"As you all know, I have wanted to tell my story for some time now. For years I have hesitated putting pen to paper, allowing myself one excuse after another, justifying my inaction. At first I didn’t want to write because I did not want to hurt the people in my life. Telling my story means telling some very hard truths about my family and my Church. Even though I have experienced some of my deepest pain because of my family, I forgive them. I also knew that telling my story would involve bringing to light some of the darkest times of my religious life. I would have to talk about sexual abuse I suffered at the hands of priests and continued mistreatment from a religious machine obsessed with covering up such abuse.
Even though my experiences were real and could help many who suffered in the Church as I had, I did not want my “religious” community hurt by the truth of who I am and what I have experienced. I didn’t want my story misconstrued as an attack on the Catholic Church that I love, but I realized it was precisely a veil of secrecy that caused much of the pain and dysfunction in my life. Imposed secrecy is rarely healthy. It is a form of slavery.
I grew up learning to keep a certain reputation in the community. No matter what kinds of struggles our family would go through, it was forbidden for us to speak of it to anyone. God forbid someone outside the immediate family think we were weak, poor, in need of help---or worse, that we were not who we pretended to be. I grew up with an innate fear of judgment. I assumed that it was never appropriate to ask anyone for help because no one would help, instead they would talk about me behind my back and take advantage of my weakness (of course I know now that these ideas are far from the truth) As a result I never felt safe to be myself. I felt obligated to put forth a staged personality, predetermined as my official character. So, I was the perfect snack for a hungry priest abuser because I was trained by my upbringing to keep my mouth shut when I was told to. I was to play the obedient son and obedient victim. They cast me that way. I hated the character that I felt responsible to play. I just hated him.
My character was supposed to be the perfect son, the perfect student, the perfect boy in the perfect family. He was never afraid. He never needed help. He was never scared. He never did anything wrong. The perfect son never questioned his parents. The perfect son didn’t really have his own personality; instead he was a compact version of his parents. The perfect son will drop over before tarnishing mom or dad’s reputation as the perfect parents in the perfect family. The perfect student is never in trouble at school and he is at the top of his class. The perfect boy is the all-star athlete and most popular kid in town whose friends are the other perfect boys and girls. Needless-to-say I did not hit the perfect mark in any of those areas. In fact I was often the opposite of what my character was supposed to be. Even though by all standards I was a loving and understanding child, I didn’t fit the role I was expected to play in the family of “perfect” characters.
The problem with “perfect” families is that they usually are so desperate to maintain their reputation that the way they deal with any slight imperfection is to judge and reject it. Anything less than perfect in a perfect family is the enemy; it is the rotten apple that if not cast away could spoil the rest by its proximity. Another problem with perfect families is that their definition of perfection is usually far from reality. After all, perfect is as perfect does, right? Since they are the perfect family, perfect must be whatever they are and everyone else is not. So the enemy becomes anyone who doesn’t do as they do and think as they think, period.
Often the perfect family becomes so obsessed with identifying and casting out rotten apples that they find little time to live a real life. To my family I was one of those rotten apples, though they tried very hard not to let the news of my rottenness slip into the community. After working so hard to introduce my character to the world, it would be pretty hard to get distance from the character they created. Once it became clear that I was not that character, my perfect family set out to find any way they could to write me out of the story without diminishing their perfection. They had to find some way of throwing me out that would make them look heroic for ridding their admirable family of such a vile interloper. I grew up believing that I was that rotten apple spoiling my family’s bunch. I know now that I wasn’t. I was a quite different apple, but not a rotten one.
I tried to find peace and acceptance in my local faith community. At first I found it. Even though my family was not spiritual---or even a church-going family---I was. I grew up only a couple blocks from my parish church so it was easy for me to begin attending mass regularly from about age six. I went to Catholic school and was very active in the parish community from a young age. Priests and Religious Sisters gave me the attention and love I didn’t get from my family and this attention nurtured a vocation to the priesthood that I felt from a very early age. Unfortunately, I found that this love was even more tenuous than the feigned love I received from my family. The Church placed even more burdens of expectation on my young identity. Instead of the unconditional love of God promised in the slogans, I was expected to play a character there too.
By the time I reached my teenage years I was so torn between the false self my family expected and the false self my Church expected, that I didn’t realize that the real me was being drown in the process of trying to be what everyone else expected of me. I spent my high school and college-aged years in the middle of a tug-of-war between two characters who didn’t really exist.
In my early twenties I threw myself into a cauldron of un-identity that boiled over into the lives of my dearest friends and became a ticking bomb in many of my intimate relationships. I unconsciously clung to anyone who had a strong personal identity because I didn’t really know who I was. This aspect to my relationships meant that most were unhealthy and ended in shambles, which in-turn produced feelings of self-hatred resulting from a trained instinct to blame myself anytime a relationship failed. I would spend nights crying over lost friendships and broken relationships blaming myself for failing to play the role the other person needed. Because I had no idea who the real me was, I never gave thought to the possibility that if I just let myself be real, people would love me for who I really was. Spiraling down a dark pit of internal emptiness led to accepted, unnecessary personal suffering. The only role I was honestly good at playing was the role of victim. As you can imagine, my adeptness at being the victim left me wide open for many who were looking for someone to use.
I quickly learned that the willing victim was a role I was good at playing."
I grew up learning to keep a certain reputation in the community. No matter what kinds of struggles our family would go through, it was forbidden for us to speak of it to anyone. God forbid someone outside the immediate family think we were weak, poor, in need of help---or worse, that we were not who we pretended to be. I grew up with an innate fear of judgment. I assumed that it was never appropriate to ask anyone for help because no one would help, instead they would talk about me behind my back and take advantage of my weakness (of course I know now that these ideas are far from the truth) As a result I never felt safe to be myself. I felt obligated to put forth a staged personality, predetermined as my official character. So, I was the perfect snack for a hungry priest abuser because I was trained by my upbringing to keep my mouth shut when I was told to. I was to play the obedient son and obedient victim. They cast me that way. I hated the character that I felt responsible to play. I just hated him.
My character was supposed to be the perfect son, the perfect student, the perfect boy in the perfect family. He was never afraid. He never needed help. He was never scared. He never did anything wrong. The perfect son never questioned his parents. The perfect son didn’t really have his own personality; instead he was a compact version of his parents. The perfect son will drop over before tarnishing mom or dad’s reputation as the perfect parents in the perfect family. The perfect student is never in trouble at school and he is at the top of his class. The perfect boy is the all-star athlete and most popular kid in town whose friends are the other perfect boys and girls. Needless-to-say I did not hit the perfect mark in any of those areas. In fact I was often the opposite of what my character was supposed to be. Even though by all standards I was a loving and understanding child, I didn’t fit the role I was expected to play in the family of “perfect” characters.
The problem with “perfect” families is that they usually are so desperate to maintain their reputation that the way they deal with any slight imperfection is to judge and reject it. Anything less than perfect in a perfect family is the enemy; it is the rotten apple that if not cast away could spoil the rest by its proximity. Another problem with perfect families is that their definition of perfection is usually far from reality. After all, perfect is as perfect does, right? Since they are the perfect family, perfect must be whatever they are and everyone else is not. So the enemy becomes anyone who doesn’t do as they do and think as they think, period.
Often the perfect family becomes so obsessed with identifying and casting out rotten apples that they find little time to live a real life. To my family I was one of those rotten apples, though they tried very hard not to let the news of my rottenness slip into the community. After working so hard to introduce my character to the world, it would be pretty hard to get distance from the character they created. Once it became clear that I was not that character, my perfect family set out to find any way they could to write me out of the story without diminishing their perfection. They had to find some way of throwing me out that would make them look heroic for ridding their admirable family of such a vile interloper. I grew up believing that I was that rotten apple spoiling my family’s bunch. I know now that I wasn’t. I was a quite different apple, but not a rotten one.
I tried to find peace and acceptance in my local faith community. At first I found it. Even though my family was not spiritual---or even a church-going family---I was. I grew up only a couple blocks from my parish church so it was easy for me to begin attending mass regularly from about age six. I went to Catholic school and was very active in the parish community from a young age. Priests and Religious Sisters gave me the attention and love I didn’t get from my family and this attention nurtured a vocation to the priesthood that I felt from a very early age. Unfortunately, I found that this love was even more tenuous than the feigned love I received from my family. The Church placed even more burdens of expectation on my young identity. Instead of the unconditional love of God promised in the slogans, I was expected to play a character there too.
By the time I reached my teenage years I was so torn between the false self my family expected and the false self my Church expected, that I didn’t realize that the real me was being drown in the process of trying to be what everyone else expected of me. I spent my high school and college-aged years in the middle of a tug-of-war between two characters who didn’t really exist.
In my early twenties I threw myself into a cauldron of un-identity that boiled over into the lives of my dearest friends and became a ticking bomb in many of my intimate relationships. I unconsciously clung to anyone who had a strong personal identity because I didn’t really know who I was. This aspect to my relationships meant that most were unhealthy and ended in shambles, which in-turn produced feelings of self-hatred resulting from a trained instinct to blame myself anytime a relationship failed. I would spend nights crying over lost friendships and broken relationships blaming myself for failing to play the role the other person needed. Because I had no idea who the real me was, I never gave thought to the possibility that if I just let myself be real, people would love me for who I really was. Spiraling down a dark pit of internal emptiness led to accepted, unnecessary personal suffering. The only role I was honestly good at playing was the role of victim. As you can imagine, my adeptness at being the victim left me wide open for many who were looking for someone to use.
I quickly learned that the willing victim was a role I was good at playing."
...
"Family and Church convinced me to think that because I was such a horrible disappointment---and because they determined that I had nothing of value to offer in any way---my life was of no use to anyone. If my life really was useless, who would be interested in hearing about it? I still believed that I was as useless as my family and my priests said, but I knew so many people who were burdened with the same pain that I thought maybe my useless story could help other people know that their pain wasn’t their fault. I thought maybe I could tell my story and convince some other suffering kid that he wasn’t useless even if I couldn’t yet convince myself of that.
It wasn’t until I realized that my fears were not unique and neither was my pain that I chose to start preaching again. I realized that I couldn’t help anyone until I decided to help myself. After all, even if it would be painful for some to hear my story it was certainly more painful to live it. I realized that countless people have lived it. My story is really the story of so many. Well, I’m sure mine has a few more bishops and a couple more drag queens than yours, but I’m sure you will identify with my emotions. Like many people I am trying to heal from abuse and escape a history of dysfunction. Like many people I tried to heal and escape by running away. I tried to run away from my childhood, from my pain, from my darkest secrets and most humiliating experiences. For a long time all I could do was run. What was so confusing is that as much as I wanted to run---and even after running for so long---something would always call me back to that pain.
What was that thing that would call me back to the pain? Why would I always find myself back in the mire? Damn it! Why? Why couldn’t I just get away from it? I read books, listened to experts, sought counseling, but no one could identify that incessant call to return to places of pain. No one could tell me what that call was and why it had such power over me. No one could explain why this call had the power to stop me dead in my tracks and make me run back to the places of pain that killed my childhood. I wanted to just leave those pains in some distant and forgotten past, but this damned voice wouldn’t let me. Counselors told me that it was a certain emotional pain that had a hold of me and I had to overcome it. Others said it was my own guilt and regret and I had to leave it in the past, put a period on it and more forward. For years I could not to reach out for help and when I finally felt strong enough to do that, no one had the answers I needed.
The abuse from family and priests lead me down a path of isolation, denial, unhealthy relationships and a string of trust and abandonment issues and, most painful of all, sexual identity confusion. After a couple attempts to end it all and an intervention from some good friends, I felt powerless to escape the pain of my past. Friends tried their best to comfort me but since for the first time in my life I was able to talk about this pain and allow myself to fall apart and experience it openly; many of them didn’t know how to deal with my seemingly unexpected emotional shipwreck. I finally decided that it was up to me to dive into myself. I had to find my own answers. I had to heal my own pain. I decided that the only way to get control over my future was to get control over my past. I realized that in order to have future peace I had to find a way to end past suffering…but how? No matter what I tried I still found myself a prisoner of this voice from the past calling me to that pain. "
...
"I had to identify this voice. I had to understand it. I had to almost negotiate with it in order to convince it to let me live in peace. At first I approached it like it was my enemy. After all, it was causing me pain so I tried to conquer it, destroy it. It only got stronger. I hated it. I hated it as much as I hated that character I was forced to play as a child. It wasn’t until I searched that hatred that I realized who the voice was. It was him. It was that little boy. It was the character of my childhood that everyone hated. It was the little boy who was never permitted to live, but who never really died either. He was stuck in some torturous existential experiment. He was trapped and I was the only one who could free him. Sure my family created him and rejected him…priests used and abused him, but I was the one who ran away from him and sentenced him to seeming silence. He was still living in the pain of that almost existence and I was the only one who could go back there and find him. No one else knew where I’d hidden him and it had been so long since I’d seen him and I’d run so far away from him that I couldn’t remember where he was either.
I knew that I had to find him and the only way to do it was to retrace my steps. So I began to do just that. As I started my journey, it was so hard. I had to confront every mistake I ever made. I had to relive every painful moment. I had to take responsibility for all of the pain I had caused other people. So many times I wanted to stop and just die, but I could hear him crying out for me. As I got closer to him my pain became more intense but I kept going. He was stuck, alone, in a place where no one wanted him. I was his only hope. If I abandoned him, he would be doomed to a hell of rejection for all eternity.
After a long emotionally draining search, I found him. There he was, six years old and huddled in the corner of my old bedroom crying and waiting for me. I ran to him and fell to the floor and hugged him as tightly as I could. I told him how much I loved him and how much I’d missed him. I told him how sorry I was for leaving him and for all the suffering he’d experienced. I told him it was all right now and he could finally live and be happy.
After all I’d gone through to find him I still didn’t get it. I thought that it was my six year old self. I thought that I had discovered my own voice…a voice of past pain and rejection. He looked at me and told me that he didn’t want to live because if he went on living, I couldn’t. He told me that he could have let himself die long ago and he would have gone to a place of eternal peace but instead he chose to live on in suffering and pain. When I asked him why he didn’t just let himself die in peace, he told me that he couldn’t bear to die until he knew that I was okay. He knew that the only way I could heal and live a happy life was if I heard him tell me that he forgives me and that he loves me. I searched and struggled to find him because I thought I was his savior, but he was mine and he suffered so that I could be free. He had to let me find him so that I could know the truth. He had to show me the real person behind the character. But it wasn’t my character, it was God. The image I saw in my mind looked like a six year old boy, but the speaker, the voice, was the voice of God in my heart.
It was at that moment that I experienced God face-to-face. He knew my pain because it was a shared experience. Just as I was cast as an unrealistic character, so was he. The God of organized religion has become a false idol. The God of the altar is not the living God of the heart. Once I could see the real person behind the myth and lies, I identified with my savior in an intensely personal way. After years of studying the complexities of Roman theology and gaining no clarity, I realized that God comes to us when the time is right for our healing. No course of study can force God’s own hand. For years I could not understand how suffering could possibly be a healthy way to attain grace. How could a loving God ask us to suffer? How could a loving God cause his own Son to suffer such horrific pains? No Roman authority was ever able to make sense of this perplexing doctrine of belief.
Only the personal experience of God gave me spiritual clarity. God suffered and suffers still not because his passion and death are a ransom for our sin but because we are born into a world of confusion and we cannot easily find our way to peace. He suffers and sometimes in an empty effort because so many of God’s children fail to find him and in failing to find him they fail to find happiness and fulfillment in life. Our heart speaks the voice of God’s love and forgiveness. God is the still small cry of self acceptance planted deep inside us---planted by our loving Creator. If we listen it can grow into the mighty tree of life that each of us is meant to be.
God is not the lifeless statute in the shrine. He is not the doctrinal God of denominational belief. He is not the static word on the pages of your bible. God is the living, speaking connection between us and the Eternal Love. He is the voice of love in our hearts. He is the seed of the divine in each of life’s children.
We carry God into the world when we are endowed with life and we either nurture him by our life or suffocate him by our failure to live. Once I found him in the deepest recesses of my pain and indentified with him, I found the courage to accept his forgiveness of my sins and with God’s own grace I forgave myself of the pains I inflicted on my own life. I could then give God the peace of existence in the world by living a happy life because he gave me freedom by waiting for me and suffering for me. I realized that each of us is the beloved disciple who stands at the foot of the cross."
"I had to identify this voice. I had to understand it. I had to almost negotiate with it in order to convince it to let me live in peace. At first I approached it like it was my enemy. After all, it was causing me pain so I tried to conquer it, destroy it. It only got stronger. I hated it. I hated it as much as I hated that character I was forced to play as a child. It wasn’t until I searched that hatred that I realized who the voice was. It was him. It was that little boy. It was the character of my childhood that everyone hated. It was the little boy who was never permitted to live, but who never really died either. He was stuck in some torturous existential experiment. He was trapped and I was the only one who could free him. Sure my family created him and rejected him…priests used and abused him, but I was the one who ran away from him and sentenced him to seeming silence. He was still living in the pain of that almost existence and I was the only one who could go back there and find him. No one else knew where I’d hidden him and it had been so long since I’d seen him and I’d run so far away from him that I couldn’t remember where he was either.
I knew that I had to find him and the only way to do it was to retrace my steps. So I began to do just that. As I started my journey, it was so hard. I had to confront every mistake I ever made. I had to relive every painful moment. I had to take responsibility for all of the pain I had caused other people. So many times I wanted to stop and just die, but I could hear him crying out for me. As I got closer to him my pain became more intense but I kept going. He was stuck, alone, in a place where no one wanted him. I was his only hope. If I abandoned him, he would be doomed to a hell of rejection for all eternity.
After a long emotionally draining search, I found him. There he was, six years old and huddled in the corner of my old bedroom crying and waiting for me. I ran to him and fell to the floor and hugged him as tightly as I could. I told him how much I loved him and how much I’d missed him. I told him how sorry I was for leaving him and for all the suffering he’d experienced. I told him it was all right now and he could finally live and be happy.
After all I’d gone through to find him I still didn’t get it. I thought that it was my six year old self. I thought that I had discovered my own voice…a voice of past pain and rejection. He looked at me and told me that he didn’t want to live because if he went on living, I couldn’t. He told me that he could have let himself die long ago and he would have gone to a place of eternal peace but instead he chose to live on in suffering and pain. When I asked him why he didn’t just let himself die in peace, he told me that he couldn’t bear to die until he knew that I was okay. He knew that the only way I could heal and live a happy life was if I heard him tell me that he forgives me and that he loves me. I searched and struggled to find him because I thought I was his savior, but he was mine and he suffered so that I could be free. He had to let me find him so that I could know the truth. He had to show me the real person behind the character. But it wasn’t my character, it was God. The image I saw in my mind looked like a six year old boy, but the speaker, the voice, was the voice of God in my heart.
It was at that moment that I experienced God face-to-face. He knew my pain because it was a shared experience. Just as I was cast as an unrealistic character, so was he. The God of organized religion has become a false idol. The God of the altar is not the living God of the heart. Once I could see the real person behind the myth and lies, I identified with my savior in an intensely personal way. After years of studying the complexities of Roman theology and gaining no clarity, I realized that God comes to us when the time is right for our healing. No course of study can force God’s own hand. For years I could not understand how suffering could possibly be a healthy way to attain grace. How could a loving God ask us to suffer? How could a loving God cause his own Son to suffer such horrific pains? No Roman authority was ever able to make sense of this perplexing doctrine of belief.
Only the personal experience of God gave me spiritual clarity. God suffered and suffers still not because his passion and death are a ransom for our sin but because we are born into a world of confusion and we cannot easily find our way to peace. He suffers and sometimes in an empty effort because so many of God’s children fail to find him and in failing to find him they fail to find happiness and fulfillment in life. Our heart speaks the voice of God’s love and forgiveness. God is the still small cry of self acceptance planted deep inside us---planted by our loving Creator. If we listen it can grow into the mighty tree of life that each of us is meant to be.
God is not the lifeless statute in the shrine. He is not the doctrinal God of denominational belief. He is not the static word on the pages of your bible. God is the living, speaking connection between us and the Eternal Love. He is the voice of love in our hearts. He is the seed of the divine in each of life’s children.
We carry God into the world when we are endowed with life and we either nurture him by our life or suffocate him by our failure to live. Once I found him in the deepest recesses of my pain and indentified with him, I found the courage to accept his forgiveness of my sins and with God’s own grace I forgave myself of the pains I inflicted on my own life. I could then give God the peace of existence in the world by living a happy life because he gave me freedom by waiting for me and suffering for me. I realized that each of us is the beloved disciple who stands at the foot of the cross."
