All of my life I have been seeking the Holy Experience. All of my life I have known that the Holy Experience would reveal everything. Every-thing about God, everything about life, and everything about me. The only questions for me have been, what is the Holy Experience, and where can I find it?
Those questions have been asked by people all over the world since the beginning of time.
Perhaps you have asked those questions, too. This series of blogs upcoming in the days ahead is the short story of how I found my answers. By telling you this story, perhaps I can help you to find your answers, too.
I hope you will forgive me, then, if I place before you here some brief narratives of my life. I know that many of you have read one or more of my previous books, and so you may already have a few of these facts and details. But if you will indulge me, I want to create a context here, in this book, within which the remainder of the messages placed here might be considered and experienced. And from time to time a brief ex-cursion into my own past may prove instructive, even if, for you, it is a revisiting of information you already have about me.
I began my search for the Holy Experience by looking where one might be expected to look. I began by looking to religion. It is entirely un-derstandable that I would do that. I was born into a family that believed in religion as a means of getting to heaven. I was raised a Roman Catholic, and by age seven I had a deep and abiding faith in God. I did not doubt for a moment God’s existence or God’s benevolence.
By age 10 I also did not doubt God’s wrath.
I was not taught much about God’s wrath at home. In fact, I was taught absolutely nothing about it. I think now, as I look back on it, that my mother did not believe in it. If my father did, he bowed to my mother’s wishes not to “tell the kids about it” until it was time.
It was when I was sent to parochial school—St. Ignatius Elementary in Milwaukee—that I learned about a God who could become angry. It was there that I learned about the Ten Commandments. It was there that I learned about sin and punishment. It was there that I learned how to make a Perfect Act of Contrition (“Oh, my God, I am heartily sorry for having offended Thee…”) in case I was in a car accident and found myself near death, or for some other reason discovered myself facing Judgment Day at an inopportune moment, not having gone to Confession for a while…
Confession was a big thing to me. We were told at St. Ignatius to go to Confession at least once a week. Saturday was the day set aside in our parish, as it is in most, so that one could receive Holy Communion at Mass on Sunday.
This is where the idea of my own imperfection first came up, as I recall. This is where I picked up the thought that my soul must be “clean” before God would allow me to receive Him under my roof.
Until then I never had any doubt that all I had to do if I wanted God near me as to call out to Him. He would always be there, Mom told me, and I believed her. How could Mom be wrong about a thing like that? How could Mom be wrong about anything?
Then I got to St. Ignatius and the nuns told me that, well, it wasn’t exactly like that. God wants to come to me whenever I call to Him, they assured me, but God cannot be received by an impure soul. Who has an impure soul? I asked. All of us, I was told. We all have impure souls.
None of us are worthy of receiving God into our lives.
How can we become worthy? I desperately wanted to know. I’d thought that God would come to us always. In fact, I’d been taught by my Mom that God was with us always, and that all we had to do to receive God’s help and blessing in any moment was to call out to the God who was Always There, and that help would be ours. Now I was being told, “well, not exactly…”
I had to be worthy of receiving God under my roof. And the problem was, I was born unworthy. It was at St. Ignatius that I learned about Original Sin, and about how I was a sinner every day, and about how God could not come into my soul if I was a sinner, but not to be dismayed, because God could forgive me my sins, and then come into my soul—but first, I had to confess them.
God could not forgive sins that were not confessed. Hence, the Sac-rament of Confession was created by the Most Holy Roman Catholic Church as a means to Salvation. If we confessed our sins, God would for-give them, rendering our souls pure again, wiping the slate clean, as it were. We could then go to Communion. We could receive the living God into our lives through consuming the literal flesh of Christ, who was God’s son and who died for our sins.
Confession, as you might now be able to see, suddenly became very important to me. I went as often as I could, the better to make sure that I had no sins on my soul should death come knocking at my door.
As a child I was nervous about this. You may think that I am kid-ding here, or exaggerating a little, but I’m not. I clearly remember being afraid to go to sleep at night, especially if I knew that I had been a par-ticularly bad boy that day. If I had talked back to Mom, quarreled with my brother, or in some other way had behaved inappropriately, I earnestly prayed as I squeezed shut my frightened eyes…
Now I lay me down to sleep.
I pray the Lord my soul to keep.
And if I die before I wake,
I pray the Lord my soul to take.
I hoped that my earnestness would earn me what my behavior had not.
Part of my nervousness stemmed from the fact that I was not sure which behaviors really offended God enough to keep me out of heaven forever (dooming me to everlasting torture in hell), which would send me to purgatory for only a temporary (if painful) period of exclusion, and which might be overlooked altogether.
(Were any overlooked? That was a question I remember asking. Did God overlook anything? Was my every thought, word, and deed to be judged? The answers I was given led me to believe this was the case. Who wouldn’t be nervous under those conditions?)
And so, I tried very hard to be holy. To be holy, I believed, was to be without sin. It was to live a life without offending God.
Thus, I went to Mass several times a week. I went to Confession of-ten. I prayed to God every night. I walked around the playground with a crucifix tucked in my belt. I became an altar boy. I memorized every prayer there was to memorize. Not just the Our Father and the Hail Mary, but the Glory Be, the Act of Contrition, and the Apostle’s Creed. And I had de-termined in the 7th grade that I was going to become a priest.
I was going all the way.
My search for the Holy Experience had begun.