This fall I went to a huge book sale and walked first, as I always do, to the section marked "Religious" where suddenly I stopped, grabbing a book with a title I could never forget: "Shepherds in the Mist." My guess is that of all the hundreds of people who came and went to the book sale that day, I was the only one who would have noticed or cared about this thin book written by a man named E. Boyd Barrett in 1949.

The story of why I was happy to find this book goes back to that very year, 1949. My dearest friend at that youthful time of my life was my cherished mentor, Father John Forman, pastor of the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception in Albany, N.Y. We used to have many talks about Catholic faith. Often he talked about the priesthood and the sacred responsibility a man had when he was given the gift of serving God through ordination.

Several times he told me about a priest who he said had thrown away his vocation. Now, through the grace of God, this man, Boyd Barrett, had come back to the church, though not as a priest. Father Forman knew this because Barrett had written a book about his return to the church. It was called "Shepherds in the Mist."

I never forgot the name of the author or the book. Years later, when some of the fine priests I knew left their vocation, I briefly would think of them as "shepherds in the mist," but with no criticism or judgment.

Now I had the book in hand and could read the story I had wondered about for so many decades. Surprisingly, Boyd Barrett never tells why he left the priesthood, nor is he critical of the church. In fact, his is really a re-conversion story, a love story of why he came back to his church. He said that "grace" accounted for this, given to him because so many prayers had been offered for him.

But there was a deeper reason, the hunger in his soul for the Eucharist. It was the yearning to be nourished again with the body of Christ that brought him back to the church.

"The holy Eucharist is the argument that triumphs," he wrote. In reading that, I remembered something spoken by the Catholic writer Flannery O'Connor when another writer, Mary McCarthy, who had left the church, commented that, as for the Eucharist, it was "a pretty good symbol."

O'Connor, brilliantly and tersely commented, "Well, if it's a symbol, to hell with it."

Her answer, I think, was perfect. For McCarthy's comment as she seems to have meant it empties the Eucharist of its very meaning, that this bread is the real presence of Christ, the Son of God.

Coming back to the church brought another special gift to the shepherd who had been in the mist: peace. He said he had found that "being at peace, having once more a conscience that is clean and enlightened with God's grace, gives one the courage to face the hardships of life. No threatening mishap is terrible anymore, no disappointment too bitter to bear. So many fears and anxieties and doubts are gone. The air is good now. Life has a true meaning.... You carry music in your heart!"

Antoinette Bosco is a columnist with Catholic News Service.