Of Men and Mary Read online

  After Jennifer’s confession, I could hardly believe the person who was my wife. She whizzed by me in the spiritual life and became a most wonderful partner, my best friend, and a fantastic mother. Together, we would invite forty to fifty people at a time to pray the Rosary or study the Bible in our home, which filled up quickly with religious paraphernalia. I had to tell my wife to quit buying pictures and statues of Jesus, Mary, and the saints. They were crowding the closets and stuffed under the beds. They were everywhere. It was embarrassing.

  God was answering my prayers, one by one—prayers that came from the pit of my soul. I never believed that the flower I had crushed would blossom into fullness of life. First, the Lord had to soften my heart, and then he could enter my wife’s. What it took for both of us was trials. He had to break us and strip us of all we thought gave us life, in order to save us. We couldn’t see that God was all we needed until God was all we had.

  At this point, the drama in my life switched from my wife to another member of my family. With Jennifer squarely “back in her Father’s home,” my second-eldest child, Jeremy, rose to the top of my prayer list. Jeremy was constantly pushing rules to their edge and quickly becoming my prodigal son. He was a great academic, a straight-A student, but ornery, always on the cusp of getting kicked out of high school. Physically small but tough, he played rugby and football hard and fast, and he drank so much beer that I gave him every kind of punishment I could think of. “This kid,” I thought, “is never going to get it.”

  Here, in Jeremy’s own words, is how the Blessed Mother intervened, once again, to change everything:

  My father often left religious things in my room, particularly books on the saints, and I wanted nothing to do with them. “Oh my gosh, Dad,” I’d think, “get real,” and I’d stick them unopened on the shelf. One spring day, when I was a sophomore in high school, I came home from rugby practice, and there was a book on my floor again. I rolled my eyes and picked it up. But this time I paused before sticking it on my shelf because on the front cover was an image of our Blessed Mother holding her infant Son. Because I saw Our Lady, I was interested.

  I brought the book to my sister Kimberly who was two years older than I and had begun to open up to the faith. “What is this?” I asked. The book was called Preparation for Total Consecration according to St. Louis Marie de Montfort. Kimberly explained that a person says prayers in the book for thirty-three days and entrusts their lives to Mary in order to get closer to Jesus. At fifteen years old, I said, “I’m gonna do it. I’m going to give my life to Our Lady.” It was a moment of incredible grace.

  Looking back now, I think, “Holy cow! How did that happen?” My life was hardly virtuous. I was living in mortal sin by virtue of skipping Sunday Mass and knowing full well it was wrong; but I started to say the prayers of consecration, and every day I was faithful to it. One night after I had whooped it up, partying and drinking with my intoxicated friends, they all passed out. Sitting there in a stupor next to them, I pulled the little consecration booklet out of my overnight bag, and as I leaned over a garbage pail, in case I threw up, I said the prayers. “Mary,” I began, and I started to cry. “I want to give my life to you. I know that I’m a wretched sinner and there’s little hope for me, but please, please accept me.”

  When I turned sixteen, I discovered the brown scapular, a sacramental that the Blessed Mother gave to the Carmelite priest, St. Simon Stock, back in the year 1251. The scapular is made up of two, small, rectangular pieces of cloth from Carmelite habits, attached to a cord which goes loosely around one’s neck. The piece that hangs in the front reads, “. . . a Sign of Salvation . . .” and the back piece says: “Whosoever dies wearing this scapular shall not suffer eternal fire.” This promise holds if the person wears it in faith and trust. When I found out about the scapular, I gasped, “A free ticket to heaven!?” I would swim with it, shower with it. It never came off, even in the midst of my non-Christian life. In football practice, my front piece would sometimes poke out from my football chest pads, causing my buddies on the team to ask, “Hey, what’s that hanging around you?”

  “Oh, it’s a scapular.”

  “A what?”

  “Yeah, it’s cool. The Blessed Virgin said that if you wear this, you’re going to heaven.” I had almost the whole football team wearing one.

  One day that same year, a few of us on the team were working out in my garage. We were taking turns on our family weight machine, bench pressing one hundred and fifty pounds . . . one hundred eighty pounds. My dad walked in and said, “Let me try that. Put on all the weight that you can. I want to see if I can do it.” My father is one of these guys who never works out. Every seven years, he goes on a workout kick that lasts all of two weeks. The weight bench was now set for two hundred and eighty-five pounds. I felt embarrassed: “There’s no way. He doesn’t work out.” My dad lifted those weights eighteen times, like a freak of nature.

  I feared my father, not just because he was big and strong, but because he was very strict, and I worried that I could never be good enough in his eyes. One day, I carried home a report card with a 4.6 grade point average. “I really knocked this one out of the park,” I thought to myself. “Dad is going to have to be proud.” As I stood in the sibling line, waiting for my turn to show him my grades, my pulse raced, my nerves danced, and I couldn’t stop my body from fidgeting. Finally, my turn came. Dad took my report card into his hands, looked at it, paused and said, “Well, now I know what you’re capable of.”

  “That’s it? That’s all he had to say?” My spirit was shattered, and I slunk away crestfallen. I still wonder if I might have toned down my bad behavior had my father lifted me up on his shoulders and paraded me around the house. I will never know. As it was, my wild antics continued and didn’t die down until I went off to college at Notre Dame University in South Bend, Indiana, where my sister Kimberly was already a student. There, I found a bunch of other Catholic students who were practicing the faith—and who were normal. I had assumed anyone who was really living his faith couldn’t be cool. But thanks to Kimberly who had started a Rosary group that grew from five to three or four hundred people, including professors, staff, and sometimes the bishop, I gained many faith-filled friends. Alongside them, I started to go to Confession regularly and to openly live my Catholic faith.

  When I came home for Christmas break, I prayed, “Lord, now that I’m here, I want to see if my conversion is authentic, so I’m not going to drink when I’m out with my friends” (which was all we ever did). I went to all the same party hangouts, but this time, I was the only one who was sober. Looking around, I thought, “Oh, my gosh! Was this really the way I was living my life? These people look ridiculous.” It was then that I wondered, “Maybe God is calling me to do something different. Maybe he’s calling me to something unique, something more.”

  Six months into my first year at Notre Dame, I decided to renew my consecration to Mary. On the campus stands a replica of the Lourdes Grotto in France, and I knelt there each day, for thirty-three days, to recite the prayers. After I had prayed the last words of consecration, I looked up at the statue of Our Lady in the cove and my heart spoke to her: “Throughout these thirty-three days, it’s been placed on my heart very strongly that I am called to be a priest. . . Mary, is that true?”

  For the first time in my life, I heard a voice within me that was not my own. The voice was Our Lady’s, and she said just one word: “Yes.” Along with her came an indescribable peace that flooded and pulsated through me from head to toe. For days to come, I was on fire with the Holy Spirit, praying all day and throughout the night. I don’t know if I slept at all. Ever since then, I haven’t doubted for a moment that I am called to be a priest.

  One day I picked up the phone. It was Jeremy and he said, “Dad, don’t renew my tuition next year. I’m not going to come back.”

  “Oh, no,” I thought to myself. "He’s gotten himself kicked out.” I said, “But you worked so hard to get there. What
’s the problem?”

  “I know that I’m supposed to be a priest.”

  I was already sitting down but felt like I had to sit down again. Even though I’d raised my kids in what may have seemed to some like an overly religious household, I’d never forced religion or religious vocations on my children in any way, neither had Jennifer. We’d never even spoken to Jeremy about becoming a priest. “You know, Jeremy,” I said, “let’s make sure it’s the right thing to do. I’m going to pay your deposit for next year, and you and I will spend the summer visiting seminaries.” He had no idea about different orders, much less seminaries, and neither did I. At the end of a summer of search and discovery, Jeremy signed up to be a priest for the Diocese of Sacramento and entered St. Charles Borromeo seminary in Philadelphia.

  In the Jubilee year 2000, Jeremy and I, with Kimberly, who was now studying at the International Theological Institute in Gaming, Austria, decided to travel to Rome. There, we did what all the other faithful Catholics in Rome were doing that year, going from basilica to basilica, getting plenty of plenary indulgences. We had a marvelous time walking a seventeen-mile pilgrimage to pray at the designated Holy Doors of all the basilicas and churches, which St. Pope John Paul II had opened in celebration of the Jubilee year. We were enjoying ourselves so much that we ended up staying in Rome from Sunday to Sunday, longer than we had planned. The following Monday morning, Kimberly had to return to school in Austria, so Jeremy suggested, “Let’s make the most of this trip. We’ll drive all Sunday night from Rome to Kimberly’s school near Vienna. Dad and I will switch off driving, and Kimberly will sleep in the backseat, so she can be awake for her classes tomorrow.” Thus we began a twelve-hour drive through the night.

  Still jet-lagged from the time change and tired from our whirlwind pilgrimage, I hopped in the driver’s seat. Every two hours, Jeremy and I took turns driving our rental minivan. At 2 a.m., Jeremy said, “Dad, I can’t go any further,” so I took the wheel again as he reclined without a seatbelt in the front passenger seat. After a half hour, I started to doze off, so I opened my window to the freezing cold, October night air. The wind whipped my senses awake as we cruised along the fast lane of an autobahn at one hundred miles per hour. At 3 a.m., I saw a sign a couple hundred yards up the road, which read: “Vienna: 20 kilometers.” We’d almost reached our destination. I breathed a sigh of relief, exhaled, and fell asleep.

  Twenty seconds later, I opened my eyes. Just a few feet in front of me loomed the back lights of an eighteen-wheeler semi-truck. I slammed on the brakes and turned the wheel. It was too late. My head crashed into the windshield, cutting my chin wide open, as the back right corner of the truck smashed through the front windshield on the passenger side. The car spun 180 degrees and landed on the center divider, facing the oncoming traffic of the fast lane. I heard Kimberly saying calmly, “Dad, what just happened?” and then I blacked out.

  When I came to, I asked in a daze, “Are you okay?” Kimberly had been lying down, and her body had simply hit the seats two feet in front of her. She was unharmed. Jeremy was moaning, “Oh, Dad. Oh, Dad.” I looked over to my right. The corner of the truck had smashed Jeremy’s face and sliced it from the middle of his nose down to his neck. His teeth were hanging down outside of his face, and his right eye had disappeared into his cheek. My beautiful son was so torn apart and disfigured that he looked like a scene from the movie, Alien, when the alien’s face was opened in two. So much blood was pouring out of his head that I thought, “Oh, dear God. He’s going to bleed to death. I’ve killed him!” Jeremy reached up his hand, and I said, “No, don’t touch your face.”

  All of a sudden, a car zoomed by at over a hundred miles per hour, missing us by an inch. “If I don’t get him to the side of the road,” I thought, “we’ll all die before I get him to a hospital.” I opened the door quickly on my side and ran around to Jeremy’s door, but it was smashed shut and wouldn’t budge. So I climbed on top of the front of the car and reached through the shattered windshield to break out the remaining glass. Wrapping my arms around Jeremy’s bloody body, I pulled him out and heaved him over my shoulders, as cars continued to fly by.

  Sitting down in the middle of the median at night, I cradled Jeremy in my arms, like I did when he was a little child. I wished so desperately that he had been knocked out, but he kept talking: “What happened? I’m hurting, Dad. I’m hurting. It hurts . . . it hurts.” Our surroundings were snowy, bitterly cold, and pitch dark, but for the headlight streaks of passing cars. I didn’t know where we were—somewhere in Austria—in the middle of nowhere. I had no cell phone and no idea where to look for help, and I didn’t speak German, the official language of Austria. Never in my life had I felt so helpless and so alone. As I sat there, holding my son close, he asked me, “Dad, can I die? Can I die now?”

  “No. Jeremy, you’ve always been small, but you were the toughest kid on the football team,” I told him. “Now you’re going to have to be stronger than ever. We’re going to pray. We’re going to ask Our Lady and all the saints to pray for us and help us.” I didn’t know what else to do. So we prayed, and a tremendous peace came over me. Somehow, I knew that everything was going to be all right, that even if he died, it was okay because “God is God, and I’m not. He knows all, and he has a plan.” Amidst this penetrating sense of peace, I felt an unspeakable intimacy with Mother Mary holding her Son after he came down from the cross.

  Suddenly, my daughter Kimberly ran across the freeway, and I worried that she would get hit. On the other side of the road, she started waving her hands, trying to flag someone down. We were in the middle of Austria, still one hundred and fifty kilometers from Vienna, and we didn’t speak the language. “Even if someone does stop,” I thought to myself, “are they even going to be able to speak English?”

  A car caught sight of Kimberly and pulled over. With Jeremy in my arms, I ran across the freeway. A big, tall, handsome, blond-haired man got out of the car, and the first words from his mouth in a thick German accent were, “Can I help you?”—in English.

  “How could he know to speak to us in English?” I wondered. The man asked what happened, and I told him, “We need to get my son to the hospital right away. I’m afraid he’s going to bleed to death.” Jeremy’s entire body was shaking. He was going into shock.

  “Put him in the front of my car. I’ll turn the heater on,” said the stranger.

  Blood was everywhere, so I warned him, “He’ll bleed on your car.”

  “It’s okay,” he responded, as if it was no matter. Then he opened his trunk, pulled out a blanket, put it over Jeremy, and turned on his car heater full blast. Whipping out his cell phone, he called for help immediately. Turning to Kimberly, I said, “Please be with him, and whatever you do, do not let your brother look in the mirror.” I wouldn’t let Jeremy look at himself for fear he would lose all hope. His handsome face was so disfigured that I thought he might die or be hideously ugly the rest of his life. “I’ve destroyed him,” I thought to myself. “I spent most of my life taking care of my kids, and then in one moment I destroyed my son.”

  The police arrived in ten minutes. Then came an ambulance and a helicopter. After emergency workers loaded Jeremy into the helicopter and lifted him up in flight, I walked over to the tall, blond-haired stranger. He was staring across the autobahn at our car, which was demolished. “This man came at the exact moment we needed him,” I began to think. “He spoke English. He had a blanket. He had a phone. He put Jeremy in his car. This is like one of those angel stories.” At that very moment, the man turned to look at me and said, “Did you know you had angels protecting you tonight?”

  As the police were taking down a report of the incident, they asked me, “And how did you contact us?”

  “This guy who had the car. . .” I told them. “He had a cell phone with him.” They looked around and asked, “What guy?” The man was gone.

  “How could the police have pulled up and not seen him or his car?” I wondered. It turned ou
t the police didn’t even have a trace of his call.

  I will let Jeremy tell what happened next, as it is hard for me to share the details of his ongoing suffering.

  When I came out of shock, I was in a dark room in the basement of the hospital, lying on what felt like a stainless-steel table. I awoke surrounded by doctors who didn’t speak English. I thought I’d been left there to die because my condition was hopeless. For fifteen hours, I lay there, fading in and out of consciousness, and every time I came to, I had to vomit up all the blood that I was swallowing. My dad didn’t know where I was, and the hospital didn’t yet know I had good insurance, so I wasn’t receiving any care. I can recall asking the doctors, “Is my dad alive?” because I didn’t remember having seen him at all. But none of them could answer me.

  When my dad finally found me and convinced the staff of his excellent insurance, I was suddenly offered red-carpet care. The staff quickly wheeled away an elderly man and another sick patient from my room to make it my own suite, while a team of top medical specialists poured in. Of all the hospitals in Europe and the United States, I was in the premier hospital for facial reconstruction surgery. My face was so torn apart that I had to go in immediately for fifteen hours of surgical reparative measures. I remained in the Vienna hospital for twelve days, and then I was transferred home.

  Fourteen more oral and facial surgeries followed over the next four years, as doctors gradually tried to “restore” me. My mouth had been totally split open. Facial surgeons had to sew my detached tongue back to the bottom of my mouth. Much of my jawbone was crushed and broken so they had to reconstruct my jaw line. Because my cheekbone was destroyed and my eye socket smashed, surgeons had to insert plates into my face so that all of the bones would remain intact. They had to rip off pieces from the top of my mouth to build new gums to hold my new teeth. I had a screw sticking out of my chin, just below my mouth, because I was missing parts of the bone that had held my lower teeth. With a tiny screw driver, I had to turn the screw a millimeter each day to raise the bone the tiniest hair so my chin would re-grow itself. Doctors had pulled the skin away from my eye in order to place a utensil down the inside of my face. They had cut skin away from my cheek to better see my broken bones on a screen and piece them all back together. For added flare, they put a balloon inside my cheek with a cord that came down through my nose so I could pump it up with air. If I’d wanted to be cured of vanity, now was the time.