For What It's Worth

My actual life is a fact, in view of which I have no occasion to congratulate myself; but for my faith and aspiration I have respect. It is from these that I speak. - Thoreau

It is said that confession is good for the soul.  Some of what I’m about to tell you may be difficult to believe.  My parents were basically good, decent, God-fearing people but life and circumstances had extracted an expensive toll from them and thus they thought themselves unworthy and never really learned to love themselves and likewise neither have I ever learned to love myself.  My mother was the oldest of five children in French speaking Quebec, Canada.  When she was nine years old, her mother got up one morning and dropped dead from a heart attack leaving her father with five children to care for.  The other children were very young and didn’t fully understand what was happening at the time but being the oldest at nine, my mother understood the awful, difficult and sad situation all too well.  Her father worked for a paper company and would frequently be away from home.  His job entailed going out into the woods and estimating how much timber could be harvested.

At first, he would leave the children with relatives and friends to be looked after but that was not a good long-term solution.  Eventually he sent them off to a Catholic Boarding School.  My mother was essentially raised by nuns.  I don’t know if the nuns were ever abusive to her or any of the other children but I suspect that they did sometimes hit children as a disciplinary matter.  She was angry at having lost her mother, didn’t want to be there and became very rebellious.  Emotionally, inside she would remain nine years old for the rest of her life.  When the nuns would try to discipline her or tell her what to do she would say, “I don’t have to listen to you, you’re not my mother.”  She would spend the rest of her life mourning the loss of her mother and craving and searching for the affection that only a mother can give a daughter.  Her father became a chain-smoking alcoholic as did her youngest sister.

My father was the fifth child of eight born to uneducated, Italian immigrants who spoke mostly Italian along with broken English.  They were very poor and endured much hardship.  Shortly after my father graduated from High School he was drafted during World War II and enlisted in the Marine Corps.  When he returned from the war he had hopes of going to college on the GI Bill but his father passed away in his early sixties from complications related to diabetes and he went to work to support his mother and the two youngest who were now adults but still living at home.  He tried taking some college classes at night after work but it was too much to handle with working full time and trying to be the man of the house.  He mostly acted and spoke like a victim, as though the whole world, life and the stars had conspired against him.  His glass was always half empty.

He met my mother; they married, bought a house and settled down.  My older brother was born and nearly three years later I came along.  We lived in a tiny, three-bedroom house and my mother had my brother and me share a room and sleep in the same bed.  Among my earliest memories in life, my mother would give my brother and me a bath in the evening, dress us in our pajamas and put us to bed.  Being young boys, my brother and I would sometimes stay up talking and playing with our toys.  My mother would be lying on the couch in the adjacent living room watching TV.  After a while, she would yell for us to be quiet and go to sleep.  If we did not, she would sometimes come in and start whipping us with an old leather belt that she kept hanging on a nail in the side of one of the counters in the kitchen.  We would scream and try to stop her from lifting up the covers.  Sometimes we would try to run out of the bedroom and get away but she would usually follow us and continue the whipping.  I would often have red marks on my skin which I would later try to hide when we went to school.

I remember that sometimes she would come into the bedroom and whip us even though we hadn’t done anything, weren’t talking, weren’t up playing with toys or making noise.  I didn’t understand why we were sometimes being hit for no reason.  “This isn’t right”; I would think to myself, “Something is wrong here. “Sometimes my father would yell from his recliner in the living room for her to stop it and leave us alone.  “Don’t you think they’ve had enough?” he would sometimes say but he would never get up out of his chair and do anything about it.  He was probably too tired from working and being on his feet all day as a shipping clerk for a a company that made plumbing and heating valves.  They would often argue and I would think to myself, “Why doesn’t he stop her from doing this to us?”

It was during this time that I became distrustful of the two of them, particularly her. Between fits of anger, she was always in bed with black rosary beads tucked underneath her pillow.  She was a hoarder and our house was full of stuff that would just sit there collecting dust.  She almost never cleaned and wouldn’t allow us to clean or touch anything without her permission.  Later when I got my own room, I would wait for her to leave the house so that I could clean it.  When she came home it was like she had a sixth sense and could tell that something had changed or been moved and wasn’t “right”.

It was uncomfortable living in a house with so much anger and depression and there always seemed to be tension in the air.  They would argue about anything and everything.  They would have lengthy arguments about whether a window shade should be up or down.  It was during this time that I sought God before any formal knowledge of him or any Sunday school learning.   This continued until my brother and I grew too big for her to hit us any longer.  I would pray to God for help, understanding and protection.  Without realizing it, I had made God my best friend and constant companion.  He was always with me, by my side, and I would talk to him and try to imagine what he was like and what he looked like.  I took comfort and refuge in him.  Later, we would attend Catholic Mass weekly and CCD.  We were also confirmed.  We never had a bible in the house but I loved hearing scripture readings at Mass and in my Sunday school and CCD books.  I would imagine what it was like when the blind man saw, the lame man walked and lepers were cleansed.  I think it was around the time of confirmation when we were given a bible.

 

When I was about seven or eight years old, my father told my mother that he wanted to invite all of his brothers and sisters along with their families over to our house for a cookout in our yard.  My mother was adamant that she did not want this to happen.  Almost no one ever came to our house.  They argued about it for some time.  My mother said that if he went through with it, she would not be there.  The day of the planned cookout came and my father started getting things ready.  My brother had taken off and true to her word my mother got in the car and left.  I didn’t know if she was ever coming back.  I tried to help my father as best I could but I was young and afraid when all of these people I had rarely seen, almost never at our house, started showing up.  I remember guests kept asking me, “Where’s your mother?”  I was uncomfortable and didn’t know what to say.  I couldn’t tell them the truth.  I was forced to lie; I would answer that she had to go out or that I didn’t know.  To this day, I am very uncomfortable and uneasy in social settings.

When the cookout was over and all the guests had left, my mother returned as my father and I were finishing cleaning up and putting things away.  My parents argued and yelled at each other.  My father asked my mother if it was over.  My mother mocked him like a little child.  To my horror, my father slapped her across the face in front of me.  After that, my mother started smoking cigarettes and they didn’t speak to each other for a very long time.  I was very afraid and didn’t know what it all meant or what was going to happen.  I remember thinking, “If they split up, what happens to me?  Where and with whom do I go?”  Things were never the same in our house after that and there was always an uncomfortable, unresolved tension in the air.

When I was eleven years old, my mother got me a newspaper route in a neighborhood that was a little over a mile from our house.  At the time, one had to be twelve or older for a paper route but my mother lied and told the man in charge that I was twelve.  So, every day after school I would walk a little over a mile to another neighborhood, deliver about fifty newspapers and then walk back home.  All during this time, I would talk with God to help me through.  He was my faithful companion through rain, snow, sleet, cold and heat.  I would talk to him about life, the world and things that I was experiencing both good and bad.  Again, without realizing it, I was forming an unbreakable lifelong bond that would prove invaluable.

My mother eventually put my brother and me in separate bedrooms.  I saved my paper route money and bought a stereo with headphones.  Music became another refuge for me.   My father never made much money and we almost never went to stores other than the grocery store.  I bought a ten-speed bike and started going around.  They built a mall in my town.  I would ride my bike there and go in all the stores and look at all the things that were there.  During this time my brother started hanging around with a different group of kids.  They wore leather jackets, smoked and drank.  I had rarely heard curse words but they spoke with them a lot.  I didn’t understand them but something about it didn’t feel good or right.  It wasn’t too long afterwards that my brother started coming home drunk and high.  He and my mother would argue.   By this time, I had my own bedroom and would go there and put on my headphones and listen to music.

When I graduated from High School, I disliked myself so much that I refused to have my picture taken for the yearbook.  Following graduation, I enlisted in the Marine Corps to get out of our house for a while.  Eventually I put myself through college (a Catholic College founded by the Augustinians) with saved paper route money and working odd jobs and embarked on a successful career as a software engineer.  I bought a house and married.  I remember when I came home and told my mother that I had gotten engaged, she wouldn’t talk to me for quite some time.  My wife’s family had left the Catholic faith and had been attending Boston Christian Assembly, a Pentecostal church.  My wife would tell of how growing up, her mother would make her wear a dress and attend church when she would rather have been smoking cigarettes and riding dirt bikes with her cousins.  At first, after we got married, we didn’t attend church at all.  I remember thinking how important a strong religious upbringing would be when our sons were born.  I had our sons baptized and we started attending church together as a family but it soon became apparent that my wife wasn’t interested in a faith life and we stopped attending.

I was very good at my work but never stayed with any company very long.  I was impulsive and never satisfied as I kept job hopping.  I would always find a reason to quit but you can’t run from yourself.   I eventually realized that I could never stay anywhere for very long so I became an independent contractor and would take work on a temporary basis.  My parents were aging and starting to fail and I found myself thinking a lot about them and how I had grown up.  At holidays, we would visit my parents and bring their favorite foods.  Usually, it would end in an argument between my parents.  Things had gotten so bad that they could not even be in the same room together for very long.  Eventually I could no longer work anywhere.  I seemed to keep falling into depressions.  I would brush and floss my teeth very hard causing my gums to bleed much like people you’ve maybe heard about who cut themselves.

Soon I could no longer eat and would get soaking wet night sweats with a strange odor.  I went to the doctor and they tested me for all kinds of cancers and couldn’t find anything.  This went on for about two weeks.  Bone marrow was the last test as they drilled into my hip, still finding nothing.  During this time, I lost over 40 pounds.  I was admitted to the hospital.  They threaded a camera up inside of me and found cysts on my spleen and damage to one of my heart valves.   I had an infection called Endocarditis which is usually associated with drug users who use needles.  I had a Staph and Strep infection from making my mouth bleed all the time.  They rushed me to Mass General hospital by ambulance.  They said they were going to remove my spleen.  I asked the doctor if there was any way they could try to save it.  The doctor said that they could try to drain the cysts with a needle and hope for it to heal.

That night as I lay in my hospital bed, I was terrified at the thought of facing death.  I began crying, praying and calling out to God for help.  To this day, I don’t know if it was real or in my head but as I looked at the wall in my room, I saw an image of Jesus with a crown of thorns on his head.  He looked at me reassuringly and said, “Remember what I went through, have faith and I will deliver you from this for my glory.”  Not long after that the hospital Chaplain unexpectedly stopped in and prayed for me.  Afterwards I felt a strange inner peace and was no longer afraid.  In fact, I remember thinking to myself, "I'm ready Lord, come what may."

The next morning, they wheeled me down and with the aid of ultrasound inserted a needle through my side into the largest cyst on my spleen.   Unexpectedly, the cyst popped and flooded my body with infected fluid.  People came running from all over as I silently prayed to god for forgiveness and mercy before I blacked out.  I woke up several days later in intensive care connected to all kinds of things.  They had removed my spleen.  I was on round the clock antibiotics for about a month.  Eventually they sent me home where I had to continue antibiotics for another month through a line in my upper arm with which to connect the antibiotics.

I recovered from all of that but then started having heart problems.  I couldn’t lie down flat and had to sleep sitting up.  I could barely walk and had to hold onto walls.  My heart valve was failing.  My wife drove me back to Mass General Hospital.  I had open heart surgery to replace my heart valve.  I was given a choice between a pig valve and an artificial valve.  Being still fairly young, I chose the artificial valve despite having to take blood thinners and have my blood checked monthly for the rest of my life.  I wouldn’t have had to take blood thinners with a pig valve but those only last so long and eventually need to be replaced.  They started giving me a blood thinner called Heparin which between .2% and 5% of all people are allergic to.  I turned out to be allergic to it and I developed blood clots all over my body.  My legs, feet, arms and hands swelled to two and three times their normal size.  After a short time, all the blood clots dissolved and disappeared with the exception of one in my left leg which is still there, causing my leg to often swell particularly in warm weather.

Most people have one or maybe two patient books about them in the hospital.  When I left, I had four books and when I left the nurses and doctors were amazed that I had survived everything.  I recovered from the heart valve replacement and not too long after fell into a deep depression.  I could barely get out of bed for two weeks.  My mother and brother came to my house and took me to my parent’s house to stay with them.  Living with my parents again triggered a lot of unpleasant childhood memories.  I started going in and out of hospitals for mental health reasons.  I could no longer live with my parents and became homeless.  I started bouncing around different cities in and out of homeless shelters and hospitals.  I was eventually diagnosed as being bipolar or having a mood/personality disorder related to epilepsy along with the environment in which I had grown up - a sort of double whammy if you will.  It was genetic on my father’s side of the family.  There was a lot of depression and one of my cousins was fully epileptic.  I began taking medications and spent over a year going to therapy to discuss my past.

During all of this time I continued going to church wherever I happened to be, even the Salvation Army.  I lived at the Lowell Homeless Shelter for a while.  One day they told me that I could only stay for two more weeks and would have to leave.  I didn’t believe them but after two weeks went by, I tried to check in one afternoon and they wouldn’t let me in.  It was just before Christmas; it was cold but there hadn’t been any snow yet.  I went to the Catholic Church I had been attending and laid down under a bush.  The ground was hard, it was cold and I couldn’t sleep so I thought that walking around was best.  I didn’t know how I would make it through the night.  I kept walking around, ducking into any unlocked building entranceway especially if it was heated.  I was afraid to stay in any of them for too long for fear of being noticed so I kept moving from one to another.  I kept praying to God all night asking him to get me through the night and not leave me.  I made it through that night with God’s help and in the morning, I went into a coffee shop downtown when it opened.  That morning I saw the most beautiful sunrise I had ever seen. I would never have made it through that night if not for God.  He had truly been faithful.

I lived in the homeless shelter rooming house in Lynn for over four years.  It is an old Hotel from the early 1900’s that had caught fire and was taken over by the Shelter Association.  Residents share bathrooms and a single kitchen.  I lived with hardcore drug addicts, alcoholics and other people with mental illnesses.  Many of the younger, female addicts would prostitute themselves in order to buy drugs.  It was during this time that God really began working in my life and my faith really grew as he showed me the truth unequivocally.  Every day I would walk to the park by the water to be alone with God.  I would cry out to him as to why he was allowing these things to happen to me.  “Where are you?” I would call out, “Why don’t you help me?”  “Why are these things happening to me?”  “Why have you forsaken me?”  Well, it soon became clear why.

It was around this time that I met Brian.  Brian was a homeless man with Asperger’s Syndrome who had dropped out of college because he had come down with juvenile diabetes.  He was quite intelligent but he couldn’t deal with what had befallen him and become an alcoholic.  He either blamed God for what had happened to him or had come to the conclusion that there was no God because he thought that a loving God would never allow such things to happen.  Brian found out that I was a Christian and would verbally attack me and my faith.  For the first time in my life, I found myself defending God and believe me when I tell you that it felt good.  It was so liberating.  I was beginning to see who I really was but had always been too afraid to be.   For whatever he came at me with, I had an answer for him from the bible.  It was at this time that I spent a lot of time reading Job and gaining understanding.  Brian was then diagnosed with Crohn’s disease and was told that he would eventually need a colostomy.  Brian started drinking very heavily and passed away from not monitoring his diabetes and not administering proper doses of insulin.  I watched him going downhill.

            

I had always been a believer but I would waver back and forth as I was pulled in different directions between God and the world.  I always seemed to be caught in a tug of war.  I always knew what was right but I kept wrestling with being a fully committed Christian.  When the chips were down it often seemed that I would choose the world’s way over God’s even though I knew better.  I would sometimes think to myself that being a Christian meant being a sucker and allowing the world and other people to walk all over me.  I would think of the Romans feeding Christians to the lions.  It comes down to a matter of faith and courage.  Anything of value has an associated cost.  There is a cost to being a Christian - one must forego much of what the world deems acceptable.  As Jesus said, "If the world hates you keep in mind that it hated me first.  If you belonged to the world, it would love you as its.” along with “Pick up your cross and follow me.”

It was during this time living in the rooming house when God showed me that we are all brothers and sisters and we are all one step away from humility.  I began forming friendships and helping people.  I would bring food from the soup kitchen across the street to those who were too sick to make it there themselves.  I would listen to their stories and try to help them any way that I could.  I would imagine myself in each of their situations.  I became friends with Mike, an alcoholic from Lexington who had been adopted.  He liked to come to my room and watch Star Trek.  I loved Mike like a brother and tried to help him but he had been drinking, hanging out in bars and fighting since he was fourteen and wasn’t about to stop at sixty.  I watched quite a few people die.  During this time, God met all of my needs time after time in the most unusual ways.  I started working with a local church doing outreach.  I would drive the church van and pick up people at the homeless shelter and around the city and take them to church where a breakfast was served before the service.  I would pick up donated food from local eateries and help serve it.

Diane was an older woman who had been smoking for a long time, was on a breathing tank and had trouble making the stairs in the shelter rooming house where we lived.  I loved her like a sister.  I would bring her meals from the soup kitchen across the street and knock on her door.  She would sometimes yell through the door for me to bring it in.  Other times she might not answer so I would hang the bag with her meal on the doorknob and leave.  One night she didn’t answer so I hung the meal on the door and left.  The following day, she was found dead in her room.  She had apparently taken an opioid pain pill that one of the younger girl’s had given her and gotten from someone off the street.  The pill turned out to be laced with fentanyl and killed her from overdose.

There was a pizza shop near the rooming house that I would pass by every day.  One day I said to myself, “It sure would be great to have a pizza.”  The next day I was walking and on top of a trash can at an apartment building across the street from the pizza shop were three whole, untouched boxes of pizza from that pizza shop.  God is faithful indeed.   I had more than my fill of one and brought the rest back to the rooming house to share with others.  Another time I was in need of cookware for use in the rooming house shared kitchen.  One day I was passing by a dead-end alleyway where addicts sometimes slept and hung out and there was a box of brand new cookware just sitting there untouched in a box.

 

There was also a store that I would often pass by that sold sneakers and sportswear. Almost all of the sneakers were well over $100.  I would think to myself, “It sure would be great to have a pair of those sneakers.  Soon after that, I was walking through the parking lot of the apartment building where I had found the pizzas and the cookware in the alleyway and there was a practically brand new pair of expensive sneakers (probably from that store) just sitting on the ground in the parking lot.  There was dog excrement all over the bottoms of them and they had been left there.  I took them back to the rooming house with me and washed them.  To this day, whenever I wear them, I am reminded that Christ takes soiled, discarded things like us and makes them clean again.

There was a female addict at the Rooming House to whom I had lent $32.  She paid me back $5 and said that she would pay back the rest a little bit at a time each month.  She never paid back any more of it.  Around this time, I was walking through the nearby shopping plaza and as I stopped to throw something in the trash, I saw a $20 bill in the trash can.  Soon after that I was walking through the parking lot of the park by the water where I went every day and there was a $20 bill on the ground by the curb.  I had more than recovered the money that was owed to me.  Once again, God had my back.

 

At the end of the winter of 2021-2022 I was really wrestling with life and my faith and came to the conclusion that I needed to make a choice.  I either needed to give up on life and trying to be a lukewarm Christian or go all in once and for all and stop wavering.  After everything that I had experienced through God, I made the decision to go all in and follow God no matter.  I also needed to forgive my mother, father, brother and myself.  As someone recently told me, we need to forgive but that doesn’t mean that we have to forget.  Almost immediately after coming to this decision in late February or early March we had a small, slushy snow storm.  I was walking through the bus station one day.  There was a man who worked for the transit authority shoveling snow and salting where people got off and boarded buses.  I didn’t know him and had never seen him before.  As I was passing by him, he suddenly turned to me and began cursing at me.  He said he wanted to kill me.  His face changed, it became twisted and grotesque like some sort of demon.  He threw snow at me with his shovel and kept saying that he wanted me dead.  To this day I think it was the devil angry at the commitment I had made to stick with God, forever, no matter.

During this time, I also came to realize how critical a relationship with God is for each of us.  I had lost my marriage, wife, children, house, job, money, health and almost my life but I still had the most important thing of all that could never be taken from me - a relationship with God.  I was the only one at the Rooming House attending church and clinging to God.  Most of the others had turned to drugs or alcohol which only made their problems worse.  Our having a relationship with him is what he intended from the very beginning but our sin separated us and accepting Christ is the only way to make it right again.

My favorite writer is Henry David Thoreau who lived not far from here in Concord in the 1800’s.  Many people simply know him as the Walden Pond guy.  He was part of a philosophical movement called Transcendentalism.  They believed that God transcends (that is speaks to us) through nature and all of us, his creation and that everything and everyone is inherently good.  It was the doctrine of the Unitarian Church and closely related to what was being taught at Harvard Divinity School at the time.  He wrote that, “It is only by forgetting yourself that you draw near to God”, “The unconsciousness of man is the consciousness of God” and “It is not when I am going to meet him, but when I am just turning away and leaving him alone, that I discover what God is.  I say God.  I am not sure that that is the name.  You will know what I mean.”   He went on to write, “If nature is our mother then God is our father.” and “When you knock, ask to see God, none of the servants.”  “Things do not change, we change.” he observantly wrote.  After everything God has done for me not to mention sacrificing his son for me, I think that the least I can do for him is to give up my will for his.  Call me crazy.  Just because we’re in this world doesn’t mean that we must conform to it.  From now on I’m all in, no matter, forever.  I’ll choose God any day of the week and twice on Sunday.  As Thoreau wrote, “It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see. The smallest seed of faith is worth more than the largest fruit of happiness.”  - a truth I 've lived and know all too well.

Author's Note

"Though I do not believe that a plant will spring up where no seed has been, I have great faith in a seed... Convince me that you have a seed there, and I am prepared to expect wonders." - Thoreau

Reviews

[Sami Khalil]

A great story of your upbringing, your ups and downs, your changing perspectives on life, nature and God eventually.
It was a gripping story; I felt for you and your family.
I'm so happy and relieved you found your identity.
I came from a different faith( we are still friends, brothers and sisters); had lots of ups and downs like you; I can emphasize with everything you mentioned.
May God keep you blessed and keep your blessings on others.

[Pete]

we never know what life will bring. we each play the hands we are dealt the best way that we know and hope for the best but must accept the worst sometimes. i learned that hope is key. thank you for sharing thoughts - it is appreciated ... :)

[Sami Khalil]

Wow! All true and well articulated. Thank you for sharing. You are welcome.

[Dave Brown]

After going through all that you deserve a bit of happiness.
I don't believe in God but I admire the fact that your belief in him has helped you through that morass of life's hardships and that somehow, you seem to have retained a healthy dose of humor through it all.
I'd say that now, the only way is up,
Take care.

[Pete]

thank you dave, i appreciate your thoughts. yes it would be nice to be heading up for a change. sometimes i can laugh now but not so when everything came crashing down on me ... :)