“Father, I need your help!”, called the Pastor to me as I emerged from the church after this morning’s Mass.

The heat wave continues.

The church was stifling, the air heavy, the two dozen or so faithful listless in their responses.

I was not much better, sweating under the vestments, unusually distracted about what to do on my day off, which would start after Mass.

When I stepped out into the morning sun after Mass the added heat brought on another wave of sweat.

Father is younger than I in years and in years of ordination. A good priest, kind, dedicated and always respectful of myself and the other assistant, who is even younger.

 

 

We never address each other by our first names in public but show the respect for our sacred office we expect the people to show.

“ Father I need your help because as you know I have the next Mass in a couple of minutes and a call has just come from the hospital.”

He told me who was dying in ER and I immediately went into the rectory to get my hospital ID….[gone are the days when being dressed as a priest and known on sight suffice for entry]…and the Holy Oils.

It took about ten minutes to get to the hospital. The dying man was hooked up to the usual equipment.

Wife, children, in-laws, grandchildren, all were there, all entering into grief.

His wife took me aside and said she’d been advised to permit him to be taken off the machines and even a casual glance at the man showed the effects of the massive stroke and that the most charitable thing to do was to allow him to die in God’s time.

I assured her the decision was proper, loving and, addressed her concerns about the moral issues.

I’ve attended enough deathbeds to know when it is the ethical cessation of extraordinary intervention and when some doctor or family member has chosen expediency, if not outright killing, over God’s chosen time for the soul to return to Him.

 

After the Apostolic Pardon, the Anointing, other prayers for the dying, sometime to comfort the family, it was time for me to leave.

By then I was totally soaked with sweat, our old hospital not being air-conditioned.

On the drive back I remembered back to when they were checking me out for a brain tumour and how I came to hate those constant tests and trips to the hospital, never imagining in those days I’d one day be, as I was until a couple of years ago, for several years a hospital chaplain.

When I got back here I changed out of my wet blacks, showered, and while showering thought I’d dig through the original notes for this work written in those days of such uncertainty:

THERE was something surreal about the fifteen minute walk from the parking lot, up and down stairwells, through tunnels, in and out of elevators, down corridors, to that tile and too many bright lights room, filled with the smell of antiseptic and fear of a death notice tension from people laying on various types of stretchers, beds, many looking frightened, some with tubes hanging from arms and other places, all waiting to be scanned.

Above all the other sounds in that place the most daunting and persistent was that of the Cat-scan machine which seemed to be in near continuous operation.

Everything moved with factory efficiency. Forms were thrust into our hands while staccato orders and warnings were given by overworked nurses about the possible deadly effects of the dyes which would be used.

Suddenly a needle was pushed into the vein in my arm.

 Fluid coursed unusually hot into my body.

 I was fed into the machine which began to use its noise and some kind of rays to slice-picture my brain.

Suddenly it was over and the priest who was my Guardian Angel for this trip was told to stay with me near the hospital “ For twenty-four hours just in case there is a severe reaction to the dye in which case rush him back here.”

To this day the memory of that test is vivid, not because a tumour was found, it was not. What they actually found was arthritis pushing the vertebrae against something or other causing severe vertigo and other symptoms which triggered a type of mimic of a tumour.

The memory is vivid because I was astonished by how fast blood courses through our bodies, something I had never experienced until that warm dye entered my vein and I could instantly feel it through my whole body.

Recalling that event on the way back from the hospital today caused me to reflect on the mystery of the Holy Eucharist…for in that Most Sacred Sacrament we receive Him, Body, BLOOD, Soul and Divinity not just as something ‘spiritual’ but physical and Real.

His Precious Blood courses through our physical being, more certainly and effectively than that dye ever did.

      The Sacred Writer of the Letter to the Hebrews stresses the power of the word of God penetrating, permeating the deepest regions and aspects of our being, revealing all to Him, yes – but there is more for this activity, this Divine Gaze, is ultimately one of love, of mercy, of healing, of truth – so that even in a moment as ordinary as a medical test we can be enlightened! [ Heb. 4: 12,13 ]

It is through the sacraments, in particular Confession/Reconciliation and most especially through the Holy Eucharist, the Holy Spirit does the effective work of “ the Word of God”, of God’s word!

Blood and water flowed from the side of Christ on the Cross, the blood which came from His Mother Mary, overshadowed by the Holy Spirit in the mystery of the Incarnation.

Our God becoming so humble and tiny as we all begin, like all of us being fed by His mother’s blood, and thereby growing, developing an arterial system and heart of His own.

This Sacred Person, this Sacred Heart gives to us His own very Self, His Sacred Body and Precious Blood, as our real food and drink.

How many Holy Communions have I received since my First Holy Communion and therefore how many times has He communicated His very Self to me? 

What have I done with and in this body, in my very person, into which the All Holy One Himself has communicated Himself, in His Risen Glory, Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity?

It is a question of remembering, a type of memory and emotional blood-letting like that ancient cure-all when doctors would bleed the sick person in hopes of draining away whatever invisible source of sickness.

I suppose in a metaphoric way this keyboard is the lancet and the computer screen the basin into which the blood lands.

The flowing of the blood, however, is not something easy, smooth.

It is difficult.

It is confession.

Not in the purulent sense of contemporary talk-shows where mere titillation is the purpose.

This, please God, and with the blessing of my Spiritual Father, is an exercise in purgation of my heart, an exemplum.

 Memory, of course, is not a tangible record of past experience but is more an interpretive record of how certain events impacted themselves upon our minds, perhaps even our souls.

 Autobiography, more perhaps than any other form of literary effort, then is virtually a   natural form of roman-`a-clef.

What is remembered is not a dispassionate account of particular events in one’s life but an interpretive telling of why, of all possible other events in the given year the writer of autobiography writes about, this one stands out so sharply it demands to be remembered.

Usually that demand is because of all possible memories this one concerns something or someone whose impact was impressive, that is, made an impression that has marked us, effected us, in some way which still endures, either as enhancement of ourselves, our lives, or as a continuous hindrance.

In the first instance it is cause for rejoicing, gratitude to God for the evident blessing. In the latter it is cause for contrition if the impediment has been self-inflicted, for a forgiving heart if we are the victim of another’s sin.

Jesus promise-teaches we will come to know the truth and in this truth-knowing we will become, or rather be set, free.[ Jn.8:32 ]

 However this is not a process of self-discovery by our own efforts, rather it is an openness to the work of the Holy Spirit, as mentioned in Hebrews, where the Spirit of Truth Himself comes to prevail to make of us a real person, THE real person created by Love Himself.

The truth being sought here is how I came…frankly how we come…to distance ourselves from reality, that is, from being in relationship with God our Father, from choosing death over life, sin over virtue.

The truth being sought is to rediscover the Father’s supreme gift to us, His Only Begotten Son, Jesus Saviour and to bow face to the ground before Jesus and cry out: Have mercy on me!

The truth being sought is to discover the true self, the one in whom the Lord and Giver of Life, the Sanctifier Himself dwells.

As Thomas Merton wrote:

Every one of us is shadowed by an illusory person: a false self.

This is the man that I want myself to be but who cannot exist, because God does not know anything about him. And to be unknown of God is altogether too much privacy.{c}

 

For far too much of my life I have lived in and from, indeed for, that false self. For a time, as a child, it was a means of survival, but as an adult what worked in a strange way for the child, works against the adult.

I want to be KNOWN by God!

True but even more do I want to KNOW that I am known by God!

What is striking about the creation accounts in Genesis is the repetition of God speaking into being, God seeing what exists, confirming the goodness and existence of what has been created until a “who” is created.

This free-will being, and the one other who is like him, brutalize the integrity of the Love Himself created person and suddenly it is clear God cannot recognize what He has not created, this distorted image of Himself, and there is a heart-wrenching simplicity to God seeking, calling out, like many a mother for their lost child! [Gn. 3:9]

The all-knowing, all-seeing God having to call out because He cannot find the man He created!

Once Adam had sinned he was no longer tabula rasa as person, the untainted one created by the Father.

 He had allowed himself to become a tablet on which any might scratch and scrawl graffiti.

Merton again:

My false and private self is the one who wants to exist outside the reach of God’s will and God’s love — outside of reality and outside of life itself. And such a self cannot help but be an illusion…………

A life devoted to the cult of this shadow is what is called a life of sin. {op.cit.}

Permit then this memory-blood-letting as exemplum for you ( and I do pray for you in this, and from this moment on ) and a purgation for me, much needed, so that in the end all that will remain in/of me, and this is my prayer for you, is CHRIST!

 

THE HOURS of this day off pass quickly.

The writing does seem to flow.

The Pastor is away and the other assistant is also gone, and the phones have remained quiet, the doorbell still.

Out on the distant waters the nation’s valiant announced today that deep under the liquid dance-floor of this July’s sun they have found the body of Camelot’s Prince and now the nation, the world in some respects, can grieve.

Those who speak to me about this latest familial tragedy use terms like: “ It’s not fair he should die before his time. “

I try and control my Italian temper at such an affront to the Lord of History and Dispenser of Mercy.

But now is not the time to write about time!

Now is the time to take advantage of the quiet, to be still!

IT IS late afternoon now.

The weather has cooled somewhat.

Driving on a back road yesterday I was struck by the golden fields of grain, the season because of the extreme heat running a couple of weeks early. Then I noticed large flocks of birds and wondered if they know something about this summer and the not too distant autumn. Maybe it shall be early as well.

Countless are the verses in many Psalms which glorify again and again the wonders not only of the created universe itself but the providential Love who created all this beauty and sustenance for us!

I particularly treasure Psalm 104 in this regard.

 

Memory of a lovely, elderly, woman, kind, strong, at the top of the stairs leading to the dank stone basement with its huge coal bin and furnace, its rows of jars filled with mustard pickles, plum jam and little bins of potatoes nestled near mysterious trunks covered with ancestral dust.

She was my Grandmother, mother to my own, a woman whose words I remember none of, whose tender expression I remember all of.

She was the one who when the city was devastated by the explosion in the First War and the shattered glass embedded itself in her face took care of the wounds herself and then took care of her children and neighbours.

It is originally from her and her own artistic talents that I come honestly to write.

My memory of her is that particular beauty as she stood at the top of those stairs, light coming from behind her, yet without placing her completely in silhouette.

She was, as I recall, bidding me to come to supper.

This is among my earliest experiential memories.

My earliest reflective or thought memory, dream memory too, is of always having wanted to be a priest.

My next memory is also of my Grandmother.

Perhaps of the same day or maybe it is that whatever intervened has been displaced by the powerful impact of the second memory.

We are at table, the whole family of Grandparents, parents, me, my two sisters next in line of birth, maybe some cousins, an aunt, uncle, or two.

Suddenly there is a great commotion.

 Clearly something is wrong with Grandmother.

 I am whisked away by one of the adults and taken upstairs to the small bedroom I share with my two sisters.

I lay there in the dark and from their crib they ask me what’s happening in scared voices and I don’t know and it is the not knowing which scares me.

Later in the darkness of that same room one of the Aunts comes in and tries to explain to my child’s understanding that Grandmother is dead.

Once the aunt leaves the older of my sisters asks what it means and I say: “ The eggs killed Grandma.”

The next evening the whole house was hushed, women in black dresses, dark suits for the men, with a wide armband of black cloth on their left arm.

Caravaggio could have painted the contrast sharpness of the hues as in the front room bright candle light bounced of muted wallpaper, the white of the priest’s surplice edging the black cassock, rosary beads, made of crystal, dancing with little rainbows like dozens of prisms aimed at the corpse.

A wreath was hung on the outside front door to announce to the whole neighbourhood they were invited to join in the ritual of grief, pay respect.

 Women came, sometimes with nervous children clutching at their dresses or felt coats. The women came to the kitchen door with gifts of food and tears and those in-decipherable, but to another woman, words that convey all manner of true understanding of the particular capacity of woman to comprehend, and endure, the vagaries of life.

Later the men would come by the front door, for a woman had died, a woman who had done their families much kindness…but a woman, that is, not someone they would have gone to war with or worked in the factory with or pounded a beat with or downed beer with when the week’s labour was done and the pay packet swollen with the hard currency of their sweat.

So the men came in the front door, showed respect, joined silently in the rosary led by the priest, made offers of help but looked upon my widower Grandfather as a living totem of the clan to which no male ever expected, much less would want, to belong.

At some point in the brief mourning period my father came and got me, it seems from that same dark bedroom, and took me in his arms to the open casket in the living room and I looked down at that soft face and would not allow myself to feel since I harboured within me a notion that my anger at her for disturbing my secret world in the cellar had caused her death…not the eggs we’d had for supper killed Grandma, I did.

The next day the living room was empty.

Sometime later the Great Uncle, the wounded warrior from the first war, died.

The mother of the milkman’s kids from just a couple of doors down died too.

Then another uncle and my grandfather and death became this always expected but only appearing when unexpected intruder whose coming meant someone you cared about disappeared.

I began to notice it wasn’t just people who died, other things died too because they too disappeared.

There used to be these wagons with horses that brought milk, ice, and even the junk man had one….but they disappeared and trucks started to come by, but no truck ever wanted a carrot or a sugar cube.

The old man with the bell which he clanged as he hollered his trade as sharpener of knives and scissors and the treadmill with its stone that spewed wonderful sparks as he sharpened scissors; the other man with his pushcart and buckets and ladders, the washer of windows and teller of stories to children; the iceman who in the summer with one fluid motion would severe a chunk of cold relief that was hard as rock but melted fast as you would laugh with your friends.

All were gone.

I came to hate death and change with equal vigour and to allow myself to grieve over neither and should the grief strain against my grit I’d use anger or pleasure to quell its determination but I would not allow it for to grieve meant to confess it was true…the death or the change.

I don’t know precisely how or when I figured out a simpler way to deal with grief was never to become attached to anything, or anyone, at the outset, then their loss or disappearance while unfortunate could be if not ignored at least accepted as the inevitability of the ruthlessness of existence.

Pretty heady stuff for a boy who’d not yet made his First Communion.

But that was the key: to think and think and think until the thing either made sense or had been gutted of all its sensation.

Indeed it seemed to me that if I became attached to anything, even worse to anyone, my attachment was for it, them, harbinger of their inevitable disappearance, their death.

Often I suspected…or was given to suspect by the father of lies, something I could not understand as a child but do now as an adult…God was doing this, being mean because there was something about me which He disliked intensely.

Given the Jansenistic spirituality prevailing in parishes in those days such thoughts were also connected to that influence.

A gradual disconnect was occurring at this early stage in my being between reality as an objective sequence of events and reality as my subjective internalizing of the import of those same events.

I became more secretive, not only about my thoughts and feelings but about my activities when out of eyesight of any authoritative adult, parent, priest, teacher.

Sometimes this would inevitably lead to disputes between me and them about factual matters.

 

For example this memory is burned into my psychic memory as fact but from the moment I told my mother and ever since she maintains it never occurred…perhaps because as a mother the outrage of the gesture was too much for her to bear or perhaps she was seeking to protect a child who already before this incident regarded life as a dangerous labyrinth:

{The phone just rang.

One of those ‘interruptions’ that is my work!

A woman in the parish concerned about a friend in another city who is dying of cancer, and has been away from the faith for decades, needs a priest but does not know where to turn.

I gave her the number of The Community’s house in that same city and assured her all would be well.}

 

ONE day, it had to have been late fall because I recall the ground was frozen but there was no snow, I was playing alone along the fence that ran between our place and the tenement building at the back.

I heard sounds of people yelling in that manner which has crossed-over from mere frustrated anger to utter rage.

These yells were hard.

Cold.

Determined in a manner which frightened me.

Someone had either lost, or forgone, control.

Suddenly there was a new sound.

One, less familiar.

Shattering glass, but not like when you dropped your glass of milk and it shattered.

 This sound was less explosive, more tearing.

There was another sound along with the shattering, a softer sound, like it was straining after the first and as all this sound was racing at me I was looking up and following the shards of glass cascading towards earth, glistening in the sunlight.

 A bundle, whose cloth seemed to unfurl slowly, was falling to earth as well and behind that, but not falling, just leaning part way out the shattered window, a young woman, face from that distance not so much a face with features as a flesh coloured oval, but one which implied hate nonetheless.

From the unfurling cloth stuck out a little arm and my brain fought against what my eyes were telling for how could a baby shatter a window and fall to the earth?

Part of my being was frozen in horror and part of my being wanted to rush through the fence and get between the glass and the baby and catch the baby and save the baby, but the baby outpaced some of the glass and hit the coal chute with a muffled thud of weighted cloth.

Little shards of glass landed upon the sudden stillness.

Soon, sirens.

I fled into the house and told my mother what I had seen and she went out, having forbidden me to follow her, returned, ashen faced some minutes later and told me I should not tell lies.

It was just a laundry bundle.

No more was said that day.

I tried a few times, even some years later, to get her to admit what I had seen but the same admonishment was given to curb my over active mind.

It would not be until many decades later when I was working in Child Protective Services and rescued a baby whose PCP’d parents were playing a dangerous game of catch with the child that I would suddenly understand which baby I was still trying to save.

Which child.

AS I BEGIN to write this late evening I listen to Bach’s Zion hort die Wachter sigen.

In all his music you can hear, indeed have vibrate within your being, the cultural reality of a time in human history, at least in Western Civilization, of the permeation of faith into all of life.

True the artists of the day, the intellectuals, scientists, and no doubt some of the ordinary people as well, may not have been what would be termed today ‘ true believers ‘, but the culture itself retained this Christian ethos and it is there in all its yearning in his music.

It is through music that the ineffable most easily I believe, outside of sacramental reality, becomes tangible.

Now flowing through the headphones is Albinoni’s haunting Adagio, music that invites the soul to dance!

I continue to go through those original notes and in them this chapter had a title taken from Sacred Scripture and I had forgotten why until I read the notes…..

Writing itself is both composition and brush stroke, it has its own melody and colour and as sculpture, painting, photography invite the eye to observe contemplatively, and music invites the heart to imagine, and feel, the composer of words must attempt to move the whole person without access to melodic variations or depths of colour, shadings of light.

I suddenly have come to suspect that to read is participatory whereas the other forms can more easily be merely observed in an almost passive state.

No doubt this is why St. John took the Greek LOGOS and used it so accurately to open up the reality of who Christ is: WORD.

 

For the Holy Gospel cannot be merely observed passively as a montage about a life but must be participated in as an encounter with Some One: the One who plaintively calls out, seeking the man in the Garden, who awaits the woman at the well, Whom we would, to borrow from St. Augustine, never go in search of if He had not first found us – indeed were He not constantly at the door of our being seeking leave to enter! {Rev. 3:20}

The great Ezekiel with the poetry of a prophet and the prophecy of poetry captures this intimacy lavished upon us by the Divine Seeker! {Ez. 16:8}

 

THAT IS the passage used as a chapter title at the time I was writing those notes. The passage had been in my heart all day long.

I have come, finally, in my life to understand something which years ago when I was reflecting on that passage I had not yet truly grasped: Sacred Scripture, the Bible, both Old and New Testaments — though for the Christian we must begin with and always see all Scripture in light of the Holy Gospels — is not just the revelation of God, in point of fact His Self-revelation, nor is it, in the Old Testament just the story of the Chosen People, or in the Gospels just what Jesus did for the people of that time — Sacred Scripture is personal: the reality of the relationship between Christ, the Father and the Holy Spirit, with each and every person — if we will open to that relationship.

Thus that passage from Ezekiel is very personal indeed!

Already by the time I was old enough to go to school I had turned inward upon myself, was well and truly developing that ‘ false self ‘ Merton so accurately describes.

 Another modern author, Leanne Payne, who has had a great influence in my life also, uses the term of practicing the ‘ presence of self ‘, as opposed to the practice of the Presence of God.

Though I did not understand it at the time I was also, with this becoming inwardly bent, moving towards an inextricable, for decades to come, interior disconnect with self and a move towards an equally inextricable influence in my life of the forces of darkness.

Were I not to be completely overwhelmed at such an early stage in life Christ Himself would, somehow, have to intervene.

The more was an appreciation, though certainly not an understanding because I was more knowledgeable of the experience of absence, of Real Presence.

Looking back now it seems inconceivable I would deliberately choose atheism as a young adult.

What was happening when that little boy that I was would stop into church on his way home from school or play?

What was he thinking, saying, praying?

How did he know that here there was some-One, unseen, unheard, unknown in any but the most transcendent and ineffable of ways?

There is no answer I can give to those questions that would be a set of traceable facts leading from the broken child, so overwhelmed with his little life, to the truth of the words of the prophet Ezekiel spoken as the voice of the Father, but this I do know: He was doing exactly what He says each time I entered the church, or rather more accurately, stepped into His Real Presence.

Even in this moment as I write these lines, in the moment you are reading them, He is again loving and moving and seeing.

So powerful are the exact words in Ezekiel about what He does when He finds us I urge you to go, discover, listen: Ez. 16:6,7!

 When my Spiritual Father wrote to me so many years ago about what he had seen upon my face when I recalled the memory of being spat upon he ended his letter with these words:

…underneath everything, even the loneliness, beyond the hurt and the anger and the confusion, I sensed something else, and perhaps that is what enabled the Lord to make your face shine. You think that you are a survivor, making it on guts and street-smarts but what I saw was someone — maybe weak and broken and beat-up — who had too much LIFE in him to die or to let himself be killed or to go crazy or even to stop hoping that love was possible. I don’t know how Jesus put that life in you, but I praise Him for it.

One time when I was praying in the sacristy, contemplating through the open sacristy door Jesus in His Real Presence in the tabernacle, I heard the heavy wooden doors of the church bang shut indicating, obviously, someone had come into the church.

It being the middle of the afternoon in that factory neighbourhood it was unusual to have someone come in at that hour.

I could hear the shuffle of winter boots up the aisle, one set heavy, the other the scuff-scuff of a small child.

When they came into view the father appeared to me as if he were barely out of his teens, if that, and the boy about three.

They did not notice me, so I was about to go and greet then when something made me stay still.

The father approached the stand of votive lights before the statue of Our Blessed Mother and dropped in a coin, lit a candle, then gave his boy a coin, helped the lad to put the coin in the box and then lifted the lad and helped him with the taper so he too could light a candle.

After a moment’s silence, still holding his son, the father said: “ Know why we do this? “

I heard no reply from the child.

“ Mommy’s sick and we can’t be here all the time to pray for her so the candles remind Jesus’ Mom to pray for…..”

From the sacristy I blessed the sobbing father and his son and watched them leave.

 As I recall that scene this summer’s evening writing these lines it remains for me a icon of His Will that we live!

Mail has been answered, the sick in hospital visited, appointments kept.

 Now it is late afternoon.

Unlike most of the year these, dog days of summer, phone and doorbell stay rather quiet.

 There is extra time to pray, to read, and yes, to write.

It rained a bit this afternoon.

One of those, warm, lazy rains, of mid-summer.

Water!

It makes up much of our bodies, even from the very beginning, in the womb.

In some form or other water is an essential element of physical life.

From the opening of Genesis to the flood and the ark, from the parting of the sea to water from the rock, from the battle between the true and the false, to the Lamb at the Jordan, from the miracle of Cana to the broken open Heart, water has its irreplaceable part as the living, flowing, river of His providence. { cf. Gn. 1;Gn.6-9;Ex.14:10-31;Ex.17:1-7;1Kg.18:21-40;Jn.1:29-43;Jn.2:1-11;Jn.19:31-37 }

Did I not just write that the phone has been quiet today?

It has taken near fifteen minutes to write these few lines, however, as a holy priest-writer once said when asked how he coped with all the interruptions: Interruptions? They are my life!

CHRIST casts His eyes upon us even before we are created in our mother’s womb.

When do we first cast eyes upon Him?

It is at the moment of our Baptism.

      The moment when water becomes sacrament of He who has first gazed upon us!

So many questions pose themselves here for the non-believer: about God, man, sacrament, about Baptism itself.

The temptation is to answer them in a way which frankly would drown you dear reader in ponderous theological paragraphs.

I am, be grateful to her, reminded of words from the Servant of God Catherine Doherty who pleaded with we priests to give people God and not theological punditry.

 So I pray here the answers sought will be found in the telling of a life created by God, sustained by Him, redeemed by Him, and how He does all that!

Given the fact I was baptized within a few days of my birth I naturally do not retain a normal conscious memory of the event, though undoubtedly my soul, being indelibly marked by the sacrament, sealed as one of Christ’s own by the Holy Spirit, has somewhere a memory of the event more vivid than I can possibly imagine.

In those days before the Second Vatican Council ritual was something cherished, not seen as some impediment to personal creativity.

Having been at the baptisms of my various brothers and sisters, and reviewing pre-Vatican II ritual books, I can piece together what would have occurred at my own baptism and touch on this importance of water become sacrament in the life of a human being.

The Baptism would have taken place over a marble font in the sacristy of the parish church, where I would have been carried in the arms of my Godfather. Often in those days the mother was not present as Baptism occurred within hours, certainly no more than a couple of days of birth.

The ritual would have unfolded mainly in Latin, the sacred language of over a millennia of the believing Church.

QUO NOMINE VOCARIS?, the priest would have asked: By what name are you called?

Naturally I could not answer being a mere baby and so the Godparents would have answered: MY name!

Sacred Scripture is filled with consoling words about the sacredness of name, the promise of redemption, the blessing of water { cf. Is.43:1,2; Jn.10:3 } and the Church Herself teaches clearly: “God calls each one by name. Everyone’s name is sacred. The name is the icon of           the person. It demands respect as a sign of the dignity of the one who bears it. The name one receives is a name for eternity. In the kingdom, the mysterious and unique character of each person marked with God’s name will shine forth in splendour. “ To him who conquers….I will give a white stone, with a new name written on the stone which no one knows except him who receives it. “ [b]

QUID PETIS AB ECCLESIA DEI?

What do you beg of the Church of God?

The solemn answer would be given in one word: FIDEM! FAITH!

FIDES, QUID TIBI PRAESTAT? Faith, what does that offer you?

The answer given this time was both a declaration of truth and a statement of hope: VITAM AETERNAM!

ETERNAL LIFE!

Having called me to live the Gospel and enter life by keeping the commandments of loving God with my whole heart, soul, mind and my neighbour as myself, the priest then leaned over my tiny body and breathed the sacred breeze of his Spirit filled breath, three times, over my face intoning: EXI AB EO IMMUNDE SPIRITUS, ET DA LOCUM SPIRITUI SANCTO PARACLITO!

DEPART FROM HIM UNCLEAN SPIRIT AND GIVE OVER THIS DWELLING PLACE TO THE HOLY SPIRIT!

Then the priest would have signed me on the forehead and over my heart with the Sign of the Cross that I might embrace all Divine teaching and live as God’s temple and blessed salt would have been placed upon my tongue to seal within my being the declaration of Christ Himself  that we His disciples are, and are to be, salt of the earth{ Mt.5:13 }.After other blessings, anointing, came the actual pouring of the baptismal water over my being and the declaration by name of my baptism in the Name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.

In that instant I was transformed from a creature of God to a child of God, from another object in the created universe to a subject also, a true person!

At that precise moment there was no darkness within my being, I was filled with His light, with all that was needed to live a full, holy life, the life St. Paul so eloquently describes as an actual, a real re-birth, not to some mundane existence, but fullness of life in Christ and therefore no longer should be we looking to ‘the world’ for the meaning of life, the purpose of the very gift of existence, but beyond ourselves, indeed into the very heart of the Trinity until that extraordinary moment comes when the very truth of the ‘am’ of ‘I’ will be revealed in Him and with Him [Col.3:1-4}.

From the moment of my Baptism, until I was old enough to start school, that ideal of the Christian way of life pretty much remained in my being untainted by any of my own deliberate doing, for I was after all a mere toddler.

However, as is simply the reality of living life in the company of other human beings, as the years went by the events of family life, life lived in this world, affected me to varying degrees.

From very early on, certainly it was already a personal practice by the time I started school, internalizing things as a battle between what I knew to be true, and true as a matter of faith, and what I felt to be true, as a matter of experience, became ever more intense, ever more something I began to keep locked inside of myself, speaking about it to no one.

Possessed of an almost ferocious self-will when it came to being stubborn at the same time when it came to giving into fear or gratification it was as if I had no self-will at all.

What began as a battle within myself over the years would develop into a great struggle with, and eventually against, the very God whose sacramental child I had become.

St. John stresses the reality of belonging to the Holy Trinity within the starkness of life in a world which is darkened by another {1Jn.5:19}.

Decades ago when I was working in the financial heart of the country, immersed in the cult of greed, returning home on the subway late one night I was accosted by a ‘bible-thumper’ with the usual assumptive challenge: Have you been saved? Do you know Jesus brother?

Instantly my ego was engaged.

 I stupidly plunged right into the insane trap and frankly proved how little I knew Jesus by assaulting the young man’s religious innocence, assuring him that, as a Roman Catholic, not only was I saved big-time but that thanks to confession I could sin and sin and be saved and saved!

This horrified him no end.

He was literally, utterly horrified that anyone who has been saved could ever consent to sinning again. To him it was incomprehensible.

He, of course, was/is right.

It should not only be incomprehensible but unheard of that a Christian, once baptized, would ever willingly cast off Christ and choose sin.

But I was really terrible that night on the subway and would not leave it alone.

I pressed him, hassled him, about the current state of the world, our so-called Christian culture, the TV evangelists, the Catholic priests, the public Christians who committed terrible sins stressing it sure seemed to me rather common for the ‘saved’ to sin and sin and sin.

He fled the subway at the next stop.

I sat there in a puddle of my egotistical waste, though at the time I was too much of a casual Christian to grasp the meaning of the entire encounter.

Only now these decades later do I understand what a missed opportunity of grace that was and I thank-God for that young and enthusiastic Christian man.

I often ask our Heavenly Father to grant me forgiveness for my lack of openness and charity.

Indeed, this is the constant prayer of my heart.

So there I was in that cold sacristy in the middle of a World War reborn in living water.

I would grow up on the shores of the great water over which the Spirit had hovered at the beginning and in the years to come, in the silence of the night, as a great war waged relentlessly within me, soak my being with the water of tears….not of contrition but of being overwhelmed by it all.

“ THEY look like they’re just coming out of some Siberian forest! “, exclaimed one of the women.

I glanced out of the kitchen window.

There, framed between the outside wall of the kitchen, and the wall of the woodshed, in that little narrow space where no buildings block the forest from view, came the great procession!

In the lead: the thurifer, his white server’s alb visible near his feet, the rest of his body bundled in a parka, head swathed in toque and scarf, his warm breath pushing puffs of steam from his mouth, in competition with the clouds of incense rising from the gold thurible, he rhythmically swung back and forth.

Behind him came the men and women of The Community, all dressed against the cold, holding lit tapers, singing…but from the distance of the enclosed kitchen the words were indecipherable.

Then the priests, the bottom edges of their coloured vestments, worn under heavy winter coats, visible above their various shaped and coloured winter boots.

Last in the procession came the Archbishop.

Coatless he was layered in golden thread vestments, his face beaming, equal to the brocade in which he was awash, carrying high for all to see, a crucifix.

Once the procession had passed by the small area from view, I moved, with all the others, to the far side of the kitchen facing the river where large windows framed the unfolding liturgy.

The frozen artery is buried under more than a foot of snow.

Deep below the cold water moves, flowing from far north, deep in the great northern forest, past our little Community, and on for hundreds of miles until it flows into The Great River and onto the sea.

Today it had a piece of itself torn open, before dawn, by axe and pick, so that into the open hole this crucifix, being carried by the Archbishop, might find leave to enter the water, sanctify it and the rivers and oceans, into which it should flow, until the heat of the sun, one tiny blessed water droplet at a time across time, will draw each into the embrace of invisible, to the earth-bound eye, particles of dust and the gathering will begin. Clouds will be woven, wind will stir, and then rain shall fall upon the fields nestled against the hills of this valley. Deep in the great forest rivulets will form, streams will be replenished and dance through the glens until they stumble into this river which will flow across the summer, through the fall harvest, until winter’s ice-rest returns.

Then, on time’s new morning like this, another procession will emerge from the forest, another crucifix will be placed into the water and the sanctification will be renewed.

That continual reality of the constant renewal throughout the liturgical year of the sacramental life of grace, our own being drawn by the Spirit to the Father through the Son is the grace of every moment in God being the moment of beginning again.

The central witness of my life is not just our constant need of Him, but more importantly His constant lavishing of grace, of mercy, of new beginning upon us!

I am a priest.

Whether it is preaching, teaching, hearing confessions, or, yes, writing an autobiography, ultimately the only One I seek to proclaim is Christ. So my real name is of no import.

The witnessing to His mercy, to His Holy Name, is.

As St. John the Baptist, with passionate urgency beholding the Lamb of God, Jesus, approaching him,  realized and proclaimed that henceforth he, John, must be less of a presence, less visible, that Christ might be the everything everyone seeks { Jn. 3:30 & Col. 3:11}, so must each priest live the gift and mystery of priesthood.

When people, for example, are more aware of Father X or Y celebrating Holy Mass than they are of Christ Himself we priests are failing to be what we are: in persona Christi – Christ for you!

As a priest, who has some small gift as a writer, my heart wants to stir your heart dear reader to open wide the doors of your being to Christ, showing through this telling of my own prodigal’s passions and pilgrimage, His mercy is greater than our capacity for sin, that our Father in every moment rushes towards the returning prodigal.

My prayer is you will open wide the doors of your being to the Holy Spirit, the Life-Giver, Teacher of Truth, the Sanctifier, confident He is tirelessly answering every human prayer.

Indeed in his own telling of what the Holy Spirit accomplishes, if we are willing within us, St. Paul boldly proclaims there is nothing the Sanctifier cannot restore to Christ, no one who cannot be sanctified, if we are willing to risk loving God who Himself is love {Rm.8:28}!

      ANCESTRY, roots, heritage, ethnic-origin, the old-country, family-tree, tribe, clan.

We all have a history.

We all come from somewhere…from some at least momentary encounter in passion between a man and a woman.

Some people can trace their family history back through countless generations with exact records. Some families use these traces to assure power over others, or at least some particular status in their own minds; others have no, or few, written records, but their colour, use of language, mannerisms, and, especially, oral history, assure them an identity; still others in our modern era have the record of photographs, and now video images of generations at play, at Baptisms, weddings, birthdays, perhaps even funerals.

However it is looked at the orphan, that is even the person with no apparent tangible official record of their original family seeks to have some kind of connection with a family history…be it a military unit, street gang, cult, or religion. In the case of the Roman Catholic Church even an orphan can join a religious order like the Benedictines and become part of a specific family within the greater Catholic family of the Church, a family which traces itself across the millennia.

The Church is also that family which, par excellence, always, passionately, welcomes home the prodigal, again and again and again, following the example of her Divine Spouse.

Of my own origins I am woefully ignorant, at least going back any further than some vague notions about my Grandparents, and even those notions are coloured by family legend and the passage of years.

Certainly they all originally came from various parts of Europe. Italy mostly is what I cling to, though none of those traditions was passed on.

The times of coming over were marked by the later wars of the 19^th century and the First World War in the 20^th century.

They clearly brought with them the typical immigrant determination to survive, with its good, and less so, aspects.

They certainly passed onto me a fierce determination as a survivor.

They were soldiers, sailors, hard-working men and women with true survivor skills.

All of them tough as nails.

When, during the First World War, the city in which I grew up was almost totally destroyed by the collision and explosion of a medical and a munitions ship, and a glass window shattered into the face of my maternal Grandmother, she simply took the glass out, sutured up her own face and proceeded to care for her children, clean up the house, help wounded neighbours.

That was the same war in which many of the men died in the mud and blood of the Europe their ancestors had thought they’d left behind to its own relentless cycles of horror.

Some ancestors also brought over with them the faith of the Reformation, but the men kept falling in love with the daughters of other ancestors who brought over with them the faith of Rome. There is an almost constant back and forth among the family branches between one side or the other, depending it seems, on who was marrying whom!

By the time the men who had survived the first war managed to survive the Great Depression and raise sons, those sons were available for the European branches of the family to slaughter each other and plunge the world into yet another blood bath, since the war to end all wars clearly had not been bloody or far reaching enough.

The original Reformation side, my mother’s, were now Catholic and my father’s side had lost the faith of Rome, so my father became Catholic to marry my mother and I became another generation of sons to begin life during a war.

Increasingly many astute Protestant and Catholic clergy have come to understand the Scriptural basis for looking at family history when considering the personal struggles of the modern Christian.

In a culture where the sons have gone to war not once or twice but many times in one century, the 20^th, where women have first because of war and then because of the societal need to consume stuff, or just to put food on the table, have been taken out of the home, especially in the critical early years of their children’s lives, where the whole social order has been in upheaval and where technology, science, medicine, communication, philosophy, art, and most other human endeavours have been in a constant state of upheaval, not to mention things like the spread of artificial contraception, abortion, homosexuality and the attendant variations on the theme of human sexuality etc., etc., we see all around us loneliness, depression, a type of lostness unheard of in human history, which pulverizes the human person as we constantly ask why?

“ … we are strange in some way, yet we are Christ’s body on earth.  Cardinal Ratzinger calls this an example Of the ‘ divine law of disguise’  — God’s Divine ability to be present in what is the weakest and least  likely, so that holiness can shine forth for what it is, His own. As we are healed and our family is healed, our living members are integrated more in charity; deceased members in our family attain a closer union with us in Christ, because they become closer to the God-Presence,  and more fulfilled through this prayer. In this corporate familial healing God’s glory is Manifest abundantly, often dramatically……” [a]

In other words, no matter how crazy the twists and bends in the branches of our family tree, God will make it all come out beautiful in the end….if we let Him!

So how much detail do I need to write about?

I am well past the half-century mark in my own life. I begin to write on the threshold of the new millennium and question how much of the past before my birth is important for me to discover Him at work.

As I write this hot summer’s evening, when it feels like at any moment the whole city could spontaneously combust, the might of the state is at work.

Helicopters, planes, ships, men and women, desperately seeking over, and in, the ocean for the man the nation still sees as the little boy peering out from the desk of the young father who just happened to be President of the United States.

When the ‘father’ of the nation was slaughtered the boy became the nation’s son.

In the intervening years the culture has decided it can do without fathers.

Now this fatherless nation must cope with the tragic death of its son.

I believe the sixties are finally over.

=================================================

I WAS BORN when hundreds of thousands of men, including my father, uncles, cousins, were spilling their blood into the sand and gravel of Normandy, Sicily, Holland, or drowning in a mixture of blood, bunker oil and seawater, as the final years of the Second World War ground on.

My childhood would be marked by other wars in Asia, the Middle East, and the constant anxiety among most North Americans caused by the ebb and flow of the Cold War. Then there would be the so-called local wars between India and Pakistan, Israel and just about everybody in the area, Biafra…who remembers that sad, little, temporary nation?

Viet-Nam would scar a whole generation…both those who fought in it and those who fought it; the civil rights battles, the struggles, often of sad incomprehension, between fifties’ parents and sixties’ flower-children…those were the years in which my adolescence would wander into young adulthood.

Early memories are of fear…war-fear, absent father-fear, polio-epidemic-fear, atomic-war-fear; grainy newsreel footage of the camps of the holocaust, the scenes from a devastated and hungry Europe, the Berlin airlift,….playing down at the docks as ship after ship arrived with war-brides and refugees…cousins, young, frightened, determined to survive, as yet another generation from the relentless killing fields of Europe sought to begin again.

How little did we know in the late forties that within less than a generation this would all repeat itself ….the scenes of bombed cities, tortured women and children, piles of bodies, defeat, flight…in Viet-Nam, Cambodia, Latin America.

Apparently however those oceans of blood in which we were drowning were not, are not, deep enough for we are approaching the new millennium at war with the future.

Not satisfied with imitating Cain on a massive scale against the brother we see, now we out Cain-Cain and slaughter our brothers and sisters in the millions before they are even born!

What a century of blood.

No wonder as a child I became obsessed with books, imaginary places of peace, beauty, with being alone for hours on end along the docks and the great breakwater of the harbour….dreaming, dreaming, always dreaming of a place of safety, of a family where fathers were not always going away.

I’d lean against the window at night, even in the winter when the thin glass would be frosted over and my cheekbone would ache with the cold, and gaze at the stars and the moon, yearn to float with the clouds…..street lamps in those days being weak of light and usually only one to a block, so even a kid in the city could see the night sky!

I’d wonder who I was, why I was, where I came from, what was life all about, why was life so fearful, sad, so relentless in its ever changing demands?

Eventually the cold, biting into my cheek, would be too much, or, if I was down by the ocean, the fog would roll in and the dampness would seep through my clothes into my bones…strange but I came to love the cold like my one reliable companion in an ever deepening aloneness….but in either case it would be time to head to bed, or home, to ponder some other time.

SOME YEARS BACK when I first started making notes for this book such old questions about who am I, why, where, had stirred within me once again one winter’s day when I was living with The Community and staying in the priests’ house.

I’d gone out to stand for a time and ponder. I stood in the companionship of that winter’s cold and snow, with pen and notepad in hand:

While standing out on the porch, watching today’s slight snowfall Stephen Hawking came into my heart.I enjoy his work very much.Were his theories uttered from a perspective of sheer adoring faith, I would be more willing to simply thank God for him.As it is I must pray constantly for him to open wide the doors of his being to Christ.Once he does then he shall know the true splendour and origin of all.

I still enjoy Hawking and still pray for him.

That admission scientists like himself make about not knowing what was before the elapse of the first one billion-or portion thereof-of a second into the big bang….Aquinas would say that is what some call God!

I wonder if, really, it is the universal — just moment of beginning of everything — that scientists are anxious about or is it not that they, being persons like the rest of us, REALLY want to know that mysterious moment of their own beginning of existence, as a way of refuting the reality of God as Father, as Creator?

In truth all the ‘ where has it come from’ questions about the universe are essentially ‘ where have I come from?’, and, ‘ why am I here?’

In my own case it is tinged with the immense inner awareness that when I ask that question I am compelled to ask how I came to be at a time when, as best we can figure, fifty million of my brothers and sisters, in a real sense my immediate family, had died, or were dying, in the ovens and camps, the saturation bombings, tank battles, sea-battles, on beaches, in the frozen horror of Stalingrad and the suddenness of an atomic flash, so far above their heads they probably never even heard the plane fly over them with its belly full of instant death.

WHILE pondering such questions the sudden melting of a snowflake on my tongue causes my being to shudder as if those melting crystals carried within the immediacy of ancient history and my heart heard the plaintive cry of God Himself calling out to Cain {Gn.4:10} 

All my pondering about the origins of life, my own included, the marvels of the created universe, being deeply affected by the course of the century of blood: perhaps only when I am truly a very old man, past pondering with curiosity and only able…please God willing….to marvel with quiet gratitude to Him, will the effort to understand surrender to, finally be melted into, the great truth, or rather to become one with the truth no-thing, more critically no-one exists but through Christ – and – of course if we neither know Christ nor that we are known by Him then our very existence, the existence of everything, everyone, most particularly our very selves – well all remains incomprehensible {Jn.1:3}!

A MEMORY has sprung into my heart from my early childhood after the war and illustrates the fundamental type of experience and my reaction to such which formed the person I have become….or rather in many ways formed the wounds within me, the healing of which has allowed me to become the person He created and redeems!

I was about six.

One day in the fall, for my birthday, I was given a new sweater.

New clothes were something special, they were yours, smelled new and henceforth would only smell like you, they’d take in your warmth, assume your shape.

Living in the city of the great harbour on the north Atlantic meant the air is never merely cold, it is so damp it soaks the cold into your bones.

A sweater was no luxury, it was necessary.

 A truly warm sweater was a treasure.

I remember that day with vividness as if the images in my mind have been painted there by Cezanne… a memory of sharp colour yet muted light, people moving about, yet still.

 I remember parts of people, but no faces, events but no time frame.

Mostly I remember I survived.

We lived on a street which went from the war veterans hospital at the top of the hill, past a few houses with little ground floor shops, tenements, the construction company yard, the lot leading to the arena, more shops and tenements, the neighbourhood chop-shop, stores, boarding houses, fire-hall, bottling plant, huge factory size bakery.

On and on it was a world of wonderful places, constant activity, sounds, smells and a boy on a tricycle could be a motorcycle cop, drive a bus, a huge dump truck, cowboy on a horse, tank commander…anything.

Riding my new tricycle and wearing the treasured new sweater off I went!

Down the block, past my best friend’s house whose bachelor uncle was a ham radio operator and, as the need would arise in our anti-commie games, became for us from time to time a spy!

Past the dark mauve painted house, always shuttered behind huge lilac bushes, which defied the cement sidewalk encroachment around their roots. That house was where a spinster lived with a string of handsome young men, her boarders. In the summer, it seemed each year, one by one the young men would leave that house early in the morning, dressed in morning suits, flower in the lapel, sometimes accompanied by one of the regulars from the boarding house, a little drunk for so early in the day.

He might return, but none of the men in the morning suits ever did!

Many of the houses in those days had old men and unmarried daughters…war­-widows. Some of the houses were homes with young widowed women who had children to care for, so the front rooms had been turned into little shops or lunch counters.

Past all those, past the tenements, the bottling plant, round past the fire hall and down the far side of the block…technically out of my neighbourhood…I recall riding in the joy of my new sweater and the fire-crispness of that fall day.

Past the big grocery store where the oldest of my younger sisters got lost one day when my Grandfather took us in there and she screamed and hated us both for losing her so I’d bopped her one as I declared I hadn’t lost her!

 Then I was midway down that side of the block, passing the little stationary store which smelled inside of paper, pencils, rubber erasers, glues, paint, ink….a world of images and ideas….a place where a dedicated spinster-sister cared for a battle wounded in body and spirit young man, her brother, who would beckon from his wheel-chair for the ‘little boy’ to come and visit.

My Mother would always agree to tea when she took me there in early fall for the year’s school supplies for me and my increasing number of brothers and sisters.

 I never liked the wounded guy, so while the women had tea would avoid him and would  stroll among the little narrow rows of paper, pens, books, cards, yearning for the world of my dreams, that place where there was neither uncertainty nor fear.

Suddenly I was surrounded.

There were five of them.

Local tough boys, older than me by far and too big for a tricycle.

I was on their turf.

They wanted my tricycle.

Worse.

They wanted my sweater.

I knew if I got off the bike I was done for.

I held on so hard my knuckles whitened and pained.

I was punched and shoved, rocked back and forth both by the blows and them trying to haul me off but I had the extreme strength of a survivor.

I was not letting go.

They cursed, swore, mocked, threatened.

I could not afford to say a word for that risked taking strength away from my grip which was now locked in place.

Adults were passing by, saying nothing, doing nothing.

 I, not expecting help, did not bother to ask for the help I did not expect.

Suddenly the rocking and pounding blows stopped.

For a second I began to form the idea they had given up.

The first glob landed on my swollen closed right eye.

Somewhere deep inside of my being that warm spittle hurt more than all the punches, even more than the fear which was so great it itself was sickly sweet in its ever increasing waves through my pounding heart and throbbing knuckles.

They spit and spit and spit and spit and spit and spit and spit and spit.

My face and hair were covered.

They spit and spit and the sound of the great intake of throat swill and gasp of air, as they prepared to hurl more spit upon me, became the only sound I could hear.

It smelled.

I smelled their smell.

Every instinct in my being urged me to let go, surrender, cry.

I would not.

From a surreal distance an adult male voice uttered some command.

The sound of fleeing boy-feet replaced the guttural grasping to fill a throat and mouth with another salvo of spittle.

The male voice attempted to convince the knuckle tight, spittle-covered boy he was safe and a handkerchief in the rough hand of a working man attempted to clean my eyes and face.

 Though I must have stared at the kind man I do not recall his face.

Escape occupied my being now.

 I pedaled home as fast as I could, put the tricycle were the other kids could take it to play with, for I would not, slipped into the house unseen, went to the room I shared with the oldest of my younger brothers, wiped myself off, took off the sweater.

 I don’t remember where I put it.

I know I never wore it again.

I also know now that I made an inner-vow that day that I would survive anything and that I could not rely on anyone to come to my aid. Not anyone.

The smell of spit was never to leave me.

 Especially would it be there, in its entire stench, whenever I was afraid, for over thirty years.

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IT IS mid July and the city has become a broiler within which we human beings struggle to go about daily life, confronting something way beyond the illusion of our power over the created order!

Sure, we can air-condition our cars and buildings….that is we the non poor of this world…but the poor in dense tenement after tenement block of inner city chaos…what cool breeze ever caresses their foreheads?

People think I am strange, frankly for various reasons, but never more so than in my opposition to air-conditioning the rectory until all the poor have the same luxury in their little apartments.

In the heat, on this city afternoon, a funeral. One attended by people who have not darkened the door of a church since they were children, people sobbing in un­-availed grief, who dutifully came to pay their last respects and who then endured the heat in the middle of a vast city cemetery, devoid of trees to make room for more graves.

The sun tore through my black jacket over my black shirt like an unstoppable laser beam seeking its target!

I am easily one enamoured of all that has to do with the origins of the material universe, of man himself, and all that has to do with the ultimate outer reaches of the galaxies, the human imagination, mind, and heart.

More am I fascinated by what lies beyond the second experience of womb…the grave.

Yet in this generation it seems we have forgotten sheer wonder and become addicted to mere information.

Perhaps that is why since I was a little child with his first Brownie camera the art and wonder of photography has so fascinated me.

When I walk about this world, camera at the ready, my physical eyes tend to gaze more attentively.

Most respectfully.

More in wonder at human beings, animals, street lights and other things we have constructed, at trees and plants, an old abandoned running shoe in the gutter, a gutted car in a vacant lot.

My heart draws stories about what I see from the fertility of my imagination .

Sometimes I will stop and take a picture knowing full well that when it is developed it will not be exactly what I saw with my physical eye but it will refract itself in the eye of my heart.

 Once again I shall stand in wonder at the inexhaustible beauty that is life!

That’s why I usually only photograph in black and white.

How wonderful it would be to know more about the ancestral beauty from which I have come, and the ancestral ugliness as well…for it is as we all know, but often do not want to admit, the stark reality of opposites and paradox which heighten the experience of living……….the broiler sidewalks where the air assaults the lungs enhances the sweetly sick smelling coolness of an old movie theatre..the doddering wrinkledness of a passing wino reassures the overly expensively dressed young entrepreneur of their youthful superiority…….the darkness abyss of the loneliness just before dawn can ease because even the most pedestrian of mornings is a beginning again and may appear as a horizon of hope.

But now duty calls this 102 degree afternoon and, for a priest, the need of any soul is always more important than any personal project!

STRANGE this ebb and flow of daily life between the immediate nitty-gritty of service as a priest and these snatched moments in the evening late hours to write about events in my life more than five decades ago.

As yet I do not clearly see the whole connection, though of course in ways at times self-evident, more often mysterious, grace is the connection.

Grace is part of His Self-Gift to us.

Perhaps – no – definitely there will come a point in this telling where I shall write about grace.

Now is the time to exemplify how His grace is Himself at work!

As mentioned the smell of spittle, the horror of that assault, the inner-vow never again to trust anyone [ only late in life would I admit that anyone included any-One ] would not leave me for over thirty years and would return with vengeance at times of great fear.

One Sunday in the winter of 1979 my Spiritual Father was attempting to bring healing into my being through a process called ‘ the healing of memories ‘ where I would allow painful memories to surface, allow myself to ‘ feel ‘ those experiences and hand everything over to Christ.

It was a difficult process with which in those early days…he had only been my spiritual director for a few months and I was most tentative about a return to the True Faith – or any faith life at all for that matter – I was not always truly co-operative.

The healing event of that Sunday afternoon is best described from his perspective as recorded in a letter he wrote me the day after:

IT WAS good to see you face to face and to have a chance to listen to you and pray with you.

One moment will always remain with me.

I’m not sure when it was, but I think you were telling me about that terrible incident when the kids hit you and spat on you and your sweater; suddenly when I looked at you, your face was radiant. You looked so young, beautiful, the way people do when they know they are loved.

It startled me because you were telling me this heart-breaking story, and I could only think that Jesus was somehow showing His love to you in the depth of your heart, revealing His Presence to you, taking away the smell of spit, making you realize that He had never abandoned you even if the abandonment of everyone else made you think that He had.

It is true any rational person rightly wonders where God was or is when we are being abused, are grief-stricken, suffer in anyway.The greater truth is God who is Love, Christ Himself is right there, more intimate to us than we are to our very selves for the worst of every drop of spit, of every slap, of all torture, abuse, of every lie, insult, rejection, of death itself, He has taken not just on { Mt.26:67-8 & Heb.4:15-16} but into Himself so that we might never, ever, no matter what, be even for a moment unloved or truly alone. 

THAT is the why of this!

MY BISHOP has just granted a sabbatical.

My Spiritual Father has said to use the time to “ write, pray, paint “.

Yesterday I traveled far to visit a friend, coping with a sudden death in the family. The return trip took place in the dark.

Age has dimmed my eyes.

I usually take easy routes when driving at night.

On those twisting back roads the slower pace allowed for reflections about the directive to spend these sabbatical months writing, praying, painting.

My heart was moved for silence, so I turned off the radio and tried to still my mind.

What came to my heart, over and over again was the line from St. Paul’s letter to the Romans where the Apostle stresses the apparent paradox that where the more there is sin, even more so there is grace [ Rm. 5: 20 ]!

The Apostle is stating that every moment of our lives is offered as a moment of beginning again.

It IS in God, the Trinity, specifically in Christ who through His Holy Incarnation in His Holy Ascension has taken time into the Trinity, that each moment is the moment of beginning, again, again, again, so long as there is breath in us.

This book is  a witness to this truth :  HIS MERCY is greater than our sin IF we but, with every breath, cry out to Him for His mercy.

The tragedy is how long it takes us to realize this and turn to Him.

The joy is, once we truly turn to Him, sin loses its allure and the Holy Spirit is free to glorify Christ within us, thus making real the truth that the glory of God is the human person fully alive, for, we are fully alive when we no longer live, Christ lives in us.

I do not claim that is accomplished within me, rather I do witness to the truth the Spirit is at work, tirelessly, to complete what was begun at my Baptism, this configuration to Christ.