Of Men and Mary Page 12

  In 1977, at age 54, I was asked to be the chaplain of the Blue Army, an association dedicated to following Mary’s requests of prayer and penance, when she appeared in Fatima, Portugal. For me, this was another sign of Mary’s benevolence toward this humble son of hers.

  After I had been a priest almost thirty years, my confidence in Mary had become strong, almost brash. An example of my extravagant trust in her is my first voyage to Medjugorje. It began with one of my trips home to Italy, when I had no sign of a call or chance to visit any of Mary’s shrines and only two weeks left of my visit. But after listening to a tape that a friend had given me on the alleged apparitions of the Blessed Virgin in Medjugorje, which had just begun a couple years earlier in 1981, I felt a peaceful desire to go. Knowing that I was gratifying the Blessed Mother, I rushed to the travel agency in Terni and asked for a pass for the ferry across the sea from Italy to Croatia. “What month?” the agent asked.

  “Tomorrow,” I replied.

  He laughed at me and said, “There are no openings for the next few months.”

  Sensing Mary would get me there, I said, “I have to return to the United States, and I can’t wait. Please try to contact the harbor agency where the ferry takes off.”

  He looked at me with a gently sarcastic smile and said, “No way. You can’t go tomorrow.” I insisted. Reluctantly, he phoned the office of the travel agency on the other side of Italy in Ancona, and their answer was puzzling, “Oh yes? A cancellation?” He hung up the phone and looked at me flabbergasted. I smiled back nonchalantly.

  Then, “Ouch!” I realized I had an American passport and would have to get a visa from the Yugoslavian consulate in Rome, the “eternal” city, where bureaucracy is synonymous with “forever.” I called the consulate in Rome, and a man on the end of the line said I’d need to present myself in person. Early the next morning, the son of a dear friend of mine, Edmondo, drove by my apartment, honked, and asked if I wanted to go to Rome with him. “You are a Godsend!” I called out to him. “I’m coming!”

  In an hour and a half, we traveled a hundred kilometers and reached the Yugoslavian consulate where lines were long. My friend, conscious of the situation, said, “I’ll be back later.”

  “No. Wait!” I responded. “I’ll be only a minute.” He smiled at me with pity and stayed.

  As I stood in an interminable line of about eighty people, I suddenly saw a consulate employee gesturing toward me to come to him. I boldly went forward to the window, where he asked, “Are you the American I talked to yesterday?”

  “Yes!” I yelped, and he stamped and signed my passport. I don’t even look American. If that wasn’t a miracle, nothing could be.

  I went back to my friend’s car after only five minutes, and he said, “I told you. It takes longer than . . .” I showed him the stamp in my passport. With a blank look, he started the vehicle.

  After a train ride back to Terni, I hopped into a borrowed car and sped to the harbor city of Ancona on the other side of Italy in order to catch a ferry the next day across the Adriatic Sea to the city of Split, Yugoslavia. It was the evening of Ferragosto, the fifteenth of August, a grand Italian holiday celebrating the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Every hotel along the Riviera was full. I convinced a woman behind the front desk of a good hotel, to give me a room for the night by threatening humorously to sleep under the couch in the foyer. “You wouldn’t want a poor priest lying in your lobby, would you?” With those words, she placed me in a room with peeling plaster and an impaired shower. Elated, I said, “Thank you! It’s perfect! I only take a shower once a year in the summer. And in winter, not as often.” She laughed.

  Relieved, I thought, “Thank God my major traveling difficulties are behind me.” But once on the boat, I realized I had only solved two-thirds of my problem. From Split to Medjugorje, I still didn’t have any reserved tickets or means of transportation. As I went to the boat’s refreshment stand, I happened to sit next to the driver of a Medjugorje pilgrimage bus, which happened to be full, and instinctively, I offered the man a beer. I told him my plight, and he said, “It is not up to me but to the leader of the pilgrimage.”

  So I looked for the head of the pilgrimage and asked him, “Can you take me with you?”

  He answered, “It is up to the bus driver.”

  I grinned and said, “It’s okay with him, if it’s okay with you.”

  The leader, looking half-embarrassed, half-annoyed, answered, “I guess it’s okay,” and I was on my way.

  I spent a glorious week exploring Medjugorje with curiosity and veneration, and I felt Mary’s sweet, peaceful presence there like nowhere else I’d been on earth—not even at her other pilgrimage sites. In her palpable embrace, I heard heartfelt confessions, lead prayers, witnessed miracles, and met with the seers. It gave me joy to join Mary’s people and to give thanksgiving to the Father who I believe is sending her to be with us in this special way in our lifetime. In fact, I felt so privileged and elated to be in Medjugorje that I returned there three more times.

  The events of my life, I have discovered, haven’t happened because of coincidence. As long as I have remained in God’s grace, Jesus’ hand has guided me providentially. All my joys and all my sufferings have been his will. In a diary entry of past years, I wrote:

  Jesus,

  Nobody surpasses you in generosity and in love . . . You did not ignore my torment because many times you saw me weep in the shade of your Tabernacle. But I never asked you for what you have now granted to me. You know what treasure is the heart of a creature called by the precious name of Mamma! You know it because this creature was close to you for thirty years in an intimacy as profound as it is unknown. And notwithstanding that every throb of your heart and every earthly breath would be for the heavenly Father, you loved her and rejoiced in her. Only your love for the Father was above your love for her. And when you had nothing else to give, you redeemed mankind from up there, from the height of the Cross, with a final effort, you gave your last and most precious treasure, your mother, Mary. “Behold, thy mother.”

  The greatest thing I ever did was to call out to Mary, at age twenty, when all the women in my life were killed in one instant. As I looked up to heaven and cried, “Now, you have to be my mom,” Jesus looked down from his high cross, and suffering with me, he shared with me his Mother. I am a happy priest today, and I owe it to the gift of Mary. I never could have imagined that the words the Lord gave me from my beloved Lea’s book would actually come true: “And if I take something good from you, it is to give you something better.” But he did. He did.

  FIVE

  CHRIS WATKINS

  Lost Belongings

  “YOU’RE A MIRACLE!” exclaimed a religious sister during a retreat I attended in my hometown of Christchurch in New Zealand. She gazed at me with astonishment after listening intently as I raked through the messy beginnings, the unstable childhood, and the self-destructive tendencies of my teens and twenties. Naturally, though, I sidestepped any revelations about my secret self.

  Not that I am reluctant to discuss this facet of my personality. It just seemed irrelevant at the time, an unnecessary wandering into that dense thicket of brambles. See, for the best part of fifty years, I have battled with strong feelings of attraction to members of my own sex.

  Again and again, throughout my life, I have agonized with the “why?” of this condition. Am I drawn to the male form and masculine presence because of a primarily absent father who, even when he was present, was still distant and never interacted playfully with me? Nowadays, I look with fondness at my three-year-old grandson having a rough and tumble with his father—my second eldest son, and quietly wonder about my own life. If I had enjoyed this same essential element of male-to-male contact in my childhood with my own father, would I have turned out differently, or would I still have been besieged by these ever-present desires and needs?

  A baby’s gender was unknown until birth in those days when scanners had yet to be invented
, but I understand that during my mother’s pregnancy her husband was constantly saying he hoped I was a girl. They already had a son, so his picture-perfect ideal was a “one boy one girl” family. Some experts in spiritual healing speculate that the sins and stresses of parents can have a psychological impact upon a baby in the womb; expressed thoughts and desires during pre-birth formation can even affect gender identification. I am left wondering about that, too, with gender confusion playing such a large part in my early years.

  My very existence began in clandestine circumstances. I was the by-product of an adulterous affair several years after World War II ended. My father was married, so was my mother—and not to each other. To make matters even more complicated, my mother was the wife of my father’s best friend. In the indiscretion of it all, I was almost aborted, if my father’s story can be believed. There was a period of my early life when I wished this had indeed been my fate. When I was barely two weeks old, my mother handed me over to Dad who was living alone, and he adopted me, legally changing the name on my birth certificate from my mother’s surname to his.

  Looking back now, I am grateful that I never grew up in my mother’s home. She gave me up at two weeks old, and I harbored a fathomless and unacknowledged rage over this for forty years. Additionally, the sight of me would have been a constant reminder to her husband of his wife’s infidelity and the betrayal he suffered not only from her but from his closest mate, my father. It could well have been an unbearable childhood.

  The reality of bringing up a child by himself soon overwhelmed my father’s good intentions. He found it impossible to raise me with live-in housekeepers who came and went, so he, too, gave me up, and I became the Hand-Me-Down Kid. Before I turned ten years old, I had gone through five foster homes. All the stand-in mummies and daddies who offered to care for me soon found that this child who looked the picture of an angel was actually a problem child, a real handful. For no reason ever properly explained to me, I was hurriedly shuffled sideways to new pastures.

  In my innocence, while thrown from pillar to post, I was oblivious that my childhood was quite abnormal. From time to time, though, I would wake up sobbing in the middle of the night for no apparent reason. Questioned why I was crying, I couldn’t explain.

  By the time I was a teenager, I was repeatedly accused of being sullen or moody, but really, I had trouble verbalizing my thoughts and recognizing feelings. I had learned to burrow away inside myself because adults did not like the real me when I let him out. Depression, like a menacing “black dog,” as Winston Churchill used to call it, became my deadliest enemy through adolescence, prowling around me with frequent notions of ending it all.

  Three bright spots, thankfully, lit up the darkness of those difficult years. The first was an art teacher who discovered my hidden talents and nominated me for an Art Scholarship while giving me private tutoring at his home on the weekends. The second was my greatest form of escapism, acting in the theatre, something I had done since the tender age of eight through to my teens at a high school drama club. The third bright spot, which saved me from abject loneliness, was a special friendship with a very macho boy who lived around the corner from my home.

  Yes, Tony was macho, but he continually revealed a softer more affectionate side of his nature as our friendship blossomed. He would often boast, “Chris and I go everywhere together; we are inseparable!” And in time, I grew close not only to him but his large Catholic family as well. His mother took a real liking to me and treated me as her “other son.” While Tony was three years my junior, he was somehow older and wiser than my sixteen years, and especially mature in the ways of the world. He was solid, blond-haired, of Swedish descent, and had the looks to go with the personality. I copied his careful sense of dress, his hair style, his pride in his appearance, and he coached me in his methods of picking up girls at discos with sweet-talk and funny lines. I had several girlfriends. But I was play-acting again. It was him whom I adored. I thrived in Tony’s company, felt so relaxed and comfortable with him, as we opened our hearts to one another, talking about the most private things, joking and being silly, too. I loved being crammed into the couch next to him, our limbs touching, and the warmth of his presence communicating physically. His mum would often tease us with a kind laugh: “I think you two are in love with each other.”

  Definitely, by my late teens, I was on a quest for love and security, anxious to get married and settle down. Top priority was a special connection, like I had with Tony, but with a young woman, a soul mate to share the rest of my life. Weddings and happily ever after—that was the social norm in 1968. I’d heard all those wry comments about men in their thirties who were still unmarried and “real Mummy’s boys.” That definitely was not my future—not that I entirely understood what was suggested there. Such issues were never openly discussed.

  When I met Anna around this period of my life, I knew she was the one. By the time I was twenty-two, there were wedding bells; she was only nineteen, a diminutive red-head with a delicious, earthy sense of humor, a creative artistic spirit, coupled with a wisdom and sophistication beyond her years, the product of a convent upbringing. As with Tony, I could explore anything and everything in our conversations. Time froze when we were together. I was truly smitten.

  Once it was known that our relationship was serious and our engagement became official, I was readily absorbed into Anna’s large Catholic family circle with great warmth. Wedded bliss, however, went out the window within months for me. Marriage opened a can of writhing worms, with unimagined difficulties surfacing on every front. I had no idea how to cultivate the emotional intimacy necessary for a happy union with a spouse. I had everything I had ever dreamt of, and now something inside me was pushing it all away. I was suffocating: feeling lost at sea in suburbia, overwhelmed by the expectations and pressures in this new role I had taken on, hemmed in by in-laws on all sides. That’s when I started sinking, the black dog locking its teeth into me and dragging me under again.

  My twenties became a decade of turmoil. Within the first year of our marriage, my new wife began attending a Bible study and prayer group, and then she returned to regular Mass. I reacted badly. Her sudden churchgoing offended my “free thinking.” I had thought she was unbound by convention, like I was, not a “victim of the narrow, oppressive, simplistic views” of a belief system that I had gladly abandoned at age thirteen. Yes, I had agreed to get married in the Catholic Church to please Anna and especially her mother, whom I really respected, but I remember sitting through the marriage instruction course, thinking it was one big intellectual yawn. I couldn’t believe that people still subscribed to such antiquated ideas and superstitions—the endless thee’s and thou’s and thou shalt not’s of Christianity were a hangover from the medieval era, no longer relevant to everyday life in the swinging 1970s! And when I learned that Catholics believe the consecrated bread and wine to be the REAL Body and Blood of Christ, I was both shocked and amused: these people practice cannibalism, I blinked.

  Anna’s decision to take her faith more seriously became my own personal challenge. Christianity was just a little too simple and obvious. I was determined to undermine her efforts. I was a truth-seeker, but I wanted to find my own answers. Before long I was visiting psychics and embroiled in all manner of occult research, Eastern mysticism, reincarnation, UFO culture, everything we now call New Age teachings.

  The aftermath of my spiritual dabbling was a depression of such unimaginable depths that I believed I would never recover. There was only one way I could see to end this abyss of gloom. As if in a trance, I walked to the nearest pharmacy one morning, bought a large capsule of sleeping tablets, went home and quickly downed all of them.

  Anna had an inexplicable, but urgent, compulsion that morning to desert her workplace and drive home. After finding me unconscious, she leapt a six-foot fence—unexplainable again—to use a neighbor’s phone. In the hospital, my stomach was pumped, and I found myself back in the grey vacuum of nothingnes
s I had been trying to escape from, with the further discomfort of a psychiatrist probing me: “You have only been married a short time, you should be radiantly happy. Why aren’t you?” With surly, youthful arrogance, I muttered, “I dunno. You tell me. That’s your job isn’t it?” The nursing staff had no time for me, treating me like rubbish. If he wants to die, then let him die, was their attitude, adding to my burden of worthlessness. I was discharged from the hospital with a prescription of antidepressants, which made me feel even more alienated and disconnected. This was compounded by regular rounds of electric shock treatments, leaving me dazed and confused.

  Was it any wonder that several months later, I gulped down mouthfuls of the prescribed medication with as many sleeping tablets as I could physically stomach? This induced a massive stroke. Fortunately for me, I was in the hospital when the stroke occurred, and doctors were able to act immediately. I almost died, was considered beyond help, the slim chance of recovery meaning permanent damage. Vaguely, I recall searing white clinical lights and my stumbling about on a walking frame to get my legs functioning again. Little did I know that my wife’s family and friends were down at the local church praying the Rosary in great earnest.

  Having miraculously survived two serious suicide bids, I emerged from all this with a strong realization that something—or possibly Somebody?—valued my existence. Perhaps there was a God, after all, who cared about me, and who had saved me. My best friend at the time said, “You’ve fallen as far as you can go. When you hit the bottom, there’s only one way to go, that’s up!” Those words comforted me. With renewed determination, I tossed all my remaining antidepressant tablets down the toilet, picked up the pieces, and got on with life.