Discerning Damian:
The Vision, The Call, The Yes
The Journey That Led Me Here.
Many people ask how I became a Jesuit. The truth is: I saw it before I ever chose it.
I had moved to Chicago to pursue theatre in a new way, in a new city. I had a five-year plan: grow my career, experience life outside of where I was born and raised, and then move back home to plant roots. But God had a different plan.
I was working as an event planner in an office so quiet it sometimes felt like time had stopped. In that silence, something began to rise. Slowly. Unsettlingly. Then all at once.
One day, while answering emails and sipping coffee, I had a vision. Me. In a cassock. Standing on the steps leading up to an altar. And I was smiling…at myself. Not a polite, camera-ready smile. A deep, knowing, peaceful smile. And I just sat there, gobsmacked. What was that?
I tried to brush it off and go back to my inbox. But something had been stirring for a while, and the silence gave it space to surface. I opened my browser, hesitated, and then typed: J - E - S - U - I - T.
I clicked through a few links until I found one: ThinkJesuit.org (now BeAJesuit.org). Videos. Stories. Real people. One of them had a life like mine before saying yes. And that was it: the door cracked open.
But the truth is…that door had been nudging its way open for years.
“I had moved to Chicago to pursue theatre in a new way, in a new city. I had a five-year plan: grow my career, experience life outside of where I was born and raised, and then move back home to plant roots. But God had a different plan.”
I grew up in Kansas City, Missouri, in a home where the sacred and the ordinary mingled: Catholic prayer meetings, Mexican food, and priests dropping by for dinner. My grandmother prayed in tongues beside my bed when I was afraid. My adoptive father taught me to pray “Jesus” on the inhale, “Christ” on the exhale, when I was anxious. My theatre was my ministry long before I knew what ministry really meant.
Still, by my early 20s, I had left the Church. Too many rules. Too many wounds. Too much silence around pain and injustice. But God kept calling—through grief, through music, through people I loved.
My grandmother died.
My friend invited me to join her in a church choir.
I went to confession for the first time in years. And a Jesuit priest, on the other side of the confessional screen, told me something I had never fully heard: God loves you.
That cracked me wide open.
And faith returned, not all at once, but steadily.
In song.
In service.
In silence.
“As I continued to discern, something shifted. I began to see more clearly. It was as if God were pointing out things on a map, revealing places, people, and moments I had once overlooked. Maybe, just maybe, God had been preparing me for something the entire time.”
A few days after the vision, I filled out a form online for a “Come and See” weekend, half-convinced it would go nowhere. But that night, someone called. And I said yes.
As I continued to discern, something shifted. I began to see more clearly. It was as if God were pointing out things on a map, revealing places, people, and moments I had once overlooked. Maybe, just maybe, God had been preparing me for something the entire time.
In watching Godspell with my grandmother, where scripture first met performance and planted a seed.
In telling everyone as a child that I wanted to be a priest, even though I didn’t yet know what that meant.
In being prayed over by my grandmother, who made God’s presence feel safe, close, and alive.
In Brother Douglas Hawkins, my high school math teacher, who saw a vocation in me and gently asked if my gifts might be meant for others.
In founding a prayer group in college with my best friends, where friendship and faith learned to speak the same language.
In running my own theatre company, where advocacy and storytelling began to intertwine.
In being commissioned to write a play about Peruvian poverty, where I sat in a humble home in Lima, meeting the eyes of a woman who offered me pudding made from purple corn with more generosity than I knew how to receive.
In conversations with friends who reminded me to pray, to return to Mass, who prayed with me, not just for me.
At daily Mass in Chicago’s St. Peter’s in the Loop before work, where silence became presence.
On the streets of Chicago, with the homeless whom I befriended, where accompaniment took on flesh and name.
I met Jesuits who were artists. Teachers. Pastors. Accompaniers of people on the margins. Men who had lived real lives—men who had struggled, failed, grieved, created, doubted, and kept going. Some had been actors. Some had worked in prisons or politics or publishing. Some made music. Some made soup. They didn’t arrive perfect, they arrived open. I saw in them not just what I could become, but what God might be trying to form in me.
I began to believe — tentatively, then confidently — that there was room for someone like me: a brown Catholic, theatre-trained, not well catechized, who lived at the intersection of many identities, with a rosary in hand, making all kinds of mistakes, and still managed to find God in the most unexpected places.
I discerned. I applied. I entered.
And through it all, I kept walking through the doors God kept opening.
Photo Captions: Mapping Out My Jesuit Formation
Second-year novices of the St. Alberto Hurtado Jesuit Novitiate in St. Paul, MN.
Novitiate | Entrance: August 25, 2012Vows Class, St. Thomas More Catholic Church, St. Paul, MN.
First Vows | August 9, 2014Ordinandi gathered moments before priestly ordination, Milwaukee, WI.
Ordination | June 10, 2023Blessing my father, Manuel Botello, following ordination to the priesthood at the Church of the Gesu, Milwaukee, WI.
Ordination | June 10, 2023Third year of First Studies at Loyola University Chicago.
First Studies | 2014–2017Third year of Regency, Lansing-Reilly Jesuit Community, University of Detroit Mercy.
Regency | 2017–2020Third year of Theology studies at Boston College, pictured with Xavier House, part of the Faber Jesuit Community.
Theology | 2020–2023