Sole Journey

My Trip to the Mountaintop and back to Nowhere

Chapter One

 

 

1. It almost seems like ages ago, perhaps even when dinosaurs roamed the Earth.

A black and white kaleidoscope, a time of slow innocence.  It was a time when Coonskin Caps and Happi Coats were popular, when Bill Haley and the Comets sung Rock Around the Clock, and the musical world was changing into high gear.  It was the year that the Brooklyn Dodgers defeated the N.Y. Yankees for the first World Series title (the Yankees won in 56 against the Dodgers!).  In the United States, Martin Luther King lead the Alabama Boycott, and the Senate voted to continue its reign of horror over the Communism Hunt, making Senator McCarthy a name not to be forgotten.  In the world, events sound just like they do today, brothers against brothers.  Chinese Nationalists and Communists clashed over offshore islands, Peron was ousted, the Panamanian president was assassinated, there were tensions between Greece and Turkey on Cyprus, and the Israelis and Egyptians were fighting.  Hotbeds of violence all over the world.

On the lighter side, we were laughing at Jackie Gleason in The Honeymooners (which became a favorite of mine, a true genius of laughing at the everyday man), looking at the never-ending Gunsmoke, and watching the $64,000 Question.  In the movies, East of Eden was playing, The Lady and the Tramp was animated (I loved that song, Bella Notte), as was Rebel Without a Cause, The Seven Year Itch, and Mister Roberts.  On the cover of the December 26th issue of Life, which sold for 35 cents, was the crucified Jesus, someone who would become the largest part of my life slowly but surely as I grew into a spiritual man.

Somewhere through all this mayhem and laughter, in the small section of Brooklyn, N.Y. called East New York, a young couple was showing their love to each other on Christmas Day, 1955.  Escaping from the tensions of a family holiday gathering and going back up to their cold water flat, they engaged in that one act that joins two humans together like no other can.  I was the result of that love that day.  The first day of my existence.  The first day of my life.  The day that I went from a dream into a reality.  It was also the day that we celebrate as our Saviors birth.  We look back to that glorious birth, so pure and simple, the answer to a world waiting.  When I was told about this coincidence many years later, I was thrilled to find out that my life started the day He was born.  The connection had been made, the journey had started, and my heart had been touched, although it would take years for me to even begin to articulate that feeling.  All before I knew the possibilities of what could occur when I let Him into my life or more precisely, recognize that He is there already and became AWARE of Him! 

The glory of a Divine Awakening, God in me and I in God.  A symbiosis, a joining of the Divine and His creation.

From a religious standpoint, I went through the prescribed rituals as I grew up in Brooklyn.  I was baptized in St. Fortunato’s church, and I received Communion there as well.  A move to Long Island in 1963 (a week before President Kennedy was assassinated), led to my receiving Confirmation in St. Martha' parish in my hometown of Uniondale.  I chose the name James as my Confirmation name, not because of the saint, or the meaning of the name, but because it was the name of my hero at the time,    Captain James T. Kirk of the Starship Enterprise(I know this is a book about spirituality, but there is a lot of spirituality in the Star Trek saga).  What was special about Confirmation?  I should be smart enough to say that it was when I received the Holy Spirit into my life and was faith filled. 

However, the best that I can say is that it represented a new blue suit for me (purchased in New York City at Barneys), a new birthstone sapphire ring, and lunch at the International House of Pancakes!  That was Confirmation.  I will never forget the total fear that pervaded our spirits in religious education class.  We had to memorize several questions and their respective answers.  The pastor or bishop would be coming to class and testing us on three of those questions and if we did not get them right, we did not receive Confirmation!  I do not know until this day whether this was a ploy, but it sure scared the heck out of me.  Luckily for us all, we knew the answers to those questions, and we all received Confirmation with the standard slap from the Bishop across our cheek.  So that day I became Victor James Augello, captain of my own starship.  Thank goodness that today I can look to concepts and possibilities when it comes to religious education, and not the pure recitation of questions and answers (most of which I forgot anyway!). 

I know my religious education was not any different from anyone else’s during that time (which would have been 1968).  C.C.D. (Confraternity of Christian Doctrine), or religious education class, was the best diversion for me on Wednesday afternoons.  It meant that since I went to public school, I could get out of school and attend C.C.D. class.  That basically consisted of (at least in the 6th grade when I was going to receive Confirmation) looking longingly at Sister Grace Edna, one of the prettiest nuns I have ever known.  The best thing about it was that due to the changes in Vatican II, she did not wear the sterile black habit that had, for so long, been worn by nuns.  Sister Grace wore a blue suit with a white blouse, and a flowing blue headdress, all combined to make a new habit for the post- Vatican II nun.  More relaxed, more liberal so to speak, and certainly much prettier.  It was during this time that this classmate Patricia had sent me a note in class asking me to get her a ring so that she could get a guy named David jealous.  I will never forget that special C.C.D. note.  Yes, I was certainly learning a lot about religion.

Fifth grade C.C.D. was not much better.  We had our class in the basement of the church on the stage.  My teacher was Mrs. Marge Moran, to whom we gave premature gray hairs, but who later became a dear friend and supporter of mine, despite the weekly torment on the stage.  She repeatedly warned my parents in my C.C.D. progress reports (yes, we had progress reports then) that my behavior was terrible, and I needed to do something about it.  Yet, in retrospect, it was a silliness, not the more seemingly pure disregard for authority that I have seen with SOME children as a former C.C.D. teacher myself.  Mrs. Moran had a head tick that we picked up on and mimicked extensively.  She was caught in the whirlwind of change called Vatican II, just as Sister Grace was.  They were trying to explain the sometimes unexplainable and were trying to make sense out of all the changes.  No more Latin masses...........now I could finally understand the priest (although I must admit there was a lot more mystery to Latin then we have in the English Liturgy today).....all of the Dominus Vobiscums..........and that other mumbo jumbo as we called it.  Now the priest faced the congregation too!

 Wow, I could finally see his face, and I was part of the action.  My father still hit his chest with his fist when the bells rang though!  I miss those bells.  They were a call to action!  At its best, it let people feel like they were a part of the mass.  I certainly paid attention when they rang!

It appeared that in trying to understand the changes and implications of this Council that some people got lost along the way.  Pope John XXIII wanted to blow the dust off the church and its way of thinking then usher in a rebirth.  “Open the windows” it was said, bring in the fresh air.  He was a catalyst for change in the church.  A change that was needed to wake us all up, and he was gifted with that wisdom to KNOW it and initiate it.  My own life at the time was indeed dormant from a spiritual standpoint.  I was, however, no different from any other 12-year-old on the verge of puberty.  Girls, not God, were the important aspect of my life at that time.  It was not the Pope that was important but the Penthouse.  My awakening was to my own physical maturity, not the maturing of the church.  As I was growing up in the late 60s, so was the church, both of us having a hard time adjusting to our new-found circumstances. 

Pre-Vatican II really did not concern me, I was too young to understand it, but I was now witnessing and taking part in a rebirth, a renewal of that religion that I was born into.  I was a cradle Catholic for sure.  I was baptized, and never fully entered the mystery of it. Not yet at least.

As a cradle Catholic, I was taken right through the system without any questions asked.  I received the Sacrament of Baptism because................., I received the Sacrament of Confirmation because......................., I went to Confession because...................., I went to mass because........................., I went to C.C.D. because..................  Because why?  It was what I was supposed to do.   My parents had me do all the right things.  I can understand now with a bit more clarity why the gospel writers wrote nothing about Jesus early childhood years (except the temple finding at 12).  What were they going to write?  That He did what was expected of Him and that He did all the things that every other Jewish boy of that time did?  Perhaps because of the very fact that He was so human and so typical did the gospel writers have little if anything to say.  Jesus, for His part, progressed steadily in wisdom and age and grace before God and men, as it is stated in Luke 2:52.  The same parallel can hopefully be said about us all, that is, that through our youth, we also progressed steadily in age , wisdom and grace before God and others.  It is through the normal, everyday courses of life that we start to build our wisdom and experiences.  We all look to a special someone to whom we can relate specific growth experiences in our life.  While I was growing up, in my early to mid-teens, a young man from Brooklyn, N.Y. was ordained a priest.  He was one of the most normal, coolest looking guys (as we said in the 70s) I have ever seen, and he was a priest.  He was current, he was with it, he was someone I could relate to.

His name was Father John Tutone, a tall Italian from the same area where I grew up in Brooklyn.  Dark black hair and a bushy black moustache and eyes punctuated with small round glasses made up his exceptionally good looks.  What a change of pace from the older, more conservative priests I had been used to.  Best yet, he spoke a language that I understood.  He related things directly to me, and to the congregation.

It is the message some priests’ try to get across today, that is, what does this mean to you and he certainly could relate that.  When he spoke, I listened.  On a one to one basis, he was congenial, had a terrific smile and you could tell that if there was a meaning of being filled with the spirit, then he certainly fit that meaning.  Father John was incredibly open to listening to me when I approached him about the possibilities of being a priest.  Yes, there was a call that I could identify in my early teens, and the feeling was to spend my life devoted to God, perhaps as a cleric.

Father John coached me by giving me books to read and by being incredibly supportive in all my questions.  I would have to say that throughout my life, support for discernment of the call has never been lacking.  God was knocking on my heart real early in my life. I was just trying to figure out what to do with that, as I would for a good many years or so.  Funny thing was that after all of the reading( I can remember a summer off from school just sitting in the sun reading these books from him, the warmth on my face and Jesus on my mind, a wonderful combination), something became clear to me.  I was turned off by the structure of the priesthood.  I did not feel that this was something I could or would like to do, more specifically with my limited understanding of what a priests purpose was  and how he functioned, I could not say that I would have liked the intense subordination that he was under.  The perceived limitations scared me.  I could not be so structured and so committed to that.  Even the thought of celibacy rattled me then.  This was something that would come back and haunt me some 20 years later as I wrestled with the possibilities of being ordained a Deacon.  However, I knew I had made a connection with the Divine and it would never leave me.  It was during this time (the early 70’s) that I had spent most Saturdays going to the five o’clock mass with my father.  He and I would go together, and his spirituality would rub off on me. 

Now, this was not to say that my mother was not religious, or a woman filled with faith.  In the early 70s, we almost lost her to a traveling staph infection sustained during a hysterectomy.  I was young enough not to realize the full meaning of coming close to death, and my father did not share that information with my brother and me.  So, there was a period when Mom recuperated, and Dad and I went to mass together.  It was our special bonding time, probably the best bonding I ever did with my father because it occurred at such a SPIRITUAL level.  He was always a man of prayer, and I took that right into my being and absorbed it.  My father never said much, but his love for prayer and God reflected onto me and was the basis for my true religious training.  I will not let Mom off the hook here, she taught me many other things!

I won’t say that my childhood was perfect, for it was sure filled with some nasty events, some that even required therapy for me in my late 30s, but I did have two good, decent, loving, yet flawed parents.  Yes, it is true, the apple does not fall far from the tree, for I consider myself decent, good and loving, but flawed as well!

No matter where I turned in life, there was always a connection to the church not far behind.  As was the custom with those students attending Catholic school, after 8th grade, if you were not going to Catholic high school, you went onto public school.  It was at this time that a pretty, long-haired, quiet young girl came into my life.  This young woman had come from our local parish school.  We started to become friendly and our romance flourished on the basketball courts of Nassau County where my new-found friend traveled around with her C.Y.O. basketball team (i.e., the Christian Youth Organization).  Boy, was she good at playing basketball.  My three daughters all take after this woman who later became my wife and became the source of my continued embarrassment about my basketball abilities.  A three-pointer let us forget it.   Show me to the hot dog stand!

She had a better education up to that point in our religion than I had.  That was the advantage of a Catholic school education, you got the basics down.  We poor public-school kids had to depend on those Wednesday afternoons at C.C.D. to foster our understanding of religion (or was it note-passing?).  So, after showing interest in each other during our 9th grade school year, we finally became a couple in May 1971.  I gave her my I.D. bracelet (talk about fads!), and the rest became a lover’s history.  The point I want to make here is that upon graduation from ninth grade (we moved onto the high school after that), she gave me a silver medal.  It was of St. Jude, Patron Saint of Hopeless cases.  I would assume that the reference was to my basketball abilities.

After I received that gift, it graced my neck for our married years together along with a cross and a medal of the Holy Family.  It was my first religious gift from my friend and my neck had been clanking with these medals for a long time.

When we talk about formation, I can tell you that throughout this period of my life (high school and college) not too much was happening insofar as religion was concerned.  I had abandoned the idea of becoming a priest and had a stint in eleventh grade as a C.C.D. teacher at my parish along with a friend of mine (we taught eighth graders).  I never abandoned my weekly visit to mass, and now it would include my girlfriend or friends at times.  I marveled at the changes in the music through the Youth Ministry, which I also became involved in for a few years, but that was more on a social level than anything else.  It was during my high school years that my father had shared a very intense, personal story with us all.

My father came from a large family.  He was the second Anthony in his family, for the first male child born had died at an early age due to illness.  It was the early 1920s, so many children who had died, did so without the benefit of a specific diagnosis.  Dad had an older brother, and unfortunately, he was not close to him.  They had quite different personalities, and as they grew older, they were each at the end of flying fists at times.  You never expect anything horrible to happen, so you continue at odds until something changes that.

1. My father was 31, and his brother was several years older, married with 2 young children. My uncle worked in the Brooklyn Navy yards, after a stint in the Navy.  He was a mechanic on the U.S.S. Constellation, and one day went off to work as he always did.  Only this time, he did not return.  As he was working in the forward part of the ship, a fire started which trapped my uncle and many others, killing them.  That normally would have been the end of it all.  However, there was a gift given to my father before my uncle left for his eternal reward.

Shortly after his death, my father was awakened at night by my uncle at the foot of his bed.  He said he had come to say goodbye to my him, and told him what had happened, with some specifics as to where he was trapped by the fire as well.  Dad was amazed, for his brother was as clear to him as he was when he was alive.  No ghostly figure, just his brother as he had always known him.  A goodbye, from one brother to another.  A final farewell to ease the tensions.

 A gift from Him to my father, a bridge to eternity.  Dad did not get emotional about much, but this always got him going.

 

1. My fiancé and I were certainly enjoying the holiday season. It was Christmas Eve and she and I were two weeks away from becoming husband and wife.  There was a lot of celebrating going on, families from far away were with us and we had a great holiday time.   We decided to go to midnight mass.  I lived three houses from the corner, and we pulled out the driveway and made our way to the corner to stop for the stop-sign.  We looked over to a man standing on the corner, and it was my neighbor George.  Should that be so strange, even though it was 11:30 at night?  Well, no, not really, except for the fact that George had died several months before.  There was no doubt about it either.  The face, the hat, the coat, the walk, and the fact that my normally staid fiancée had recognized him as well.  We saw it, we recognized him, and we watched him walk up the block, past his house, briefly looking over to say his last goodbye.  We were dumbfounded.  We knew it could not be, but it did look like him, without doubt.  Was this a gift for us?  Was my uncle’s appearance to my father a gift as well?  My father had seen, and now my girlfriend and I had seen too.  Life after death, a time where the soul wanders before it is taken up to its final resting place.  Reality or fantasy?  All I know is what I saw.

It was also at this time that I made my first Christian, adult decision about an issue facing us all as believers.  I made the decision to oppose abortion.  It was the time of the new marches on Washington, and Roe vs. Wade was not all that old.  I felt that ending a life in the womb was wrong and I also felt that God is the creator of life, and it lies in his domain to take that life back.  I remember saying to my wife to be, I am going to decide about this, and I did.  Little did I know how much hatred was being generated from this until I went on a prayer chain to protest a local abortion clinic some years later.  To me, I did not think that free choice meant that we have the right to murder, for I believe that life starts at conception.

To me these were seeds of what sort of things would be happening in the future.  Little glimpses of what might be that would help me learn and understand.  In January of 1978, I was married.  My faith and spiritual development took a back seat, meaning that there was not any tremendous priority for me to inquire about it.  As far as I was concerned, I was doing everything I should have been doing.  I was a good Catholic.  My life continued an even keel until several years later, when a Born-Again co-worker shook me up and opened my eyes!

Chapter Two

 

1978

I was only 21 then, and full of energy and desire.   I had just graduated Hofstra University with my degree in Management in hand.  Francis Ford Coppola spoke at our graduation and two weeks later I was to be married.

1. It seems like eons ago. Over 40 years ago now!

January 6th, the night before my wedding.   My last dinner at home with my parents.

We sat down to eat and as we always did, we started to say grace, but tonight was different.  We joined hands and then with the realization of losing their second son to marriage, my parents cried.  As a typical young man, I really did not understand the high emotion of the moment.  I would not understand that until I had my own children and started to bear separations.  It was my parent’s way of saying they were going to miss my permanent presence around the house for I was always a homebody, meaning that I loved my house, my room, and the security of being there.  It is what kept me from going away to college and helped me develop my basis of believing in the priority of family.  That closeness is also what broke my family up some two years later, for sometimes, separation is necessary for growth.  At least it was in my case.

My wedding to my wife was typical.  I was a nervous groom.  I was also emotional, and being the true man that I was, I knew that I must NOT cry at my wedding even though I was near that.  So, to keep my emotions in check, I exchanged vows with my sister-in-law.  Now, do not misunderstand that.  She was standing behind my wife-to-be, as maid of honor, and as I was facing my bride, it was easy enough for me to just look over her shoulder at my sister-in-law.  The church was so beautiful at that time of year.  It was right after the Epiphany, and the holiday decorations were still up.  Poinsettias were all over the altar, and the nativity and a tree dotted the alcove where our first pictures were taken.  Father John did a marvelous job, and I remember feeling that his homily was as good as ever. 

That night we retired to our honeymoon bed in our new apartment, then received notice that her dog died.  It was our first test as a couple, and as part of the whole plan, the first of many experiences that would occur to test our vows of “in good times and in bad “.  From a spiritual standpoint, I was asleep.  We went to mass every Saturday.  I felt no special closeness to my spiritual life, my faith life or God for that matter.  I had no understanding of my religion yet, nor did that matter.

After we were married, we decided that we would try a new life outside of the great state of New York.  We had looked at Oregon, but it appeared to be raining most of the time in the Portland area, and neither of us could take the rain, so we decided that we would try Florida.  That came about after my brother and mother visited the east coast of Florida and came back with the intention of moving down.  Since we were discussing moving anyway, this seemed like a good place to explore the future while still staying together as a family. 

We moved down to the Tampa area in May of 1979, followed consecutively by my brother in August, and my parents in October.  We were all settled when my brother and I had purchased our new 65- seater, full service, Greek-Italian restaurant, called El Greco.  We had Mom and Dad to thank for that, for they took the $35,000 they had made on the sale of their home in Long Island and gave it to us to open the restaurant.  Not bad, so I thought.  Little did I nor anyone else know that starting a restaurant without a $1 in the bank as operating capital, was a bad move.

 We had a catering room in the back, which held another 100 or so people, and we did put that to use on occasion.  To put it bluntly, my brother and I had the energy and enthusiasm to operate the restaurant, but not the experience or guidance to succeed, especially in the hard economic times of 1979, when interest rates were up at 21%.

My brother and I worked 16-hour days.  We never saw the wonderful Florida sunlight.

Mom and Dad worked with us. Dad as a meager laborer (and did we work him) and Mom as hostess and superb dessert maker.  Our wives even joined in later as waitresses. 

We lived and worked in an area that was heavily Baptist.  The Baptists had an aversion to alcohol and our restaurant was zoned as no alcohol to be served on premises.  We found this to be a little unfair, especially because there were several eating and drinking establishments around us that served alcohol.  We petitioned the local council to get them to approve a C.O.P. license, that is “consumed on premises “.  After much politicking, appearances before the council and some finger crossing, we were approved for the C.O.P. license.  I think we later became the only restaurant that had gotten a beer and wine license and had lost business!

I can remember that night distinctly.  I drove home from work and went directly to our church.  Since it was late, I went to a little area in front of our church where there was a statue of the Holy Family, in a brick alcove.  I tried to pray a prayer of thanksgiving, but I was having a problem.  I was wandering.  I could not focus.  I could not pray.  I was EMPTY, LONELY, LOST, EMOTIONLESS and as fragile as the plaster statue that I was praying to.  I was a little boy at 21, trying to find his place in the world.

Instead, I succeeded in finding nothing but pain.

Our restaurant was floundering.  We had no back-up capital to float us through tough times, which these were, and my parents were throwing bad money into bad money by trying to help us.  My brother and I were on food stamps (now that is a laugh, owning a restaurant and being on FOOD stamps), and my wife was pregnant with our second child.  I almost don’t want to tell you that our newly fledged insurance salesman messed up our policy and didn’t give us pregnancy coverage, so after our second daughter was born, he had to pay for the hospital and doctor out of his own pocket.  Another disaster was the heavy Florida rains.  It had brought a flood into our restaurant.  We could not escape it for the parking lot was on a down slope and several inches of water flooded the restaurant forcing us to close for several days for repairs.  IT WAS ONE THING AFTER ANOTHER.

I was suffocating.  I was also in an ideological battle with my mother and brother over selling the restaurant.  They wanted to try to keep it open and I thought we should cut our losses and say enough is enough. So here was a wedge.  One that would take me about 10 years of heavy emotional wrestling to resolve, at least with my mother.   That point of woundedness was so big, and so hurtful.

Thanksgiving time, November 1980.

The restaurant finally was sold.  We got out for our debts and made nothing.  My brother and I were near penniless, and my parents were about $40,000 poorer.  I was devastated.  I was a failure.  I was disgusted and emotionally beaten from the struggle.   Without too much of an argument from my wife, we both thought that moving back to New York would be the best thing to do.  We were not crazy for Florida, and I was near what I would characterize as mental fatigue.  I felt as if I had been through a war and wanted to get away from the casualties.  My wife packed all our belongings up into a rented truck, and with one more child than we originally arrived with one and a half years before, moved back to New York.  That Thanksgiving, I took a picture of my mother with her face being cradled in her hands.  She had a soft smile on, but her face reflected the pain of a mother about to lose her second son again.

December 1980.  Welcome back to Long Island!  It is always great to be in New York.  One week after we arrived back, John Lennon was shot to death.  Yes, it was great to be back.

I was lucky.  No sooner did we get back from Florida, then 2 weeks later, I got a job as an Assistant Restaurant Manager.  My life would soon be changing forever.  I worked for a chain of Pizza-Italian style restaurants that were formerly Pizza Huts.  This was not a successful operation.  The owners were two garment manufacturers from New York City who decided to go into the restaurant business.  It was my break, because I helped them on menu development, and helped open several stores as well.  I finally made manager 6 months later!   Since we were a chain of stores, we carried some weight with the foodservice distributor that we dealt with.  My salesman was the Manager of the sales department of a local, small distributor.  He saw that there might be some bad writing on the wall and told me that if I ever wanted a job selling food, I could call him. 

After finding out that the company had no insurance coverage for any of the employees, I decided it was time to move on.  I started my first job as a food salesman in 1982.  By this time, my wife and I were renting a nice home out in the suburbs of Long Island.  Little did I know that something would be knocking at my heart that would change the course of my life permanently.

YOU MUST BE BORN AGAIN, AS THE BIBLE SAYS, OR YOU WILL NOT ENTER HEAVEN!  You’d better listen to me, or else you will not make it.  What??

What was this all about?  I had heard about this religious group, the Born-Again Christians.  Now I was working with one.  I will call him Bob.  Bob was a respected food salesman at the time, and I he was to mentor me so that he could teach me all he knew about selling.  Little did I know that religious education came with the deal.  Bob was an extremist in the greatest sense of the word.  He was very into his religion and so was his wife.  I would listen to these tapes that Bob had made of himself and his wife giving testimony about Jesus Christ in their lives.  It just was not chatter; it was ecstatic prophecy.  Crying, but joyful crying over the presence of Jesus in their lives.  They were born again by water and they were saved.

I was not.  They were and I was not, at least according to his gospel.  Even then, there seemed to be something askew with that attitude.  I am, you are not.  You must or else.  Demands to do something or else.  This was my first exposure to a fundamentalist approach to salvation.  The scary part was that I did not understand it, nor did I understand my OWN religion enough to be able to counter this threat.  I was clueless.  Yet, throughout the days of my sales training and religious indoctrination, I became increasingly uneasy.  It just did not seem right.  Day after day, I would be hit by Bob with, “Did you know that the Bible says .........., or that the Bible tells us to ...............”.  I was being thrown his interpretations of a book that I did not know the first thing about.  My own background and upbringing as a cradle Catholic and I was fundamentally ignorant myself.  Jesus WAS born in a manger, Jesus PERFORMED every miracle in the New Testament, and so on, word for word, story for story.

I was too bothered by all of this to just let it go.  I needed to find out more about this.   What was he talking about?  Would I lose heaven if I were not reborn?  What did it mean to be reborn anyway?  What did our religion say about it?  I had more questions than I had answers.  Looking back on it now, I realize that this was the start of my CONVERSION.  It is the point where you have so many questions in life and fewer answers.  It is the point where you want to know, you must know, what the basic truths are.  I loved Rod Steiger as Pontius Pilate in the movie, “Jesus of Nazareth“, where he rather disgustedly looks at Jesus and says, “What is the truth?”, as he was staring it right in the face.   We are looking for the truth all the time and yet at times we do not recognize it.  The bottom line is that we need to be at a point where we are looking for the truth, and we want the answers to those questions.  We need to be INQUIRING.  It shows an interest in that relationship, a relationship that is ours for the asking.  A relationship that is the most joyful and fulfilling in our lives.  A relationship with Jesus, our friend and savior.

I finally got to the point where I had made an appointment with the pastor of the parish church I was attending.  I cannot remember verbatim the entire conversation, but I can say that I came away with the answers I was looking for.  My pastor told me that I had experienced a rebirth myself by coming to him to discuss the matter.  My own comfort zone was shaken so to speak, and I needed some reassurance so that I myself would not be off chasing half-truths.  Perhaps we all have many spiritual rebirths in life, many re-awakenings, many “renasciamentos “, where we come to see the truth through the fog.  That very day, I came away from that rectory knowing that I had questions that needed to be answered, and my journey towards the truth started in earnest that very visit.  I would be asking questions from that point forward.  My need to KNOW became a strong focus in my life.  My wrestling with the possibilities of a potential relationship with this Jesus Christ became an ongoing interest.  I don’t know exactly what I said to my salesman friend, but suffice it to say that I told him that I was not interested in becoming “born-again“, and that I would be sticking with my own religion.  I also was not interested in being in the dark anymore.  Little did I understand it then, but I was expelled from the womb of complacency, and thrust into the world of religion.  The mustard seed was planted.  

I do not think that people would ever describe me as a wallflower.  Even when I try to shrink away from the crowds, people have always picked me out.  Perhaps it was my smile?  Perhaps it was my confident air?  Perhaps it was my size?  Perhaps it was because no matter what I tried to do, I always wound up conversing.  Perhaps even it was my sense of humor, my saving grace.  I always see the humor in any situation, even the direst.  A defense mechanism?  A way to NOT deal with the seriousness of a situation?  Perhaps.  I can tell you this, it is where the child in me resides.  The child that refuses to grow up, refuses to be an adult, refuses to live in a world that does not really play.

 

Play?  Yes, really play.  As adults, we call it pursuing our dreams.  As children, it was

playing pretend.  Jumping rope, not to be cardio vascularly correct, but just to enjoy jumping rope, and having fun doing it.  Playing with the girls.  Oh, I loved the girls when I was growing up.  We used to play (perhaps in 3rd grade) crush each other in the corner, where you would corner a person then a group would crush him.  Notice I said him, for this was a guy’s game.  Dodge ball too.  If you could not catch it, then you were out.  A test of will.  A test of strength.  However, after all of that was over, I then would try my hand at jumping rope with the girls, swinging on the swings, or just being.  Girls were particularly good at that, so it seemed.  They did not have to be constantly busy like the boys had to be. I somehow realized exceedingly early the distinct differences between boys and girls.  It was as if when I wanted to tone down and just relax, I would seek the company of the girls, and that pattern followed me as I was growing up.  It helped me get in touch with my own feminine side, which for a man might be his dark side, that side that we fear because it makes us less of a man.  With me though, I have found, especially as I matured, that being in touch with my feminine side has allowed me to experience life and God more fully.

1. We bought our first house. A modest three-bedroom ranch.  We paid only $43,000 for it.  Things were looking great.  My wife was busy working nights at her new job at the IRS and I was a night widower.  One of the first things we had to do was to enroll our oldest daughter in religious education (C.C.D.).  We lived close enough to a very countrified parish called St. John the Evangelist in Center Moriches, Long Island. 

It was here that I met a fireball of energy, who came in the form of our Director of Religious Education.  She was tireless.  She was involved.  She had a sense of what it meant to be church.  She respected the establishment, yet at times could question it.  I was about to be evangelized into the church, and neither she nor I would realize that this was what was happening.  God just sort of flows through you at times, and my heart was starting to be wonder about things and about HIM.

In 1984, a call went out for C.C.D. teachers in our parish.  I answered.  A call, an answer.  I signed up and went directly into teaching 4th grade students about God, the Bible and our Catholic religion on Saturday mornings for 1 hour.

What did I know that enabled me to teach children about our religion?  At that time, not much, but enough to share with them the goodness of the Lord, my own limited knowledge, and a good 4th grade book with an excellent teacher guide to all the lessons.  You see folks, I was not just teaching them, I was teaching myself too.

It was a quest to know and to share.  That has continued to this day.  INQUIRING and SHARING.  What a great way to penetrate God’s essence and discover HIM!

I was having a great time teaching 4th grader students.

 In 1985, our D.R.E. was looking for people to take over several vacant slots in the grade level coordinators, and I answered to that call to battle as the 4th grade coordinator.  Among the several things I wanted to see happen was consistent communication between all the teachers on this level, myself and our D.R.E.  Another thing I encouraged was getting the parents involved.  Religious education at this level was important to all members of the family, and I asked the other teachers if they wanted to have parent nights and also have parents available at the first class to see what it was we were offering to their children.  We could also do some educational sharing with the parents as well.  That went well, and I most of the teachers participated in that.  I also loved the idea of getting involved in the larger community, not only in America but the world.  Somewhere in my reading, I came across the Christian Foundation for Children.  I liked the idea of adopting a child in a needy country and supporting him/her through our efforts.  I brought this to the attention of our D.R.E. and she approved.  I ran it by my teachers as well and we all were aligned. 

So, what do you do to raise money?  Certainly, the

Impressum

Verlag: BookRix GmbH & Co. KG

Tag der Veröffentlichung: 04.12.2020
ISBN: 978-3-7487-6706-0

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Widmung:
Dedicated to my wife Lee who helped me journey back to the Mountaintop