the rise of a nearby hill. The story of the apparitions profoundly moved Dan.

A new path opened up for Dan, one offering an alternative to the beautiful house and nice car. His new path was one far less travelled by young Australians, and led him to the other side of the country to train for the priesthood.

It hasn’t been an easy journey for Dan. Born in a practising Catholic family in the town of Albany in Western Australia, Dan has struggled with anxiety attacks since his teens. He remembers his first attack at the age of 13.

‘My father was building an extension out the back of our house, and at night I was always worried that I’d left the back door open and that someone would break in and murder my sister’, he remembers. ‘I was terrified that I’d destroy my family, that I’d let everybody down.’

The soft-spoken and eloquent young deacon speaks openly about his troubles, explaining how he was forced to dig deep into himself to deal with the attacks as they grew worse. It was this that helped him form an even greater relationship with Jesus.

Dan says his struggles have helped him better understand the suffering of others. Perhaps this is what G K Chesterton, the influential writer and Christian thinker, meant when he said: ‘One sees great things from the valley, only small things from the peak.’

It could also be why Dan was attracted to the Missionaries of God’s Love, a new order that formed out of a lay community known as the Disciples of Jesus. Devoted to a life of poverty, you get the sense that they’re trying to strip their religion back to its basic foundation, which is people and relationships.

‘The most valuable thing my vocation can bring is genuine empathy. It’s like saying look, there is no easy way through this. We are just going to have to walk. But if you need me then I am here for you and together we can get through this’, says Dan.

And Dan sees much that we have to get through.

‘In this country there’s no reason for material poverty’, he says in reference to our staggering numbers of homeless people. ‘At the risk of sounding pious, I think we also suffer from a poverty of the heart.’

Now 30 years old, and a deacon at Burwood parish in Melbourne, Dan is about to be ordained a priest.

‘In this last year I’ve felt really confident. Confident more in the fact that all of the suffering has been for a purpose, that it hasn’t just been random. I remember at the end of last year there was this deep sense of confidence, I call it a grace, that led me to believe that everything was all going to be okay. There’d still be suffering but ultimately it’d be cool.’