Good Friday

For Good Friday, I wanted to share a moment of spiritual insight.

March 1987, I joined a religious retreat in my senior year at St. Joseph's University.

We went to Wernersville, Pennsylvania, to a monastery run by the Jesuits. It should have been freezing cold, but for the whole week, we had beautiful, warm, sunny weather. Until then, I'd been emotionally isolated. I learned about happiness and empathy that week.

On the last day, I went to a service in the chapel. Suddenly, I saw Jesus on the cross in a new way. I was struck by the pain and suffering depicted by this sculpture. I could envision the reality of a person being nailed to a piece of wood and hung up to die. It was awful!

I plunged into sadness at the thought.

Then it turned around with another thought. It just popped into my head.

"Jesus doesn't want us to be sad. He wants us to be happy. He just wants us to know how important it is to love one another."

My spirit exploded with a cold wave of joy. I went to talk to a priest I'd been chatting with throughout the week, and I shook with cold chills. He touched my shoulder and said, "It's like you've been touched by the Holy Spirit."

For the next few months, I lived my life raw. All the usual barriers and devices I employed to protect myself had been stripped away. I went on another student retreat to a site run by nuns in Long Branch NJ -- on the beach -- and I shared my new insights.

But I was not equipped to switch from isolated loner to living with such raw emotions. I had missed out on years of lessons about appropriate behaviors in friendships and relationships. I didn't know how to keep my feelings in check. Attempts to connect to a woman I cared about ended very badly. Obviously, I had gone off the tracks.  As I sorted it through in the months that followed, I realized my mistake was in mixing up the joy of my spiritual journey with the emotional needs I had.

I had to separate the spiritual needs from the emotional. Somehow, I needed to back out and try again.

After I moved to Corning, I stopped going to church. I didn't stop because I was bored with it or angry at God or didn't believe.  I still loved God. I stopped going because I had a lot to sort out.

I knew I believed in God. So, I accepted that, and then waited to see what else life would reveal to me.

I had to sort out the emotional needs first. In Corning, my experience with women continued as a series of crushes I never did anything about until it was far too late.

Finally, one night as I drove from Elmira to Corning, I listened to a psychologist's radio call-in show. A woman on the line was bemoaning the fact that she would never find the perfect man for her, and the host had a great response: "It's not about finding the perfect mate. It's about having fun. If you can have fun with someone, then everything else will follow."

OOOOOHHHHHHHHH!

I got it. This started a year in which I had just enough emotional growth to be ready to meet Amy. That all eventually led to marriage, kids, family and our life together.

In the meantime, my spiritual journey continued in a sideways direction. I was not actively seeking insights about God, but as  newspaper reporter, I found myself visiting every kind of worship service. As part of news coverage, I attended services of all denominations of Christianity, in synagogues, mosques and at a Unitarian center. As I met with and interviewed a variety of people, I learned about other faiths, Judaism, Buddhism, Islam and Protestant Christianity.

I saw a commonality in these faiths. Love of God and your fellow person, kindness, mercy were all there in each one, so long as the person expressing it held to their core beliefs. There were others who  used their faith to bully and belittle others, but these are not the true ambassadors of the higher power.

Ultimately, this would lead to a conclusion.

God is a diamond. A diamond has many, many sides. You approach that diamond from the direction that works for you.

It was the first Christmas after Jack was born that I began my journey back to the church. Christmas seemed so empty without God, and I saw no point in having our kids celebrate a holiday without understanding its meaning. I wanted them to have meaning in their lives. To realize there is something beyond themselves that is worthwhile.

With Jack as a toddler, I started going back to Church. It was not easy to get back to that rhythm. I had to sort through a lot of emotions. When we moved back to Upstate New York, I ended up in a night job as a copy editor. I hated the hours and it made it difficult to get up on Sunday mornings to go to church. I think I subconsciously hated God for that situation, so I stopped going to Church for a while.

In 2004, I began having chest pains. I went for a series of tests, and in May 2004 was scheduled for a heart catheter. This is when they poke a long needle into the big vein that runs through your groin and run it up into your heart to find out -- a possibly fix -- what was wrong.

The night before, I was very worried. Jack was 4 years old, and we were expecting a new baby boy in June. I prayed to God. I asked to be a part of his plan. "Let me raise these two boys and help them grow into good men."

The next day, I lay on a table and they injected me with valium. Then they inserted the needle up into my heart. The doctor -- a Muslim from Pakistan, by the way -- worked silently and I felt nothing. After a while, he tapped me on a shoulder and said, "I found nothing I could fix. There is nothing wrong." He gave me a clean bill of health.

What he did find was interesting. Across the surface of the heart is supposed to be three arteries. I had been born with only two.

God made me that way. He had planned this all along, just to get my attention. So that I would know he wanted me to be a part of his plan.

It was at Liam's baptism that I felt I had fully returned to the church. Yes, this is the approach to God that works for me.

A couple of years ago, I sat in the church pew waiting for services to begin, frantically trying to write out a check for my monthly donation. I thought to myself, "Yes, I am giving money. But I don't volunteer. ... Ok, maybe I will volunteer for something, but only if someone asks me."

Within 30 seconds, I felt a tap on my shoulder.

The head usher, a gentleman named Bill, stood next to me. "Could you help with the collections today?"

WOW!

Well played, God. I've helped with the collections at that mass since then.

I suppose someone else would read all this and say this is all just coincidence and luck. But I choose to see the influence of God in my life and the world. I see it as a positive force, but it needs our help and it needs to be aided with kindness. He just wants us to know how important it is to love one another.

So, my journey continues.