I’m not supposed to be here. I’m not supposed to be writing this. I’m not supposed to have the most beautiful wife in the world. I’m not supposed to be on speaking terms with my family. I’m not supposed to have the house, the cars, the business, the family vacations, the vegetable garden, the five chickens, etc. In fact, I did everything in my power to bring destruction upon myself and the people around me. Supernatural grace is the only possible explanation I have.
I come from polar-opposite parents. My mother was born into a very authentic Irish Catholic family, with all that goes along with that. If you’re Irish Catholic, you’ll understand: Ireland is second only to heaven in number of martyrs. My mother and her family were tough, God-fearing people. You pulled yourself up by your bootstraps, you stuck together, and you thanked God for it. But whatever you did, you didn’t talk about your feelings.
My father was raised by wolves. When you shook his family tree, nuts and drunks rained down. My dad’s mother was a drug addict. His father was tripped up by mental health issues. His parents were the only people I ever met who married and divorced each other twice. My father was lucky to survive his upbringing. I believe he loved Christ in his own way but was never taught how to move beyond his own suffering.
I suppose it’s heartbreaking when you realize Jesus isn’t Santa Claus and he doesn’t always give us what we want. It’s unfortunate that my dad died without healing that relationship. I hope and pray he snuck into purgatory. But he died with a belly full of booze, and, I imagine, a heart full of unforgiveness and a ton of unconfessed sin.
I was born in Troy, New York, in July 1973. I was “born again” a month later at St. Augustine parish in Lansingburgh, New York, when my mother asked the priest to put the indelible mark of baptism on my soul.
I was raised by my mother. My father was an infrequent visitor in my life. We were nominally Catholic then. We were in and out of St. Augustine church for the next ten years. I have the absolute fondest memories of that church. I love to go back now and attend Mass there. The thought comes to mind, “This is where I got God. He was formed in my mind sitting in these pews, with these beautiful paintings of the saints, the amazing stained glass, the marble altar, the golden tabernacle.” It calls me back to that childlike faith, before all the bitterness and jadedness of the world entered in. (Nothing like these contemporary “God barns” we have now. How does a building that looks like it should have a hockey rink in the center of it call a person to prayer?)
I grew up with a very loving parish priest. Fr Smith was a great, holy man with such gentle eyes. I never knew a bad priest growing up. Now the sisters, on the other hand—they meant business! I’ll be straight with you: Sister Geraldine didn’t give me anything I didn’t have coming to me. If I wasn’t doing something wrong at school, it was because it was Saturday. The nuns were tough, but they had to be: They taught a bunch of little hooligans like me. But Sister Geraldine was also the woman who held me and wiped the blood from my head when I cut my face open on the playground.
Not having a father had a profound effect on me. My mother would eventually remarry, but the heart of every boy is to designed to connect with his father. I felt an enormous void inside of me. It was this void that I would try fill for the next twenty-five years. Every boy needs a father! The devil sets too many snares to not have a guide. Thank God for mothers—God only knows where I would be without mine—but a boy needs a man to show him how to be one.
Without a father I looked up to older kids in the neighborhood. This is dangerous. The devil took Jesus on a tour of what could be his after forty days of fasting, and he resisted with all his human and divine strength and overcame temptation. The devil took me on the same tour, and I asked him, “Could you super-size that?” It was like a sin shopping spree for the next twenty years.
Fr. Larry Richards lays this all out in his “Confession” talk, how sin is us spitting in the face of Jesus, and that’s exactly what I did. I began to stuff that void of my childhood with all the sin I could get my hands on. All hearts are called to joy and happiness, but how do we know the real from the counterfeit? I bought into the counterfeit. As the song goes, I was “lookin’ for love in all the wrong places.”
The real chemical reaction took place at age twelve, when I got my hands on some Genesee Cream Ale. They don’t call that stuff “spirits” for nothing. That stuff was god in a bottle for me. The pain and insecurities all went away after the first sip. It also enabled me to follow my real pursuit: women. This started me down a path that ended in a fiery blaze.
I had what I perceived as a lot fun for long time. But in 1992—I was almost 19 at the time—my father died from an alcohol and drug overdose. A few months later, my grandfather, who raised me, died of cancer, and about a year after that my younger stepbrother, while on a bad LSD trip, shot himself in the head. It was official: I had checked out. If you brought up the word “God” around me, you were using a dirty word. I’d had it with the God of my youth. I was going to find my own god. Relativism, Buddhism, Protestantism, hedonism, alcoholism. I had a bad case of the –isms.
This path of destruction lasted about seven years. By then, I was doing quite well for myself. I was homeless, living in San Diego, California. I was smoking cocaine seven days a week, drinking around the clock, stealing food from grocery stores so I could eat, selling cocaine, and doing any other felonious activities I could get involved in.
But one morning I woke up and something had happened. I had not eaten, showered, changed my clothes, or brushed my teeth in a week. I sat down on some steps, and I encountered hopelessness for the first time. I had never known it before. I had felt awful, pathetic, wretched, disgusted, in anguish, in agony, thousands of times. But this was the first time I had ever felt hopeless. It was as if there had always been at least a candle burning at the very end of a long tunnel, and it had just gone out. I wasn’t afraid of dying, but the possibility of having to live like this scared the hell out of me. Literally.
Not long afterward, my uncle from New York somehow found me in an apartment I had been breaking into to sleep in San Diego. He threw me on a plane, and thus began the journey of another prodigal son returning home. I know how badly the prodigal son of Jesus’ parable wanted to eat the slop being fed to the swine. I was starving in every sense of the word.
I got into rehab on June 21, 1999, which, coincidently, is the summer solstice, the longest day of the year. And, boy, was it ever. I have not had a drink since. I wish I could say God threw his finest garments on me and slaughtered the fatted calf. But that was not my experience. I had really damaged myself. I had to claw my way back to the Kingdom.
That time was the most excruciating time of my life. The emotional, mental, and spiritual torture was almost unbearable. He wanted me to know that this is not some cheap grace, where you just simply ask Jesus into your heart and you’re saved and free to move on with your life. It’s a lifelong sanctification, wrought with trials, obstacles, and hurdles, and at times it’s unbelievably painful. It’s a marathon, not a sprint, and we hope we can finish the race. He knew my heart, and if I felt too good too quickly, I would be like the seed planted in rocky soil that sprouts up quickly and withers away.
I had not yet even begun to consider coming back to the Church at that point. But, for some reason, the only way I could get to sleep in the halfway house I was in was by listening to EWTN. I used to take naps listening to Mother Angelica recite the rosary. I think perhaps it was because my mother said a five-year Novena to Our Lady of Guadalupe for me. I owe my life to my mothers. Both of them.
Like I said, I struggled my way back into the faith. I was coming around to Jesus very slowly, but to the Church even more slowly. Then one day, for a reason I don’t recall, I bought Thomas Merton’s autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain. I don’t know why I bought it. It wasn’t recommended; I didn’t know anyone who had ever even read it. But, regardless, I read it.
When I was about halfway through the book, I was invited to go on a twelve-step retreat to a Benedictine monastery in Quebec. I was already falling in love with the Church Merton was so eloquently describing in his autobiography, with the incense, the candles, the bells, the saints, the holiness. So now I’m sitting in a place just like the place in Merton’s book, and I’m falling in love. I’m listening to these men sing the most beautiful songs I’ve ever heard to our Lord. I’m watching these men surrender their lives to Christ.
And I fell in love with God’s Church. She was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. How could I have not noticed her before? It was as if someone had hidden her from me. Why didn’t my family tell me about her? Why had all the Catholics I knew never mentioned her? Did they even know her? How could her own children not know her? Why did I see her? How would I tell others of what I’d found? They’d think I was nuts.
When I saw her for the first time, I finally found out why I had a heart. It was to love. But her love is different. You can feel it. It’s not cheap, but eternal. It’s not nervous. It’s not the health-and-wealth gospel of televangelists. It’s like an eternal Energizer bunny—it just keeps going, and going, and going.
I got confirmed that Easter. I finally married my wife (in the Church) and baptized our one-year-old child. My wife was confirmed the following Easter. We conceived our second child at the Worldwide Marriage Encounter the following year. We had our third child, Avila, two years ago—who, by the way, was conceived the week we went to Washington, D.C., for the March for Life. We held the hands of both of my wife’s parents and said the rosary while they died, two years apart to the day.
I cried for the entire week of activities following Pope John Paul ll’s death. I cried through my wedding. I cried through my entire Cursillo. I cried when my children were born. I cry daily since coming back into the Church.
God has truly saved a wretch. An undeserving wretch at that. I wasn’t even looking to be saved. I’ve discovered God can never change his nature toward me, regardless of what I have done. Nothing can separate us from the love of God. He is my Father, and I am his son. And now that I’m a father, I know what that means. Do my boys get a smack on the rear on occasion? You bet. Do I stop loving them? Not for a minute.
I have slowly come to believe in the infallibility of the Church’s teaching. It was not an overnight matter, and it involved some serious lifestyle changes. But eventually I submitted to her teaching authority. Christ founded one, holy, Catholic, and apostolic Church, and who am I (a Kennedy? a Pelosi? a Kerry? a Biden?) not obey her? I have great sadness in my heart when I hear our ignorant, separated Christian brothers and sisters, or ex-Catholics and supposedly current Catholics, speak poorly of the Bride of Christ. We need to pray for them.
I’m so grateful for the New Evangelization, the outstanding Catholic apologists, and the hundreds of monks I’ve met in my journeying to different monasteries; for my parish priest, Mgsr. Williams, who feeds me with the sacraments; for my mothers, Mary and Patricia; for my wife, who loves me for better or for worse; for my children, Aidan, Mateo and Avila; and, most of all, for Jesus and his Bride.