Of Men and Mary Page 3

  In that moment, the priest slowed down. He came to a woman in a wheelchair, and kneeling before her in faith, began to bless her head, shoulders, hips, thighs, knees, calves, and ankles, probably her toes, too. Relieved, I sat down near the two of them to rest and was approached by the woman’s husband, who shared with me, “My wife was in a car accident seven years ago, and her spinal cord separated into two pieces. Then six months later, spinal meningitis hit her and deteriorated her spinal cord below. For seven years, she hasn’t moved a muscle beneath her waist.” I looked down at the woman’s legs. They had atrophied to the size of my wrist.

  Doubts crowded my mind: “She is not going to get up. Why is Father wasting his time? It is medically impossible for this woman to walk.” Sitting in an uncomfortable, cold sweat from the exertion of catching falling human beings, I started to look for other things to do. Where was Fr. Jozo? Maybe he needed help. . . But then my attention would be drawn back to the woman. I felt as though God had a string attached to my heart, and every once in a while, he would tug it. This tug-of-war lasted several minutes, as I sought out a distraction, something else to do, and he focused my sights back on this woman and the priest, who was continuously blessing her. I felt completely at his mercy.

  Fed up and full of arrogance, I prayed flippantly, “What, Lord! What do you want? Do you want me to pray for this woman?”

  Silence.

  “Well, then, I will. Get her up out of her wheelchair. Show us your power.”

  Then I heard God speak: “Michael, if I get this woman up and make her walk, will you enter the seminary?”

  “Absolutely not.”

  Twenty tumultuous minutes passed as I squirmed in my seat, agonizing over the thought of priesthood because football was my God. “I’ve got an NFL career ahead of me. I’m two years away from entering the draft. Do you think I’m crazy? Give all that up? Give up the goal of my life?”

  Silence.

  Finally, my heart warmed a little, and I thought to myself, “Well, it would be pretty cool to see her get up and walk.” But I decided to change the rules, so I said, “Okay, Father. If you get her up out of her wheelchair and walk her around this entire church, I will enter the seminary.”

  In five seconds, she was up on her feet without anyone telling her to do so. Then she grabbed the back of her wheelchair and started taking a lap around the church. “What are you doing!?” my mind panicked. “Why are you doing this?! Somebody stop her! Somebody tackle her!” Wandering in desperation to the center aisle of the church, I decided to quickly change the deal. The floor in the Široki Brijeg church was made up of blocks of grey slate, so I focused on a small block near the Tabernacle and got more specific: “If she doesn’t step on that tile, I’m not going!” The woman came to the front of the church, planted both feet on that very tile, and plopped back down in her wheelchair.

  A few expletives escaped my lips, and I walked out of the church to sob. “You know my dream, Lord,” I cried. “Why would you take it away from me?”

  For three years, I suffered. An internal battle raged in my soul, while God continued to encourage me with hundreds and hundreds of affirmations of my call to the priesthood. God threw out the red carpet of confirmations when the Servant of God, Maria Esperanza, who received apparitions of the Virgin Mary (along with the gifts supernatural knowledge, healing, visions, discernment of spirits, locution, ecstasy, levitation, the odor of sanctity, the stigmata, and the ability to read the hearts of others—just to name a few) stopped in mid-translation when I attended one of her talks. Feeling impatient, I got up to leave when she grabbed me and said, “You have the face of a priest.”

  Before my college years ended, I was recruited by the Cleveland Browns football team. I would have been well on my way to a career in pro football were God not getting in the way. For this stubborn young man, hundreds of confirmations weren’t enough, so I took many more trips to Medjugorje where I saw many more marvels—the blind seeing, the deaf hearing. I’ve been a witness to all the miracles of the Gospel, with the exception of one: walking on water. But we do that in Wisconsin in the wintertime.

  One of the greatest miracles happened in a one-of-a-kind confirmation during the last game of college football that I played. While I was walking to the line of scrimmage, looking at the faces across from me, I thought, “Oh my goodness, I know these men.” But I had never seen them before, never played against that team. I crouched down in a three-point stance on the offensive line to block for the runners and the quarterback, as this strange sense of déjà vu took over. I was remembering something that never happened.

  For the next twenty minutes, I could literally see the next ten plays in my mind before they occurred. I knew what play would be called in the huddle; I knew what play would happen next; I knew how many yards we were going to get; and I knew if we were going to score on the drive. We won the game 22-18. I knew that, too. Frightened, I thought I was going absolutely bonkers. Back in the locker room, while my teammates celebrated, I put a towel over my head and cried, fearing that too many drugs and knocks to the head had blown out my mind.

  That night, a party was held at my home—the “football house,” to which only 400 people showed up (and yes, there was beer), but my spirit couldn’t enjoy the festivities. At about midnight, I’d had enough, so I went to my room, locked the door, prayed my Rosary, and fell asleep. At 3 a.m., I had a dream. It was of the same ten plays from the game that day, the same twenty minutes during which I could see glimpses of the future. While I slept, God showed me that this was the same dream I’d had when I was eight years old. We were in a huge stadium; our team uniforms were just like the Philadelphia Eagles; their team uniforms were just like the Arizona Cardinals. I had assumed, therefore, as a child, that I was seeing and experiencing myself playing in a pro football game. I woke up in amazement. Then God spoke to me again: “This was your dream. It has been fulfilled. Now mine—priesthood.”

  In 2005, I was ordained a Catholic priest by Archbishop Timothy Dolan, now Cardinal Dolan, and I’ve never been happier. I thank God to this day that I did not play football because in this world, there are so many distractions from God. American football was a distraction for me. Priesthood, on the other hand, is life for me, and life to the fullest.

  TWO

  FATHER RICK WENDELL

  The Man Who Died before He Lived

  IT’S A MIRACLE I’M ALIVE. I grew up a thrill-seeker. When life got too mundane, I’d test its limits. My friends and I had our own versions of extreme sports. We started out with rope swings over the river, and then over cliffs. We fought each other with BB guns and played toss with fireworks, which blew off my friend’s hand. We went camping in weather twenty-degrees below and drove at speeds over a hundred. Four of my high school friends died in high-speed car wrecks, but that didn’t slow me down.

  The result: three operations on each of my wrists, five surgeries on my left knee, one on my right, two broken ankles, a separated left shoulder from jumping off of freight trains, and a snapped collarbone from performing flying bicycle stunts—not with a decked-out mountain bike, but a Schwinn with a banana seat. My mother said she was just trying to keep me alive. When I was sixteen, wearing my Boy Scout uniform with a merit-badge sash and driving my ‘69 Ford Mustang, a police officer chased me down, jumped out of his car, pointed his gun at me, and yelled, “Put your hands on the roof, kid!” I “didn’t know” how to drive a car unless it was going full blast. My parents absolutely forbade me to have a motorcycle, so when I turned eighteen, I made sure to get one. It only took me a few months to spin out in a death-dealing crash followed by eight hours of surgery. After that, people began saying, “God is saving you for something special.” “Nah,” I thought. “I’m just lucky.”

  Achievements came easy. Mom found me poring over her medical books when I was five. I sculpted, appreciated fine art, played leads in musicals, and was captain of our high-school hockey team, with the temper to go with it. I was truly a Renais
sance kid in a good sense, but my personal morals flew all over the map. At the end of my senior year at Hill-Murray High School in Maplewood, Minnesota, I went to five proms with four girls. After having gone with one of my girlfriends to each other’s proms, we unexpectedly saw each other again with different dates at a third prom. When I graduated, five hundred people paid to come to my party, replete with a live band, porta-potties, and four sixteen-gallon kegs of beer—to start.

  Coming from a practicing Catholic family, it was assumed that my two brothers and I would say grace before meals, prayers before bedtime, and attend parochial schools. Being late for Mass was not an option because mother would make us sit in the front row. Not my idea of a thrill. Since businesses weren’t open on Sundays in the 1960s due to the blue laws, our family would have a formal meal at grandma’s house after Mass every Sunday. Catholicism was a family given, but my 1970s Catholic high school faith formation was dangerously thin and punctured with holes. “God loves you,” we were told. “You’ll figure it out.”

  I spent my first year of college homebound, doing independent study connected with the nearby University of Wisconsin because I had forty-five pounds of plaster on three broken limbs. When I recovered, I couldn’t get away from home fast enough, so I escaped to St. John’s University, a Catholic college in Collegeville, Minnesota. I didn’t witness any examples of faith among the monks on campus, and we students weren’t required to go to Mass on Sundays, so we didn’t. My immorality mushroomed because of the lack of moral guidance, and I became increasingly disillusioned with the idea of faith. Intellectually, I couldn’t prove that God didn’t exist; but He wasn’t relevant in my life, and he or she, or whatever, certainly wasn’t important enough for me to modify my behavior.

  Although I’d been told God was all love, I never felt him and certainly didn’t understand him as a loving father, perhaps because I never experienced my own father’s love. The only time Dad told me he loved me was on Christmas Day after downing a couple bottles of champagne. Even though I was always an honor student, was voted outstanding artist in high school for my sculpting and pottery, and excelled in sports, especially contact sports, Dad never came out to watch a single one of my games and couldn’t find his way to offer a hug or a compliment. Rather, he criticized me. When I was fourteen, my father hit me for the last time, perhaps because I was getting bigger and stronger, or perhaps because my smile of sheer rage immobilized him. I swore in my heart that day that I would kill him if he touched me again (a curse I placed on myself that had to later be broken by Jesus Christ).

  After earning a Bachelor of Science pre-med degree from the University of Wisconsin in River Falls, I worked for a short time in a hospital emergency room to build my résumé in order to attend medical school (like my mom had). Late one Saturday night after I’d survived another terrible motorcycle crash, the contract doctor in the emergency room, whom I deemed very cool, sat me down and said, “Rick, you can do this job. You have the ability. But being a physician is not what I do, it’s who I am. And I’m not sure that you would be happy.” I listened and instead sought out the deepest snow available, which I found in Little Cottonwood Canyon, Utah. Between hitting the slopes in wintertime as a professional skier, and lifeguarding and riding Harley Davidsons in the summer, my days became a living cliché of sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll.

  In my opinion, there was only one way to go—full on, top speed—ready to risk my very life for the next thrill. It was the 80s, when cocaine use was fashionable, not criminal, in certain crowds. I showed up in places within the drug trade where no one should go, and I met with people no one should see, for the spirit of evil within them was palpable. I attempted feats so perilous that if I didn’t complete them, I would die. Perched on one ski, atop a three-hundred-foot cliff, I stopped twenty-five feet away from plunging to my death. My face was a historical map of cuts and scrapes, and every inch of my back had been bruised or lacerated—the markings of a young man trying to prove himself to a father who didn’t care. But the biggest scars were on my heart.

  When I found out that I could make better money in construction than lifeguarding, I left the slopes of Utah to form a little construction company back home in Minnesota. By age twenty-seven, I had fifteen men working for me, building high-end, custom, golf-course homes. Enjoying the income, I purchased my family home, a waterfront property, and decorated it with a big boat and a string of cars and motorcycles. I was young, in shape, arrogant, and everything I tried to do I could do well. The world shouted success at me with my possessions, money, power, and popularity, not to mention girlfriends. In time, I was engaged to be married to my trophy girl—the prettiest and wealthiest one of them all. To add to her good qualities, she could pound booze almost as hard as I could and liked the same stuff on pizza.

  By the late 1980s, my mother was living with me because my dad, after thirty years of marriage, had served her with divorce papers. The stress gave her a heart attack and sent her to the hospital, where my father refused to visit. With me in the family home, she recuperated after her angioplasty, and I hosted her, not because I was a great son, but because the arrangement was convenient.

  My home rested on a river bluff and needed over a thousand railroad ties to hold up the embankment. One sunny, Friday afternoon, as one of my workers and I were fastening a couple ties together with a fourteen-inch steel nail, my sledge hammer came down hard, but I missed hitting the nail, and it went flying, gouging me deeply in the face. Following the protocol natural to my Ski Patrol training, I had my mom drive me to the hospital, where I was stitched up without incident. When I was released, Mom picked me up, drove five blocks, and stopped at a grocery store. Being the demanding, controlling type, I sat in the car begrudgingly. Life was on my time clock, and I needed to go back to work, make out some checks for my employees, and get on with things.

  While I was waiting, my heart began to race, and it wouldn’t slow down. I thought perhaps I was suffering from heatstroke. The beating in my chest grew so persistent that I got out of the car, walked toward the store, and when I stepped through the automatic doors, my body started to collapse. Grabbing a clerk, I said, “You’re going to have to do CPR,” and then I lost consciousness. An ambulance happened to be a block and a half away at a fire station, so when the clerk dialed 911, paramedics arrived immediately. My mother came quickly to the scene and knew all of the ambulance workers because she used to run the hospital laboratory: “Just ship him!” she shouted. “Don’t even assess him. Put him on the gurney and take him to emergency.”

  But before the ambulance could get out of the parking lot, I coded: my body went into cardiopulmonary arrest. The emergency team shocked me three times with paddles, trying to bring me back to consciousness. They intubated me, inserting a tracheal tube down my windpipe. They put in peripheral lines for an IV and gave me oxygen to try and get my blood pressure up. They performed manual, closed-chest compressions on my heart, which had completely stopped. But nothing worked. I was clinically dead.

  The paramedics then charged the paddles and applied electrical shocks to my heart to return it to rhythm. It was at 3 p.m. on a Friday. They rushed me into the emergency room. None of the ambulance crew left my side. When the new shift workers came on, they joined the second-shift crew, and together they worked on me furiously, trying to bring me back to life. I was only thirty years old and in great shape, and the heart attack I had was called a “witnessed arrest” because I coded in their presence. This type of cardiac event has a high probability of resuscitation, but they couldn’t get me to have my own sinus rhythm—my regular heartbeat. I was not breathing on my own. I was gone, killed by an anaphylaxis reaction to the anesthesia used for my stitches.

  A person’s blood PH, which indicates how much oxygen the body is getting, is normally 7.4. When it drops below seven, life-saving procedures are often terminated because permanent and irreversible brain damage has occurred. My blood PH descended to 6.4, which is called acidosis and is in
consistent with life. However, I was an organ donor and had AB positive blood, a type that is found in less than 2 percent of the population. Consequently, I was very valuable in parts.

  Because they didn’t have an apparatus that compresses the heart, normally referred to as a “thumper,” the team had to rotate giving me manual chest compressions. Ernie, the respiratory tech, squeezed the bag of oxygen with his bare hands for several hours. The staff in the lab, who had worked under my mother until her poor health prevented it, wouldn’t show her the lab reports because every indication was I was brain dead. They were no longer trying to save my life. They were attempting to stabilize my body so that it could be shipped to a harvest center in St. Paul, Minnesota, where they would eventually pronounce me brain dead and harvest my organs.

  My mother was assembling the family around me: my fiancée, my two brothers (one who flew in from out of state), and my dad. My father had waited a couple hours until he was done with work at 4:30 before leaving to visit because I’d been in the hospital so many times before and had always come through fine. But when he arrived, the staff said to him, “Put down your flowers and your card, and go say goodbye.” He later told me that when he laid his hand on mine, I was cool to his touch and turning blue-gray in color.

  Within the family, none of us had been going to church. My mother was angry with God because my father was divorcing her, and “bad things don’t happen to good people.” My father, brothers, and I were CEO Catholics (Christmas and Easter Only), and even then, we attended Mass for reasons of culture, not faith. My mother felt very alone at fifty-six, with no brothers or sisters or close relatives, and family meant everything to her. Into this climate, she begged God with her whole being and cried out, “Lord, I need him. I’m alone in the world. He’s my first-born son. But if you need him, take him. If you give him back to me, give him back to me whole, or don’t give him to me at all.” Hanging onto hope, she and my fiancée were yelling at me, “You are loved, and you cannot leave!”