Of Men and Mary Read online

  I can remember passing out in the store entrance. Then my next recollection is of lying on my back with a man leaning over the top of me, pushing on my chest; but I couldn’t feel it. This didn’t disturb me. I simply took note of it. I was looking up at a swinging IV bag and wood-colored cabinets, which lined the interior of the ambulance, but my vision had expanded to include a perfect perception of what should have been in my peripheral vision. I could see everything without turning my head. There was an excited conversation happening, but somehow, I wasn’t listening to it. I was not emotional at all. And then I went through the picture, so to speak. This is where human words fail in describing what was happening to me. I went from observing the scene to passing through to the other side of it—into blackness, nothingness. I wasn’t scared, I wasn’t happy, I wasn’t sad. I was just observing, yet I was within what I was seeing. Then, in what seemed like the distance, but wasn’t, there was light. I don’t know whether I went toward it, or it came toward me, because distance, space, and time cannot describe what I was experiencing. The light was just there. It had no visible source, and its brightness was beyond blinding and yet soft on my eyes. It cannot be described by color or wavelength or anything that we use to describe light here on earth because it was infinitely more.

  Soon I was amidst this light. Intuitively, I understood that I was in the presence of God. I didn’t simply think this, I knew this, beyond and before any question I’d ever had. I knew that God is. God is the most obvious thing there could possibly be. I also knew instantaneously that one human lifespan is but a blink within that reality, and yet this life that each person is given by God is profoundly important. What we do with it is critical, as if life were a test, but not one that we pass or fail, a test of who we are.

  Somehow, I simply knew things without having to think about them. Only years later did I learn that this kind of knowing is called “infused knowledge,” a term coined by St. Thomas Aquinas wherein knowledge comes from one direction only—God. The mind doesn’t deliberate over a subject and arrive at a conclusion, but simply knows and comprehends, without any effort or receptivity of its own.

  At the most fundamental level, I also apprehended God’s answer to Moses’ question to the burning bush, “What should I call you?”—“I am Who Am.” In a like way, I understood Revelation 1:8: “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the one who is and who was and who is to come, the almighty.” I knew that there was no beginning or ending to him. God doesn’t change, and everything that is—is because God is. Nothing is separate from God, nothing at all. God is present in all things and at all times because God exists outside of time. Time for us is only a construct that we use to help us understand our relationship with the things we experience and observe, how we interact with and respond to the physical aspects of creation. There is a certain reality to the changing of the seasons, the rising and setting of the sun, the influence of the moon and the reality of the tides. We relate to time by making watches and calendars, by following lunar cycles and navigating the stars. But all this is relative. As a thing unto itself, time does not exist.

  The most profound part of my experience, by far, was knowing that God is Love. Never had I realized that I could be loved like that—with a love so perfect, so pure, so intense, so marvelous that nothing else mattered. My dad loved me, but he hadn’t been able to express it because his own father had not taught him how to love, nor his father before him. Dad couldn’t bring himself to do so much as tell me I was a good boy. My fiancée loved me, and I loved her, at least as much as we knew of romantic love. My mother was thinking of love when she had me baptized on Valentine’s Day in 1960. I was the first child who leapt in her womb, a child she named after her beloved father. Mom adored me and was the image of love in our family.

  Yet nothing was like this! I was in the presence of a love so intense that I didn’t care about anything else. . . There was no need for anything else. This Love was absolutely fulfilling in every way, a love that I had always looked for but never found, a love one would never want to be separated from. I was created to love and to be loved because God is Love. This fundamental truth is written into every human heart. Everyone knows what it feels like not to have that place fulfilled, and we will try and fill it with anything that even masquerades as love but isn’t. But there is a place in our hearts, a throne, really, that only this Love can fulfill. I never comprehended such a perfect love until I was immersed in it. In God’s presence, I wanted only to be loved by him and to love him in return.

  My encounter with God occurred while I lay clinically dead in the hospital for over two and a half hours, without a functioning brain, without my own heartbeat or my own breathing. I would not respond to coma stimuli: the infliction of pain to elicit a response. My eyes did not react to light; my pupils were fixed but not yet dilated.

  Then without warning, my soul was ripped away from the magnificent light, and I felt as if I were falling downward. I reached up for the light because I didn’t want to be parted from it. With my mother on one side and my fiancée on the other, telling me that I was loved and that I could not leave, my arm came up off the gurney and wrapped around them. In a flash, my heart started beating on its own and my breathing resumed. My eyes started reacting to the hospital lights, and my normal skin color returned. The doctors were shocked. In fact, the entire staff have since spoken to me, asking me to tell them what happened because none of them believed my return was possible. I had gone from being a corpse to a strong man attempting to sit up and get off the gurney. In fact, I was trying so fiercely to get back to the light that the staff had to tie me down so I wouldn’t pull out all of the lines stuck in my body.

  Still in various states of shock and disbelief after seeing a dead man come alive, the staff knew they had to redouble their efforts. They quickly ushered me into the same ambulance with the crew that had never left, and drove me twenty-two miles to a larger hospital with more cardiac support, where they placed me in the ICU to be closely monitored. The fact that I had become conscious again was no guarantee that there was not permanent brain damage. By the time my family caught up with me, I was sitting up in bed, perfectly healthy. When my mother walked in, she scanned my body, peered at my face, and asked, “Are you still in there?”

  “Yes, mom,” I responded. “But I died.” I died on a Friday afternoon at 3 p.m. At the time, I knew nothing of how Jesus had appeared to Sr. Faustina Kowalska, the saint of Divine Mercy, and told her that 3 o’clock in the afternoon on Friday was the hour of mercy: the hour that Jesus died and gave his life for us on the Cross so that we might live. I was thirty years old and a carpenter by trade.

  The following day, doctors ran me through a battery of tests—CAT scans, stress tests, etc., which left them baffled. Not a trace of residual damage could be found. In the meantime, a parade of visitors stopped by. One was my fiancée’s half-brother, a Missouri Synod Lutheran missionary, who along with his wife and children, created a computer-generated banner for me. After asking the Lord for an appropriate Bible verse, they were inspired to write on the banner, “Psalm 25:4-6,” underneath the words, “Get well soon!” I thanked them kindly. Being a “good Catholic,” I had no idea where psalms were in the Bible! Were they in the New Testament? The Old Testament? Someone left the room and returned with The Good News Bible. Careful to make distracting small talk, I quickly thumbed through it, beginning with the Old Testament, and came upon the Psalms. Pulling out a greeting card, I marked Psalm 24, intending to read it later, and placed the Bible on the nightstand.

  Then the really weird events started to happen. At dawn on the Lord’s Day, my third day in the hospital, I had a mystical experience, a dream that was not a dream. In it, I relived the experience of dying. My body began to writhe in intense mental and spiritual anguish as I felt the loss of my life. Horrified, I received the spiritual and true knowledge that if I had gone to judgment, my life was forfeit. Instead of experiencing union with God in the way that I had, I would have recei
ved an eternal sentence: banishment! For years, I had scared myself “to death” by doing extreme sports, but nothing I’d ever experienced remotely came close to my reaction. A paralyzing terror ripped through my being, causing my heart rate to skyrocket and my blood pressure to shoot up. It was a fear like I’d never known. For a fleeting moment, I experienced the complete abandonment and separation from God and others, without the hope of ever being reunited. I was going to be cast out, without parole, into a lonely, solitary torment forever because through my thoughts, words, and actions, I chose hell without consciously knowing that I had. I would not wish this experience on my worst enemy.

  None of us think that we’re that bad. We assume that there is always someone worse than we are, that perhaps that other person might deserve hell. Or we think that no one deserves hell. Many of us are taught to believe that God so loves the world, or at least me, that he would never send anyone, or at least not me, to hell. Or perhaps we believe that hell does not exist. We are wrong. At our own personal judgment, which none of us can escape, we will know full-well where we are lacking and what destiny suits our soul.

  As I lay shaking in my hospital bed, I reached with a trembling hand for the Bible, opened it up to my marked page of Psalm 25, and read:

  Show me your ways, LORD,

  teach me your paths.

  Guide me in your truth and teach me,

  for you are God my Savior,

  and my hope is in you all day long.

  Remember, LORD, your great mercy and love,

  for they are from of old.

  Do not remember the sins of my youth

  and my rebellious ways;

  according to your love remember me,

  for you, LORD, are good.

  There was a tangible presence in the room. It began to guide my hand to different passages of the Scriptures, all in the Old Testament. None were of my own choosing or by accident. I read of Israel being driven into exile and then returning, of being banished from its inheritance and then restored, and I somehow knew that Israel was me. Tears began streaming down my face.

  Then I heard an interior voice that penetrated my whole being. I knew exactly who it was. With ultimate authority and tremendous force, it commanded, “STAND UP!” I immediately stood up with my Bible. One does not disobey He who is Command. Then he led me to read passages about his grace and mercy, ending with: “. . . Jesus said, ‘This sickness will not end in death. No, it is for God’s glory so that God’s Son may be glorified through it’” (John 11:14).

  Then I heard his voice again: “For this, you must give glory and praise to God,” and every passage, every word, every phrase changed to the theme of giving praise. In time, I read:

  “When he came near Jerusalem, at the place where the road went down the Mount of Olives, the large crowd of his disciples began to thank God and praise him in loud voices for all the great things that they had seen: ‘God bless the king who comes in the name of the Lord! Peace in heaven and glory to God!’

  Then some of the Pharisees in the crowd spoke to Jesus. ‘Teacher,’ they said, ‘command your disciples to be quiet!’

  Jesus answered, ‘I tell you that if they keep quiet, the stones themselves will start shouting’” (Luke 19:37-40).

  Then, suddenly, words of praise started coming out of my mouth, out loud and unpremeditated. I was freaked out. I mean, who does that? By this time, I was sobbing. The situation was highly, hugely emotional for me. There was a big presence in the room, and it wasn’t me. I had a cardiac sending unit in my hospital garment chest pocket, relaying my heartbeat, and I couldn’t help but think, “What are the nurses picking up from their monitors? Because this stuff just doesn’t happen to people, certainly not to a Midwestern custom-home builder with an impressive list of sins and a potty mouth.”

  With the praise of God emitting from my mouth, tears streaming down my cheeks, and snot pouring out of my nose, I was in bad need of some toilet tissue, and there was just no way to “sleeve it.” If you don’t cry often—which I didn’t—you don’t cry well. I walked into the bathroom, and the theme changed again. This time, the interior voice said, “This is what you have done with your life. . . Now give me your life. ON YOUR KNEES.”

  I knelt down in front of the bathroom mirror and stared at myself, attempting to do a reality check. It was still dawn. I was still me. I looked around at the steel grey, four-inch tile, the cream-colored grout, the Formica patterns, the tilted mirror mounted in stainless steel, the call box with a cord that hung to the floor with a white plastic tip, and I asked myself, “Am I having some kind of an emotional breakdown? If you go through intense physical trauma, does it release some crazy brain chemicals? Am I just being emotional? Am I just afraid to die?”

  The voice responded to my thoughts and kindly, but directly and unmistakably, said, “No. You know exactly who is talking to you, and you know that this is real. Don’t you feel a little foolish asking this question?”

  I simply let out a peaceful sigh and thought, “Okay. At this moment, my life merits hell and not heaven. This is what I’ve done with my life.” All grew quiet. I didn’t know what to do. Like most people after experiencing an earth-shattering event, I wanted to talk to somebody. But who? I didn’t know anyone who knew God. I didn’t hang out with those people. I was guilty of the life of the comfortable. I didn’t care about God or anybody else, only myself.

  Dying soldiers on battlefields, more than for any other human being, cry out for their mothers. So, I called my mom. I don’t recollect the conversation we had, but Mom did. Later, she would tell me that she gave me words of support and consolation, and then my voice changed. “That was for me,” I told her, “and now this is for you. . .” Then I read something out of Scripture that I cannot remember, but it so struck her heart that she knew she had to pray for my father for the rest of her life—which she immediately began to do. She and my father had parted with such venom that neither would talk to the other. Can you imagine the impact on our local church and our family, when years later, they showed up at church together? By that time, my father had developed episodic dementia. On Easter Sunday of 1995, he was restored to the home, and right up to his death, my parents united as one in marriage in a better way than they ever had before.

  I left the hospital on Sunday, June 24, 1990, in the same skin, with the same address and the same business, but everything was different. I knew that God truly existed, and I was in him; he was in me. None of creation was a mistake—a random cosmic accident, where a bunch of cosmogonic dust happened to blow together nicely, and on we crawled out of a swamp. Rather, all of Creation was an intentional act of Almighty God. What I did within it was infinitely important. So, what was I going to do with my life now? Nothing but God mattered. What did a boat matter? A fancy house? Achievements? They didn’t bring me anything. What’s more, I didn’t want to be on earth. I longed to go home to heaven, but I didn’t know how to get there.

  The following day, Monday, I flipped open the Bible, and the pages landed on Chapter 11 of John, the raising of Lazarus. My eyes fell on verse 25:

  “Jesus said to her [Martha, a sister of Lazarus], ‘I am the resurrection and the life. The one who believes in me will live, even though they die; and whoever lives by believing in me will never die. Do you believe this?’”

  My response was, unhesitatingly, “Yes. I believe this.” Then Jesus continued to lead me to more passages. This time, all in the Gospel of John.

  “Do you know the Father?” he asked.

  “Yep, met him Sunday.”

  “I and the Father are One” (John 10:30).

  “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6).

  Period. That’s when the promise was given to me. My future was heaven. An interior recognition branded itself into my being that God is sovereign and that Jesus Christ is Lord. When that happens to a soul, it is salvation. I hadn’t understood any of these things until God revealed
them to me through Sacred Scripture.

  Thus began my journey of faith in Christ. All I knew was that Jesus was Savior, the Bible was God’s Word, God could talk to me through Scripture, and God talked to sinners who weren’t worthy of him one bit. I didn’t know if the Catholic faith was the correct way to get to God, so I did my own investigating. I went to Mass with the “frozen chosen.” I went to the Sacrament of Reconciliation where the priest, through no fault of his own, gave me a penance of five “Hail Mary’s.” I reeled. “Dude!” I wanted to say. “Five ‘Hail Mary’s’ wouldn’t even touch the first nasty thought I had in my head this morning!”

  As I wandered through the world, it seemed to me that most everything human beings were doing to one another and to God was wrong and ridiculous. On my worst days, I even thought about walking in front of a bus to achieve my goal of eternal life, but then reminded myself that life comes from God and is sacred. It was not my choice to end it.

  Not long after that, my fiancée’s mother gave me a book about the alleged apparitions of the Virgin Mary in “Medjahoochee,” or “Medgegookie.” (None of us from North America knows how to say Medjugorje, pronounced me-ju-gó-rya.) The book was by Fr. Joseph Pelletier on the first five days of the apparitions in this small town in Bosnia-Herzegovina, the former Yugoslavia. When I read it, I wasn’t at all skeptical, and thought, “If something this incredible is going on in the world today, I want to be like the apostle Thomas and go put my fingers in the Lord’s wounds.” I wanted to “touch” Mary’s presence. I’d heard about Fatima and Lourdes and other sights of Marian apparitions, but they were far away and long ago. The Medjugorje apparitions had begun in 1981. “Are they still happening?” I wondered.