Of Men and Mary Page 15

  I see evidence of God’s presence and providence, signs of his infinite care and attention in so many details of my day-to-day life, and therefore I feel a security and contentment I’ve never known before. My house is built solidly on the Rock, which is Christ and the foundation of the Church given to Saint Peter. I start every day thanking Jesus for so many, many things. “What return can I make to the Lord for all that he gives me?” (Psalm 115:12).

  Prayer has a special priority for me. I mean, spending time with the one you love is so important, so I get up early and sit for an hour in the company of Jesus before the day begins, and several times a week I try to make a Holy Hour of adoration along with Mass.

  Mary also occupies a special place in my heart as my spiritual Mother, and in following the guidelines laid down by her at Medjugorje, I’m invested with the armory needed to keep me constant in faithfulness and chastity: I pray the Rosary daily, study the Scriptures, go to regular Confession (weekly now), receive Jesus in Holy Communion frequently, and I fast two days a week. Most months, I keep the First Saturday devotions requested at Fatima.

  In recent times, I was able to satisfy a burning desire to make pilgrimages to holy sites in honor of Our Blessed Mother: first to Fatima and Garabandal, then Lourdes, and finally to Medjugorje, where I received a calling to the Franciscan Order. Two years after returning home, I was professed as a Lay Franciscan.

  Today, my children are all adults and successful in their chosen fields. I recall Nathan reassuring me several years ago, “I know you worry, Dad, but all your kids love you very much.” Maybe the steady foundation we had together, when all four children were young, has helped enormously. Back then I spent so much time initiating entertainment, taking them trekking and camping overnight, going to football with the three boys, doing fun things together, hardly ever missing my nightly bedtime round of reading to each child individually. Since the marriage break-up, I have always tried to be supportive in their lives and activities. When the youngest of my sons experimented with drugs in his late teens, I was able to be there with him every day of his recovery program and through his ongoing difficulties, which has made us very close. Now there are four delightful grandchildren who bring added pleasure as the family circle widens.

  As for Anna and me, we maintain a good relationship. I can still hear her saying to the family-court counselor during our formal separation, “Part of the sadness of parting, for me, is that I will lose my best friend.” Twenty-eight years have intervened since that painful period, and time has done wonders for both of us. The fact that we have always communicated well, kept in touch as the children grew up, has helped in the process I’m sure. We have long chats fairly frequently, heart to heart, eye to eye, about matters of paramount concern as well as the laughable peculiarities of the world and human nature.

  Like Saint Paul, I can say, “Although I have been a blasphemer, a persecutor and a rabid enemy, he took mercy on me because I did not know what I was doing when I opposed the faith” (Timothy 1:12-13). The bramble thicket, that area of my psyche I have continuously wrestled with, guards me against the danger of spiritual pride, and I am the freest I’ve ever been—no longer governed by my body’s appetites, no longer weighed down by secrets, old baggage or guilt. The profoundly destructive effects of rejection, which got me into so much trouble in the past, the craving for love and a need to belong, don’t snare me in their sticky webs. The old black dog has been chained for two decades and no longer overshadows my thoughts and spirit.

  I am nearing seventy now, and the Lord has kept me fairly youthful in spirit and body. Since I surrendered fully to Him, He has lavished extraordinary graces to help with my decision for chastity and has fostered a stability in me I could never have imagined. I look back at all the lives which used to be me—several lifetimes, really, and I marvel at how mightily I have been blessed, how I have been transformed by an ever-deepening intimacy with the God of love who is as close to me as my own heart. In him, I belong.

  Amazingly, a personal prophecy was given to me several years ago by a friend: “The Lord is giving back to you the years the locusts have devoured” (Joel 2:25). That time is now.

  SIX

  DEACON DAVID LEATHERBY

  Marital Hell to Marian Bliss

  EVERYTHING CHANGED FOR US when my father, David Leatherby (I’m his namesake), got a new job in California and met his new boss. Burt Bride was his name, and Dad admired him greatly. Sitting down at the dinner table after a long day’s work at his new job, my father would tell me and my siblings true tales about the virtues, honesty, and courage he saw in Mr. Bride, the western regional manager for Safeway stores, with only a sixth-grade education. There was only one unfortunate thing about Burt Bride—he was Catholic—and we Leatherbys had been breathing anti-Catholicism like air, as did all of our devout Methodist relatives from our home state of Bible-Belt Iowa.

  One day, Mr. Bride called my father into his office. Dad’s first thought was, “Uh oh, I’m going to get fired.” Mr. Bride skipped past any small talk and said to him bluntly, “We may leave here and never be friends again, but I’m willing to take that chance. Have a seat.” Dad sat down as relaxed as a sprinter at a starting block. “David, I just want you to know that I’m Roman Catholic, and I represent the one true faith. The Catholic Church is the one that Jesus started, and it has the fullness of truth. If you can prove me wrong, I’ll quit the Catholic Church and become a Methodist. But if I prove I’m right, you have to become a Catholic. Do we have a deal?” He extended his hand toward my father, a headstrong and intractable man, who was never one to back down from a challenge.

  “Okay,” my dad countered, “you’ve got a deal.”

  Mr. Bride handed him some spiritual reading: The Story of a Soul by St. Therese of Lisieux and The Confessions of St. Augustine—both written by Doctors of the Church, and The Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis. Literature like this my dad hadn’t found in any Protestant denomination. Imbued with such profundity of love and faith, these writings made him feel that he had been missing something in his life. He grew convinced that there was something far deeper, greater, more sublime and mystical to Christianity than what he had known. God was so much more than he had ever realized. When he shared his insights with my mother, she protested immediately, but then secretly researched Catholicism on her own. Each of my parents came to the conclusion in a few short months that they desired to enter the Catholic Church.

  I was only ten years old, the oldest of five children, and when Dad announced to me, “I want you to know that we’re becoming Catholic,” I threw a formidable fit. The only Catholicism I’d been introduced to was a strange Catholic couple down the street whose three kids were “total nerds.” Running back to my bedroom, I flopped on my bed and wailed, “I don’t want to be a Catholic! I don’t want to be like those people!”

  A few months after Mr. Bride’s challenge, our entire family was conditionally baptized into the Catholic Church on December 22, 1965. Back then, baptism was required in case our original baptism was invalid. “You will be going to a Catholic school,” announced my father. In the span of one day, I fell from being a bright star among public-school friends to a lonely, inadequate newbie. And there was the Mass. What the heck was everyone saying, and why were they doing calisthenics in the pews? My parents also signed me up to be an altar boy for the Latin Mass. Disoriented and adrift on the altar, I wandered through alien territory among strange rituals in a dead language. Meanwhile, my anti-Catholic relatives kept chirping surreptitiously in my ear, “Don’t you know that the Catholic Church will lead you to hell? They pray to saints, they worship idols, and they think the pope is God! Why did your parents do this?”

  Well, my parents never looked back and went on to become “even better Catholics” by having five more children. They sent all ten of us to Catholic grammar schools and Catholic high schools. Even so, my siblings and I became products of North American culture, showing up for Sunday Mass when it didn’t
get in the way of our plans, and selectively deciding which parts of our faith were worthy of belief and which were destined for a spiritual dumpster. For most of us Leatherbys, it was okay to call ourselves Catholic and decide for ourselves what Catholicism was.

  When I was sixteen, I attended a play on a small stage surrounded on three sides by an audience of school members, some of whom were from the neighboring Catholic girls’ school. During the play, a fourteen-year-old girl, who was facing me in the seats across the way, caught my eye. She had an innocence and a purity about her that attracted me—and she was pretty. I started waving to her. Then I waved again . . . and again. In her shyness, she didn’t know what to make of me. As soon as the actors took their bows, I walked up to her and introduced myself. I found out her name was Jennifer and never did find out what the play was about.

  Three years later, we married at the tender ages of nineteen and seventeen. In our first eight years of marriage, my wife and I had four children—Kimberly, Jeremy, Katie, and Matt—and to provide for them, I set my sights firmly on being successful in the world. Working like a slave to mammon, I founded two businesses: first, a painting contracting company, and then a retail appliance store, which grew to five storefronts. Upon selling these businesses, I went into partnership with my dad and founded a chain of ice cream parlors called Leatherby’s Family Creamery. Franchises opened up quickly throughout Northern California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, and Florida. We ended up selling over thirty franchises and became known as the hottest food franchise in the United States. My dad was even invited to be on the iconic Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson to tell his success story, but he declined because he was selling franchises as fast as he could talk to people and felt the national exposure would overwhelm him.

  Life seemed perfect. I had it made: a classy home, a beautiful wife, money, four great kids, and a Cadillac with a phone in it (which was almost unheard of at the time). But I still felt I was lacking something. One day, I picked up and flipped through our Sacramento Catholic newspaper (my dad had everything Catholic splayed across his desk). When I came across a write-up about a five-day silent retreat, I felt a tug in my heart and decided to go—an odd decision at age twenty-eight, considering silence was foreign to me. I always had something to say. On my first day, I began to sweat from the strain, but I did keep my mouth shut, except to speak during a spiritual direction hour each morning, when I met with a Jesuit priest.

  In this unfamiliar school of silence, grace began to stir my conscience, and I turned my attention inward. I had to admit to myself that when it came to my faith, I was really a lukewarm Protestant, disguised as a Catholic—a man who, helped along by my suspicious relatives, felt that the Church was an old-fashioned inflictor of arbitrary rules dictated by old, uninformed men in Rome. Other than sitting in a pew with my family most Sundays and getting my kids to say an occasional half-hearted prayer at bedtime, I had not nurtured myself or my family with the Catholic faith. As a result, my moral character was punctured with holes that I was seeing for the very first time. “What kind of person am I?” I asked. The answer came. While I appeared to place others before myself—my wife, my kids, my friends, even strangers—everything was ultimately about my desires, my prestige, my pleasure, power, and possessions. To get my way, I was a person of compromise, someone who could twist the truth without a prick of guilt. I was selfish. I was duplicitous. In fact, I began to feel dirty.

  As I persevered through my silent scrutiny, God brought me closer and closer to him, to the point that by the fifth day, I could think a question and the Lord would answer—not with a clear or audible voice, but through my knowledge of his response. Such spiritual communion had never happened in my life, and soon I didn’t want the retreat to end.

  On the last day, when I was kneeling in the retreat house chapel, I noticed an elderly nun, about eighty-five years old, praying in the front pew, and I thought to myself, “I bet she’s done one hundred times more good in her life than I have in mine.” Then another thought came: “Since I’ve never fully given myself to God and others, and I’ve only been truly saintly for a collective total of about one day, that would therefore mean that she only spent one hundred days doing good. But she’s probably done one thousand times more good than I’ve ever done. . . but that would only be about three years of her doing good. My gosh, she’s undoubtedly been a source of goodness for at least fifty years. That means that she’s done twenty thousand times more good than I have!” Crumpling forward in my seat, I began to sob. I had never done anything that I felt made the world a better place. My whole life had been focused on me and what I wanted. “What will I say to God when I see him face-to-face?” In the crucible of silence, a cry rose from my heart: “Dear Lord, help me to be a better person. I want to make a difference in this world.”

  Those words became my daily prayer, and soon afterward, the Leatherby’s Family Creamery franchise started to have business troubles. A franchisee in Florida had not paid his rent, and our company had guaranteed the lease. Since Florida law allows a landlord to sue for the full term of the lease and file an automatic judgment, we were hit with a judgment for $2,500,000, and that was only the beginning. Five lawsuits descended on us all at once. We had sold franchises to people who had decided to syndicate, who sold shares to hundreds of people who wanted to buy into Leatherby’s franchises. So when things fell, a suing frenzy descended upon us.

  I was in court at least every other day, accosted by attorneys who accused me, my father, and the entire Leatherby family of being a horde of cheats and frauds. They weren’t searching for the truth; they were looking to win in order to crush us. Before then, I had thought lawsuits were about justice; but these were about lies, undue punishment, and stealing people’s assets. Dad and I were being sued for whatever a person could be sued for. We were even accused of violating the federal RICO Act, which was used to prosecute gangsters in the Mafia. Sitting in court, day after day, I felt so angry that I often came close to throwing up. “I’ll never escape this nightmare,” I feared. “If I can’t prove I’m innocent, the end of this could be prison.”

  Almost daily, for months, our personal names were smeared across the local newspapers. Much of Sacramento knew the ignominious name of Leatherby and believed every line they read. I lost many of my friends and became a person of ill repute. Even in church, I could hear people whispering my name.

  My father lost his home. I couldn’t keep mine either. We lost the business and had to file bankruptcy. Mom and Dad were able to keep ownership of our one ice cream parlor in our hometown, but almost all the money from the store had to be pledged to pay our legal fees. I moved my family into an apartment, and the company that bought the franchises hired me for six months to help with the transition. But when that ended, the money ran out.

  I kept myself going by repeating, “At least I have my family. At least I have my health.” At night, for recreation and to help relieve stress, I would play full-contact flag football, and during a game, my leg was dislocated and my knee so severely damaged that it had to be reconstructed with plates and screws. All my life, I’d been an athlete who loved sports, and now I would never run, or jump, or play sports again.

  “Oh Lord,” I prayed, “what could be worse than all this?”

  My wife, Jennifer, approached me shortly thereafter and said, “You know what? I don’t think I love you anymore. I don’t want to be married to you. This is no fun. Our names are splattered across the papers, we’re being humiliated, and you’re not the same person I married. You’re not happy.”

  Despairing and dejected, I reluctantly assented to moving away from my wife and four kids, wondering if my heart could bear the load. I had no job, no money, and was on crutches. I felt terrified. Borrowing a few bucks, I moved myself into a flophouse downtown and lived on the fourth floor because it was the cheapest one. To get to my room, I had to crawl over prostitutes and drunkards passed out on the stairs, and hobble down the hallway of a floor filled with
sex, drugs, and abuse. At night, the sounds of sin would pass through my paper-thin walls.

  God broke me. I look back and can see his methodical hand as, one after another, he separated me from my idols: my good name, my friendships, my money, my possessions, my health, even my family—everything in which I had placed my trust without realizing it. In order for my soul to survive, I had to find a new source of strength: something that would never leave me—something eternal that I could trust and believe in—something that would love me unconditionally. If I did not find it, my heart was destined to give into darkness, which it almost did.

  Bitterness came knocking, and I welcomed it in. I felt I had a right to thoughts of rage, revenge, and impurity. Because I didn’t like people or trust them anymore, I used them in superficial friendships and again began to justify twisting the truth to get what I wanted. My new close friends became alcohol, profanity, and plenty of blame. But in my brewing anger, I never did get upset with God. I didn’t want to, although great doubts and painful questions about his faithfulness plagued my mind: “Why did you abandon me? Where were you? Where are you?”

  My heart felt alive only toward my children. Every Sunday morning, I would pick them up and take them to church, or pop in for a weekday-night visit to put them to bed, even though Jennifer would dash away when I came anywhere near her. I had lost hope that she would ever love me again. She had abandoned me in my time of trial and acted so hateful and angry toward me that I didn’t think I could ever trust her. Still, I desired my wife’s affection and desperately yearned to return home. I wanted my family, and my kids needed their mom and their dad. Stumbling forward in a dimly lit faith, my new daily prayer became, “Dear Lord, help me get my family back.”

  Penniless, I set my sights on working for a particular commercial real estate company, which was the best in the nation. I must have called the hiring manager at least one hundred times, but he would never call back. I sat in the lobby of his office building at least ten times, but he would always walk on by. My last name wouldn’t let me in the door. One day, I decided to be even more forceful and try to knock the door down. Hobbling into to his office on my three “legs,” I said to his secretary, “Please tell Mr. Smith I’m here for my appointment” (which I didn’t have).