A boy who watched a priest swing incense one Sunday now stands in persona Christi, offering the sacrifice he once only admired from the pews.
It was an unremarkable Mass, the kind that fills up a Sunday calendar without announcement. Rev. Fr. Felix Akpa moved through the sanctuary as he always did, and at a certain point in the liturgy, lifted the thurible and let it swing; slow, deliberate, solemn. In the pews sat a boy of twelve or thirteen, a Class Six pupil with no idea that the moment would reroute the rest of his life.
“I was captivated by his solemn composure at swinging the thurible,” Fr. Edmund recalls. “Since then, I had loved to become a priest to also swing the thurible.”
It’s the kind of origin story that invites a gentle follow-up question. Surely, as an altar server, he would have handled the thurible himself soon enough. Isn’t it? But, young Edmund is precise about the distinction. “It was a priest I saw using the thurible, not a server. I wanted to use the thurible as the priest did.” What drew him wasn’t the object in the hand but the bearing of the man holding it- a composure he calls, simply, edifying.
When he brought the idea home, there was no resistance to overcome. “They were very much in agreement,” he says of his parents’ response. A quiet but significant grace, given how many vocation stories begin instead with negotiation or doubt. He is one of five children, including a twin brother, though the family has since known loss: his father died in 2018.
By the time Fr. Edmund reached Bishop Herman College in Kpando to study General Arts, the seeds of discipline and service were already visible. He served as Sacristan for the 2015/2016 academic year and belonged to both the Lectors ministry and the Legion of Mary on campus.
That grounding may explain why the leap into seminary formation felt less like a leap at all. “I didn’t experience much difference going to the Seminary from school,” he admits, crediting his years in an all-boys institution for the smooth transition. Academically, too, the path held no terrors. None of the seminary courses proved extremely challenging.
If the story ended with incense, it would be charming but incomplete. Fr. Edmund is careful to trace how far his vocation has traveled since that first captivated glance. “My attraction to the priesthood has gone beyond the sight of a swinging thurible to an intimate relationship with God and his word,” he says.
Scripture, in particular, has become a passion he pursues both privately and publicly. He conducts scriptural exegeses and shares them on his blog, carrying the Word beyond the sanctuary walls.
There is a reason a swinging thurible can arrest a child’s attention and still hold meaning for the priest he becomes. In Catholic worship, the rising smoke is never merely decorative. It echoes Psalm 141: “Let my prayer be set before you as incense.”
It signifies purification, sanctifying the sacred space and the people within it. It expresses reverence-honoring the altar, the Gospel, the offertory gifts, the clergy, and the congregation alike. And in its slow, visible arc, paired with the murmur of its chains, it draws worshippers into a fuller, more sensory encounter with the divine; present at the Entrance Procession, before the Gospel, throughout the Offertory, and at the elevation of the Eucharist during the Consecration.
Seen this way, the boy in the pew was never simply admiring a metal vessel on chains. He was, without yet having the words for it, drawn toward a life of prayer, purity, reverence, and deeper worship. The very life he now leads at the altar.
Today, Rev. Fr. Edmund stands where Fr. Felix Akpa once stood, offering the sacrifice of the Mass in persona Christi. The thurible that first caught his eye as a child is now, quite literally, in his own hands. Not as the object of fascination it once was, but as one instrument among many in a life given over to God.
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