Of Men and Mary Read online

  Then one Saturday they announced over the intercom: “Catholic Queen of Peace group is now meeting in the multi-purpose room.”

  “I ain’t never heard of nothin’ like that,” I says. But it sounded like something extra I could do. I went into this room where there were four inmates, a bunch of little old ladies, a mound of Rosary beads, and some cookies. The guys who showed up were a bunch of rocket ships—I mean, real nuts. One of them had a beanie on his head and was talkin’ about fruits and vegetables. He didn’t know if he was Jewish, Muslim, Baptist, Catholic, or what. Another guy, obviously Protestant, was sayin’ how Catholics were gonna go to hell. Then there was a Protestant becomin’ Catholic, and a Catholic who never came to Mass. So I figured, naturally, “These guys are here for the cookies.”

  At the end of my first time with the Catholic Queen of Peace group, one of the little old ladies pushed a newsletter toward me, called The Miracle of Medjugorje by Wayne Weible. These ladies had their own box of prayers, song books, little Rosary materials, Legion of Mary literature—all sorts of holy stuff that they brought in there to save us poor inmates, and they didn’t especially want this newsletter in their box, so they just slid it over to me. Why I picked it up, I don’t know, but I brought it back to my unit. Well, I didn’t believe what it was sayin’. I didn’t believe that the Virgin Mary was appearing to some six kids in Medjugorje. But there was a couple things that sounded Catholic enough, so I did them: seven Our Father’s, seven Hail Mary’s, seven Glory Be’s, and the whole Rosary—all fifteen decades at a time. Mary supposedly said to fast on Fridays, so I started fasting one day a week on bread and water. I didn’t know she wanted Wednesdays, too, otherwise I’m sure I woulda done that also because it was more stuff I could do to show God, “Hey, look! See! I’m tryin’. Hold onto that lightning bolt.”

  Two things in the article baffled me, though. The Virgin Mary said, “Pray with your heart,” and “Love the love that’s in your heart.” By this point, I’m sayin’ 15,000 Hail Mary’s a day but still scared to death, serving God in abject fear. I didn’t know what it was to love or be loved.

  I’d walk around the compound with my hands in my pockets so that nobody could see me prayin’ the Rosary. And bein’ that I was a respectable convict, I didn’t do nothin’ to show any kind of weakness. I’d been wild, involved in strikes, riots, and stabbings. And now I’m tryin’ to love the love that’s in my heart. “What do you mean?” I’d ask Mary, afraid to ask someone else, in case they thought I was crazy. “Ah, I’m probably just nuts,” I’d say to myself. “That encounter with God really didn’t happen.” But it happened enough to make me not dare to think it didn’t happen.

  One night I was out prayin’, asking Mary the same question, like I asked her every night: “How do you pray with your heart?” when suddenly the world seemed to stop. Everything got quiet, and I could see real clear. I looked around at these guys walkin’ around in prison involved with chasing this, chasing that, doing this and doing that—but with nothin’. They reminded me of walkin’ dead people, zombies. I’m not a cryin’ type person, but I was in tears, begging for each one of them. Us guys in prison don’t grow up and say, “Well, I think I want to spend the rest of my life behind bars.” The path there usually starts from hurt or pain. Something went terribly wrong somewhere in our lives, and we perpetuated our own hardness, over and over again, the further we got away from grace. It broke my heart that they didn’t know why they was alive, and I felt that they didn’t want to hear about why, so it was hard to say anything to any of ‘em about God.

  I guess that’s how Our Lady was tryin’ to teach me to pray with my heart. Feelin’ sorry for them, I started prayin’, “For this one, for that one . . . and I says, “Why don’t you do somethin’ to these guys? Why don’t you do to them what you did to me? Why don’t you zap ‘em? Why don’t you make them know you’re there?”

  And then I noticed . . . it wasn’t only the guys in the prison, but the guards. If God wasn’t the center of their being, they looked dead. And that really rocked me. It affected me real bad, so I tried to pray more and sacrifice more. I started adding fasting on Mondays and feast days, as well as on Wednesdays and Fridays, so I was really pushin’ it. Some days, when I was really hungry, I’d want to give in and have chicken, or cake, or somethin’ they served in the prison, but I started to understand that I could give it up for love. “I’ll suffer that pain in my stomach for that person,” I says to myself. And when I got tempted to change my mind and say, “Ah, I’m weak, I need to eat this,” somethin’ else in me would say, “Maybe I won’t.” You just learn how to do stuff like that. Our Lady was workin’ in my heart without me even knowin’ it.

  Well, a couple months of this went by, and I walked over to Mass one day where Fr. Hewett had a stack of them newsletters. That’s probably where them little old ladies got ‘em from. Fr. Hewett don’t push nothin’. This guy, he just lets the Holy Spirit work. So after Mass, he says, “I’ve got some of these newsletters if anybody wants them.” It was the same newsletter about Medjugorje that I’d already read. Well, I go up and grab one. Now what possessed me to do that, I don’t know. I don’t ever read anything twice, especially somethin’ I don’t believe. But I brought the newsletter back to the dormitory and read it again. This time, it grabbed me. It touched somethin’ inside.

  So I got curious and started readin’ that paper over and over. The way the kids described Mary was so beautiful. She just oozed love. When it came to Jesus, I’d heard talk of how he loved me and stuff, and I believed he died for me, but I didn’t really get it. My thinkin’ was, “God loves us, and well, maybe if I’m next to decent people, he won’t zap me because he might take out some of them, too, by mistake.” But if they weren’t nearby, I was in trouble. I’d never heard of Our Lady zappin’ nobody, though. You know what I mean? She’s Mom.

  Our Lady would always invite the six kids from Medjugorje to pray, and she’d smile at them and tell them to wear a coat and somethin’ warm on their legs the next day because it would be cold. She was just love. When they described her beautiful blue eyes, I thought, “Man, I wish I could see those eyes.” I didn’t care if they were yellow, purple, or striped, as long as they were her eyes. I wanted them to just pierce me, to cut right through all the garbage that was inside of me, so I could open up and try to love God or somethin’.

  Well, somethin’ in me got stimulated. I went over to Father and says, “Hey Father, what do you think about this Blessed Virgin Mary appearing over there in Medjugorje?”

  Fr. Hewett don’t get moved by every little thing. He’s a regular knock-around guy, so I figured his advice was trustworthy. He said, “Well, I can’t speak for the Church because whatever they say goes, and they haven’t said anything one way or another, but the good thing about it is they haven’t condemned it. I was over in Medjugorje. I heard confessions, saw some pretty profound conversions, and noticed a great sense of peace. Personally, I think that Our Lady is there. As a matter of fact, I’m going again next week.”

  I said, “Oh, yeah?” And I left. As I’m walkin’ around thinkin’ about what he said, I start wonderin’ if I can get some kind of extra holy zap, maybe send somethin’ over there to get blessed. I wanted a healing like people get from water from Lourdes, France—some kind of somethin’ to help me understand that Mary loved me, too, that the things she was sayin’ to those kids, she was sayin’ to me, too. If I could only believe this kind of stuff, believe that I’m loved, that God loves me.

  Then I remembered I had a scapular. My mom had sent it to me in the mail when I lived in Florida about seven or eight years earlier. Mom was always real religious, and while I thank her now, it seemed like she was always tryin’ to shove this kinda stuff down my throat. But I was glad for this scapular; it was cloth, not one of them paper ones, and it had the words, “Whosoever dies wearing this scapular shall not suffer eternal fire.” That sounded pretty good, but when the scapular came, I was livin’ in adultery with a
woman. I put it right on, and that same night it broke. Maybe it didn’t like my situation. Figurin’ it was still good to have, I wrapped up the scapular, tied the strings in a knot, and carried that thing in my pocket for about eight years, even in prison.

  So I reached into my pocket and pulled out this scapular, now with about six pounds of lint attached to it. After cleanin’ it, I went to Fr. Hewett and said, “Look, why don’t you take this over to Medjugorje with you?”

  He said, “Ah, Jim. You don’t understand. At customs they give you a hard time, and I might lose it.”

  But I said, “No, come on. Come on, Father. Give it to Marija. The newsletter says Marija is real spiritual, ya know. Give it to Marija to hold, and maybe Our Lady will get somethin’ from God to give to me on this scapular.”

  He said, “Jim, you can’t even get next to these seers because there are hundreds, sometimes thousands, of people surrounding them.

  “Come on, take it anyway, Father. Try.”

  “All right. Everything over there is blessed by Our Lady, anyway, because she’s there.”

  So he took my scapular over to Medjugorje. In the meantime, while I’m waitin’ for him to come back, I found a scapular investment prayer for the priest to say and a morning offering I could pray in order to live out the scapular stuff—all from the box the little old ladies brought in. I’m figurin’ I’m gonna do this good, ya’ know. Well, he comes back, and he did get next to one of the seers, Vicka. He put the scapular in her hand, and then he had to run her down because I guess she thought it was a gift or somethin’—this broken-looking all balled-up thing.

  I sewed the scapular where the string was broke, took it to Confession and Mass, and says, “Hey, Father, come on. Invest me with this scapular will you? And bless it first.” My mother wouldn’t have sent me nothin’ that wasn’t blessed, but I didn’t think of that then.

  He said, “It’s probably blessed already. Did you make your first Holy Communion in a Catholic school? If so, you probably were invested in it then.”

  I says, “I don’t know if I was or wasn’t.” So we started arguing back and forth. He’s Irish, just like me. Finally, he does it. He invests me with the scapular.

  That week, all of a sudden, I received such a gift of faith. When I read the Bible, it would speak to me. Before that, I had a hard time reading the Gospels and couldn’t believe that Jesus was doin’ all those things. Now I believed. And a love for Our Lady seemed to blossom and grow inside of me. I just wanted to do everything for her.

  My whole life I never knew how to love. I wasn’t the toughest person in the world, but I was willing to hurt somebody before they hurt me, and I projected that. In the prison, some guys, they’ve got this face that looks like you just wanna take it right off the front of their head. I mean, they just got an attitude, ya know what I mean? And they do things . . . well, prison ain’t a holy place, ya know? People step in front of you when there’s a line, which is dumb because if you get mad, you can just choke ‘em. I had a real bad temper, and one guy got on my nerves. Every time I seen this guy, all I wanted to do was hit him.

  One day after the scapular thing, I seen him, and he was cuttin’ up in the line askin’ for some cake, and other guys were sayin’, “Hey you ain’t gettin’ nothin’,” but with words that weren’t so nice.

  Then I said, “Hey, you want mine?” And I’m thinkin’, “What possessed me to say that? Because if I give it to him, I’m gonna smash it into his face.”

  “What, you don’t want it?” he says.

  I says, “Nah, you can have it,” and he took it.

  When I did that for Our Lady, all that tension between him and me just eased. He even acted different around me, and when I seen him after that, I started thinkin’ of him as a human being havin’ the same problems that got me where I was at.

  Our Lady kept on givin’ me this desire to love her. I wanted to do all kinds of things for her. There were some goofy things I did, too. I read about the kids in Fatima, how Jacinta and them was mortifying their senses and all that kinda stuff. And these kids suffered. I mean they really suffered, voluntarily, for poor sinners. When they played, they’d get these leaves with stickers and make ‘em pop in their hands, and if they got stuck, they’d offer that up. Jacinta had a little rope she tied around her, and from the day she put it on, it had blood stains all over it. These little kids was doin’ that kinda stuff, and I felt like a real heel. I wanted to do more stuff for Our Lady, so when I heard about a hair shirt, I went down to the carpenter shop where I worked in the prison. We had this radial arm saw with big teeth in it, and when it cut through the wood, it didn’t put out sawdust; it produced long thin splinters. When nobody was lookin’, I’d take a handful of splinters and put ‘em all down my shirt. So now I had a hair shirt. And I’d stand there with my arms stickin’ out, like a little kid bundled up for snow. I was the lead carpenter who had to handle most of the major construction they had at the prison, and I’d try to go to work, but I couldn’t move.

  So I went to the priest one day and asked him if it was all right to mortify my senses. He asked me what I was doin’ and did it make me feel uncharitable to people. I says, “No, I just offer all this stuff up, ya know?” Then he asked if I could do my work, and I says, “No, not really. You can’t move around with all them splinters stickin’ in you.” He advised I cut it out. What a relief.

  And then Father brought me a book called The Queen of Peace Visits Medjugorje by Fr. Joseph Pelletier. I opened this book, and when I seen pictures of these kids lookin’ up at somethin’, it just went through me; there was no doubt in my mind that those kids were seein’ somethin’ real, just by the looks on their faces. I had to put the book down and take a deep breath. “Wow,” I thought. “Not only does God really exist, but he loves us.” That’s what got me. “He LOVES us. US!—right here and now, and he’s lettin’ us know by sending us the Blessed Virgin Mary.” That thought went all over me and through me and made my hair stand up. I ate that book up. I was really on fire. For a month, as a matter of fact, I was hoping and expecting Mary would appear above the prison. I walked around lookin’ up and got a stiff neck. I wanted it so bad.

  But I didn’t know how to get the word out about God. I’d get somebody to show up to the Rosary group every once in a while, but they wouldn’t come back. In fact, they would avoid me when they seen me on Saturday—”Time for the Queen of Peace prayer group.” My friends knew I was really out of character and thought I was nuts.

  Meanwhile, I was growing in love for God through what Our Lady was doin’, and I was prayin’ hard to learn to love Jesus with all my heart, like he deserved to be loved. I wanted to serve him without fear and to understand his love more deeply in my soul so that I could say, even when I messed up, “I believe that you love me.” I searched through a bunch of novenas and found one to St. Joseph. He’s a carpenter, and so am I, so I figured I’d ask for his help. I started prayin’ to him that day, and when I counted out the nine days for the novena, I saw that it would end on the “Feast of St. Joseph, Husband of Mary.” “Wow!” I thought. “What a coincidence.”

  St. Joseph’s feast day was on a Saturday, so that day I went over to the Rosary group with the little old ladies. This other volunteer, a young fella named Bob comes in with a little bag of books and says, “Here. My neighbor sent these in.” Usually, this neighbor sent in stuff like Mass bulletins from 1939, but I grabbed the bag ‘cause I was readin’ whatever I could. The first book I pulled out was a little black one called The Secrets of Mary by St. Louis de Montfort. All I seen was some “thee’s” and “thou’s,” so I put that old archaic English right down. Well, this book, it drew me. I kept wantin’ to pick it up; then I’d put it down; then I’d pick it up, again. There was like a magnet on it.

  I went back to the dormitory at “count time” when everybody is present, and again, this little black book draws me to it sayin’, “READ ME!” Finally, I says, “Man, what is this thing?” I open it up and s
tart to read, and on the first page of the first chapter, it said, “The Secrets of Mary and the doctrine of the slavery of Love.” Somehow, I knew with my whole heart that St. Joseph had come through for me. In my little pea brain, I didn’t understand it, but my soul just leapt. My hair was standin’ on end. It continued, “Predestinate soul, I am about to share with you a secret that the Most High has taught me that I have been unable to find in any book written anywhere.” I said, “Wow!” Those words just went all through me. I didn’t even know what he was talkin’ about. I had no idea this was about a consecration to Mary, or even what a consecration was, but my soul knew because my whole body was on fire. Even now when I think about it, my hair stands straight up.

  A little further on in the book, St. Louis de Montfort said somethin’ like, “Before you get carried away, get on your knees and say the Veni Creator Blest and the Ave Maris Stella.” I’d never heard of these prayers, but I looked in the back of the book and found ‘em. I’m not an emotional person, but this moved me. All around me, there’s people in the dormitory, and now he’s askin’ me to get on my knees in front of everybody. I ain’t never got on my knees to pray in front of nobody, but I wasn’t gonna blow this. St. Louis said, “Get on your knees,” so I got on my knees. Tryin’ hard to see the words while wiping my eyes from cryin’, I managed to say the prayers.

  After I read The Secrets of Mary, consecrating myself to her was now the most important thing in my life, but I didn’t know how to. I wanted to make this consecration immediately. I mean NOW, yesterday! To me, it was like becomin’ ordained a priest or somethin’. I wanted to give my life to Our Lady—especially in light of the faith God had given me through the grace of Our Lady of Medjugorje. I wanted to belong to her and give myself totally to Jesus through her.