I grew up in a modest neighborhood in Woodland Hills in Los Angeles’s San Fernando Valley. My father, who had the dark hair and blue eyes of the “black Irish”—traits he passed on to me—worked in construction from a young age. In his early twenties he was rushed to a hospital emergency room with broken ribs and a punctured lung suffered when a steel girder knocked him off a two-story building. The emergency room nurse was taken aback when he asked her to leave.
“Why?” she said.
“You’re contributing—to my—shortness of breath,” he gasped. The nurse—my mother—complained in later years that she was completely bamboozled by a man who could flirt under such duress.
A year later they were married. My dad was raised Catholic but quit going to church when he left home at age 17. His mother, my Granna, prevailed on her parish priest to perform the wedding. My mother had a nominal belief in God and no serious objections to the Church ceremony.
I was born in 1962, six months after my parents wed. (You do the math; I did, countless times growing up, as I lay in bed listening to my parents bickering and blamed myself.) My mother gave up her “career” to raise us—two brothers and a sister followed within six years—and she never let us forget it. “I should have married a doctor,” she’d yell at my dad. “They’re never home either, but at least they’re rich.”
It was true: Dad was always working, and still we seemed to just scratch by. Mom blamed him for lacking the vision and incentive that would take him to the next level professionally.
Although we didn’t practice the faith, my maternal grandmother insisted that the children be baptized. I grew up with a vague notion of God, but it seemed to me that once he had set the universe in motion he pretty much left it on its own.
Our neighbors the Gerschlers had a large crucifix in the entryway of their house. The corpus was the kind you often see in Mexican devotionals — gaunt, blood-covered, eyes cast heavenward with a look of spooky suffering. I was struck by how unaffected my friend Cory and his family were by this macabre icon that hovered over all their comings and goings.
I had a typical “Valley” childhood: TV, sports, hanging out at the beach and the mall. I learned to surf at Malibu, a beach on the other side of Topanga Canyon from our neighborhood. When I was eleven I harangued my parents into buying me a beat-up, garage-sale surfboard for $20, and after that I was in the water every chance I got.
My tenth-grade English teacher, Mr. Curtin, was a flamboyant part-time actor and a self-professed existentialist. He used a short story by Stephen Crane called “The Open Boat” to expound on the uncaring universe in which the ultimate meaning of life is no meaning—or rather, as Mr. Curtin liked to put it, “what personal meaning we can etch into the great, stone face of the universe.” To a 15-year-old with no spiritual grounding, this existentialist pose seemed pretty heroic. I began talking about meaninglessness and spouting the “great, stone face” line.
My parents’ arguments became more venomous. They almost always started out about money then escalated into recrimination and reproach. I remember a Paul Simon song I used to listen to: “Oo-oo, spare your heart—everything put together sooner or later falls apart.” And so it did: Shortly after my sixteenth birthday my father walked out one night with a suitcase and moved into his own studio apartment.
My parents remained married, but the separation was permanent, and it broke my Granna’s heart. When she died a year later my father moved back into the modest bungalow of his childhood. I told people my parents were divorced and nursed my wounds privately.
I remember once sitting at the Gerschlers’ kitchen table taking my rationalistic, empirical stance regarding the supernatural. At some point I said to Cory, “You can believe whatever you want to. It’s just not reasonable.”
“Of course it’s not reasonable,” interjected Mrs. Gerschler, a sweet woman who always seemed vaguely overwhelmed by her six children. “What of any value is reasonable? Is your love for your family reasonable? Is all the time you’ve spent getting so good at basketball or surfing reasonable? God’s love for us is completely unreasonable, so why shouldn’t our belief in him be the same?” I had no answer, but I still thought Christianity was hokum.
My senior year I was offered a basketball scholarship at a private, Catholic university in the Los Angeles area. In fact it was Catholic in name only. The majority of students and faculty I encountered were no different than the godless people I had grown up around. But I was happy, since I didn’t want religion being shoved down my throat.
In my first college game I tore the ligaments in my left ankle and was done for the year. (Actually, I was done for good: The ankle was never the same; I lost a year’s eligibility and, to my coach’s relief, I think, I quit the team the following year.) I sank into an existential funk. What else had I expected? Everything put together sooner or later falls apart.
Then I met Mary. Actually, I had already noticed her around campus. She was the prettiest girl I had ever seen. One evening in the library she sat down at the far end of the table where I was studying, and suddenly my English textbook was the farthest thing from my mind. On some lame pretext I struck up a conversation. Mary didn’t seem to mind. Within a few weeks we were dating steadily. By the time she went home to Denver at Christmas, we were seriously involved.
Mary was the gentlest spirit I had ever encountered. News footage of starving children made her cry. She was also smart and as fun-loving as any 18-year-old. She knew nothing about basketball or surfing, but she accepted that they were important to me and was enthusiastic about my enthusiasm.
Our favorite pastime was to drive the short distance from campus to Manhattan Beach and take long walks at sunset. Mary shared my love of the ocean. She loved to just sit and watch how it changed in the fading afternoon light, how clouds hunkered down at sunset along the razor-edge of its horizon, how seagulls hovered and swooped and killdeers ran in stiff-legged fast motion along its edge. Nature was, she said, the biggest argument she could imagine for the existence of God.
I argued against God, but with decreasing vigor. In the face of Mary’s confident and unquestioning faith, I began to realize that my atheism was more convenience than conviction. I was unconvinced of Mary’s Catholic God with all his rules and demands, but I began going to Mass with her at the campus chapel. When she went to Communion and I stayed seated, a longing I could not name sometimes overwhelmed me.
I had a giant selfish reason, however, for denying the objective morality of Catholicism. Mary and I were living unchastely, and it bothered her a great deal. She would have what I considered lucid periods—“Surely God can see how much we love each other, so how can it be wrong?”—followed by periods of guilt and confession. It made me angry, I realize in retrospect, mostly because Mary’s legitimate guilt got in the way of my own illegitimate pleasure.
For almost two years we lived this way. Mary went home over the summers and worked as a secretary in her father’s architectural firm. I worked construction with my dad. It allowed ample time to surf when the waves came up, and I spent a couple of weeks each summer with Mary in Colorado.
In the fall of 1982, our junior year, I took a surf trip with some friends to the island of Todos Santos off the coast of Baja California, Mexico. The waves were huge that day, nearly twice as large as any I’d ever surfed. My heart was in my throat, but I caught a couple of 15-footers. Then, on my third wave, disaster struck. I was late paddling in—my friends were screaming “Go! Go! Go!”—and as I dropped down the steepening wave I hit a huge section of chop. My board went out from underneath me, I landed flat on my back in water as hard as concrete, and it seemed the entire ocean came crashing down on top of me.
You don’t fight a bad wipeout. You cover your head with your arms to protect it from your board-or the bottom, should you hit it-and you wait it out. Trouble was, I lost most of my oxygen on initial impact, and very quickly I began to panic. It felt like being mauled by some gigantic animal. I took a few hard strokes, not knowing which direction was up or down. My eyes were wide open, but all was black chaos.
After what seemed like a long and futile struggle, though my body was still wracked with panic, my mind suddenly went calm. The thought came with great clarity: You will die here.
No! Please! God! In my desperation, for the first time in my life I prayed a sincere prayer. Please! God!
The turbulence subsided. Black dots danced on my eyes. The dots mushroomed and joined together until they formed a solid sheet. It might have been a last bit of turbulence or it might have been my imagination playing tricks as I blacked out, but I felt something under my armpits hauling me up. The water was suddenly bright. I took in a breath an instant before surfacing and had to vomit out a throatful of saltwater to suck in another breath that was half air, half water.
Miraculously, the leash that attached my surfboard to my ankle was intact. I reeled in my board and clambered onto it. When I finally made it back to the boat, the Mexican fishermen, who had watched the whole incident unfold, kept gesturing at me and at the angry sea where I had nearly died, saying something that sounded like “la looz dez day see yellow.” Unfortunately, I knew only one phrase of Spanish. “No comprende,” I said over and over.
Mary was terrified by the story but made me repeat the part about the bright light and the feeling of being hauled to the surface. I recounted the fishermen’s strange behavior and the phrase they had used. Mary, who spoke some Spanish, said, “La looz what?”
“La looz dez day see yellow.” She said it a few times, burst out laughing, then suddenly became serious. “La luz desde cielo,” she said.
“What’s that?”
“‘The light from heaven.’ Was the sun out when you surfaced?”
“I don’t think so,” I said.
“Then how do you explain the bright light?”
“The sun could have broken through a hole in the clouds for just a minute.”
“Brian Kelleher, your guardian angel hauled you up from death’s door. If you don’t fall to your knees every day and thank God for saving your life, you’re just wretched. Besides, don’t you know what that island is named after?” I shrugged. “Todos Santos,” she said. “All Saints.”
I did try praying for a few weeks, but it was too easy to slip back into my old, ungrateful patterns. I was wretched. In November Mary became pregnant. I knew she wouldn’t have an abortion in a million years, and I wasn’t sure I wanted her to. Over the next few days the sad movie of my family history repeated in my mind. I would marry Mary. I would have to drop out of school and work construction to support us. Money would be tight. We would bicker. More children would come. The movie always ended with me with a suitcase in my hand. I found myself wishing the baby would go away.
The next week, in the middle of the night, it did. After cramping all day, Mary miscarried. The doctor said she had been about nine weeks pregnant. My heart was a mixture of grief and relief. I felt like I had killed the baby by wishing it dead. Mary said nothing, but I know she felt similar guilt.
She went home at Christmas then called me in January to tell me she wasn’t coming back. “I love you, but I can’t be with you,” she said, her voice breaking.
I freaked out. I pleaded. I begged. I told her I’d come to Denver. She got angry.
I was a wreck for months. My schoolwork languished. One night in the spring, alone in my apartment, the import of what I had done suddenly hit me. I had lost the only woman I had ever loved, and our baby, through sheer selfishness. I felt as though I were having a heart attack. Sobs wracked my body. I cried until I couldn’t cry any more, then I curled into a fetal position and squeezed my eyes shut until they ached. I had the actual physical feeling of spiraling down into darkness.
“No! Please! God!” A familiar cry came to my lips. “Please, God, if you’re there, help me.” The feeling of descent slowed, then I came to rest against something soft. I had the vision of being curled in the palm of a large hand. I was still in darkness, I wasn’t rising, but the falling had ceased. I fell asleep where I lay.
I started going to Mass again, sitting in the back and wallowing in the memories of being there with Mary. But something completely unexpected happened: That old Eucharistic longing hit me as never before. I took to sitting in the darkness before the Blessed Sacrament, mesmerized by the red flame that signaled Christ’s presence. I prayed silently, no longer disbelieving, but unwilling to take the next step.
In 1985 I graduated with a business degree. For a year or two I tried my hand in the construction industry, but I wound up living south in Laguna Niguel and bartending at the Hennessey’s in Dana Point. The money was good, the hours weren’t bad, I had plenty of time to surf, nights I was everybody’s best friend, and the women were plentiful and willing. It was easy to slip back into an immoral lifestyle.
After the initial break, Mary and I stayed in touch. She graduated with an art history degree from a university near Denver and continued working for her father. At least once a year for the next several years I would visit her in Denver, or she would come see friends in L.A. and we’d spend an evening together. Mary was possessed of a serenity she hadn’t had when we were together. I told her I still went to Mass occasionally, but she knew me and the lifestyle I was living too well to be fooled about my piety.
During a visit in 1990, as she chided me gently for the way I was drifting through my twenties, I asked her (somewhat snidely, I’m afraid) if she prayed for me.
“When I pray for you,” she said, “I pray that you never, ever forget the fear you felt as you were drowning or the hands that hauled you up from death.”
Mary’s constant witness to the importance of her Catholic faith made cracks in my carapace of selfishness that allowed it to be broken finally by the events of the following year.
In April 1991 I got a call from my mother that my father hadn’t shown up at work that morning, and when a friend had stopped by the house, he found the TV on and Dad dead in his armchair.
My father, dead at age 53. An autopsy, apparently standard in such circumstances, revealed a heart attack. In spite of her decades battling my father, Mom was devastated and refused to go through the house and clean things out. My two brothers were living out of state, so one bright spring afternoon, a day before Dad’s funeral, my 22-year-old sister, Monica, and I let ourselves into Granna’s old house. We wandered around like two lost kids, touching the frames of photos and sharing memories of our childhood visits there.
While Monica rattled around in the kitchen, I picked up the television remote that lay next to the armchair where my dad had died and turned on the TV. It was tuned to some religious station called EWTN. Curious, I dialed the cell phone number of my dad’s friend Charlie, who had found him. Had Charlie changed the channel? No, he’d just flicked it off.
An inspection of the bookshelves held a further surprise. They were jammed with books about the Catholic faith that had belonged to Granna, but nearly every one had recent annotations in my father’s strong hand, things about his personal experience that related to what the author was saying. I loaded boxfuls of Augustine and Chesterton and Sheen and Merton and von Hildebrand into the trunk of my car.
The next day at the funeral, old Msgr. Kelly—who had baptized my father and married him to my mother and baptized me—verified that my father had quietly come back to the Church several years earlier. In fact, for the last two years or so of his life he was a daily communicant. When dad’s coffin was lowered into the ground, I felt grief but also a great sense of joy. He was right with God.
Later that week I called Msgr. Kelly and asked if I could meet with him. He chuckled. “Your father said you might call someday,” he said. “He said he just hoped I’d live long enough to be around when you did.”
Over the next year I poured through Granna’s old books, learning from these great minds about the rich Catholic faith of my baptism. At the same time I grew to know my dad better than I ever had while he was alive. His notes were his final gift to me, leading me to the gift of faith. Several months later I was reading a powerful chapter called “Fire Watch” in The Sign of Jonah by Thomas Merton where he describes how sometimes at night the presence of God filled the humble Cistercian monastery where he lived. I turned the page and read in my father’s bold hand, “Brian boy, when I see you again the presence of God will blow us away!”
Over the next year Msgr. Kelly led me gently over the rough spots of disbelief, supplementing what I was learning in RCIA. At Easter Vigil 1992, when I was received into the Catholic Church, my mother was there, her eyes shining. “If it’s important to you,” she told me afterward, “go for it!” Coming from Mom, it was a resounding endorsement.
Each day I praise God for saving me and for the great gift of the Eucharist. I’m still bartending. It allows me to pursue other interests, and, besides, a bar is a wonderful place to witness Christ. To those who ask, I have a simple description of my faith: Everything put together. And made whole.
Mary? She’s taken on a husband and child and lives somewhere in Pennsylvania. In their annual Christmas photos she ages gracefully. Her husband, an architect, has a nice smile, and their daughter looks like a carbon copy of her mom.
I may never find another woman like her. That’s in God’s hands. But the faith and temperance she helped me find is an inestimable gift I can never repay except with prayers for her well-being. Those I give in abundance.