sleep, but was unable to do so. So I stayed up, thinking about my life and how I had arrived at that moment, praying to a God I had met earlier in the day.
My childhood was, to say the least, troubled and difficult. My parents were Russian immigrants who had escaped from the Soviet Union in the ’50s. Neither had believed in the Communist system, and both had dreamed of a life of freedom in America. In many ways, this is why they fell in love, or it was, in some way, one of the primary reasons they ended up together, for never in my life did I ever see any real love exchanged between them. Their fathers both fought in and died in World War II. My mother’s father was taken prisoner near Raseiniai and died in a German POW camp, and my father’s father froze to death outside of Leningrad. Their mothers both worked in factories near Daugavpils, and both were brutalized by German occupiers in the early stages of the war. My mother’s mother had a child by a German as a result of a rape, and my father’s mother was branded a sympathizer as a result of being forced to work as a prostitute servicing German soldiers. After the war, they were shunned by their neighbors and constantly harassed by the KGB. They were often taken in and held for indeterminate amounts of time at local prisons, and were denied the same rights as others who had suffered during the war. Also, because of this situation, neither of my parents was allowed to attend a decent school, or had a chance to become anything more than a basic service worker. They held jobs as cleaning people at a tank factory, where they met, and six months later they fled to Finland, initially leaving with four other workers from the factory. Though neither would ever discuss what happened during the actual escape, I know that all four of the other people they left with died during it. Once I heard mention that my father was somehow responsible for their deaths. I also know that they learned that as a result of their escape, their remaining family members were rounded up and sent to a gulag in Siberia.
Once in Finland, they went to the U.S. Embassy and asked for asylum. Because they had worked in a tank factory, the U.S. government believed that they might have valuable intelligence and flew them to a military base in Germany, where they were debriefed. Aside from knowing how to sweep and mop floors, neither of them knew anything. They were, however, given residency and sent to Detroit, and given jobs similar to the ones they had held in Russia, though this time in an auto-parts factory. They married, more because they knew no one else and had become dependent on each other, and I was born, though during my birth there were complications that prevented my mother from being able to have any other children, which she reminded me of almost daily for the rest of her life. They brought me home and continued on with their sad lives. They worked at the factory, and when they were home they drank and fought. My father beat my mother, and when I was relatively young, two or three, he started beating me. We both learned to leave him alone and not speak in his presence, though that made little difference. As I got older, the beatings got worse. At different times, both my mother and I had our noses broken, our arms broken, our ribs broken, and our teeth knocked out. The neighbors knew what was going on, but none called the authorities. It was a different time, and that was thought of as the correct way to handle such a situation. People at school knew I was from a troubled home and they spurned me. I had no friends, and no teachers who cared about me or believed I would ever do anything with my life. When I was sixteen, my father went over the edge. He saw my mother talking to a neighbor, a man, and believed she was having an affair. When she came home, he beat her with a wrench, and when I tried to stop him he beat me. When I woke up in a hospital room six days later, I learned he had beaten my mother to death, and had hung himself in his jail cell after being arrested for murder. To be completely honest, I wasn’t upset at all. I felt bad that they had lived such miserable lives, but I felt relieved that their lives were finally over. My only concern was what I would do, or how I would take care of myself. I had no other family, and I was entirely alone. Soon, though, I learned I was not. A Catholic priest came to see me and told me he had spent several hours a day praying at my bedside. My parents were both atheists, and I knew nothing of God. I did, however, feel that this man was kind and pure and interested in helping me. He gave me a Bible and started talking to me about God, and about Jesus Christ and the manner in which he gave his life for the sins of man, and about the power of prayer. I was in the hospital for several weeks, and over the course of that time he indoctrinated me into the ways and beliefs of the Roman Catholic Church, and I became a Christian. He was the first person to ever pay attention to me, and show me love, and I came to love him in the manner I believe many sons love their fathers. When I finished high school, I entered the seminary and began training for my life as a priest. When I finished, I took my vows and entered the priesthood, believing I would devote my life to the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Ghost, and to what I believed was the one true church. I believed I had found my true home, and that I had found my true family, and that what I was doing was the work of God, based on his word.
As I lay in my bed, reflecting on my life and praying, I eventually fell asleep, though not for long. I woke at five the next morning and prayed the Liturgy of the Hours from my Breviary, as I do most mornings. After praying, I would normally write the homily for the morning mass, but I was feeling God so powerfully, and feeling so strong in my faith, that I decided not to write anything and say whatever I was feeling in the moment. I was very excited to celebrate mass, which I do on most days, and which can be something of a grind, especially on days when the church is empty. On that particular day, I knew it wouldn’t matter if there were any worshippers or not. I didn’t believe I’d be celebrating with anyone but God himself, who had blessed me so profoundly the day before, and I believed that none of the church’s problems were relevant anymore, and that we were about to enter the greatest era in our long, distinguished history, an era when we would be proven righteous, and our glory would be confirmed by the Second Coming of Jesus Christ. The dwindling numbers of church members, and the aging of the remaining membership, would no longer matter. The controversies related to our policies towards women and homosexuals would cease to be. People would stop blaming us for the spread of AIDS in developing countries because of our stance on the use of condoms. And the never-ending scandals caused by the sexual abuse of children would end. We would be righteous.
I got dressed and left my quarters and walked to the church. I prepared the service with the deacon and the two altar servers and walked towards the altar to begin the introductory rites. I looked out into the church, and I saw four people, three elderly women and one elderly man, and the man appeared to be both homeless and asleep. Although this was typical of a morning mass, normally it would have disappointed me. This morning, though, it did not at all, for I knew at least three of these people were here to worship, and that at some point soon, along with the rest of God’s true followers, we would all be in Heaven together. I began the service, and greeted them by saying In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, and my voice sounded pure and strong and true. When the people answered amen, I felt chills down my spine, and I thought yes, my Lord, amen, yes, my Lord Almighty, amen.
Normally, and according to tradition, during the Liturgy of the Word, I would read one passage from the Old Testament and one from the New Testament, but on that day I read two passages from the same book of the New Testament, Matthew 24:42-44,42 Keep awake therefore, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming. 43 But understand this: if the owner of the house had known in what part of the night the thief was coming, he would have stayed awake and would not have let his house be broken into. 44 Therefore you also must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour, and Matthew 25:31-34, 31 When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit on the throne of his glory. 32 All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats, 33 and he will put the sheep at his right hand and the goats at the left. 34 Then the king will say to those at his right hand, “Come, you that are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world.” Nobody noticed my indiscretion, not even the deacon, so I kept going, believing that God had endorsed my choices, and that he understood I was trying to alert people that his Son had arrived. The rest of the service was simple and beautiful, and as is the case sometimes with the things we do in life, whether they are part of our life’s work, or simple tasks, or recreational events, everything felt right, and it was easy, and the time, which could sometimes pass slowly, seemed to speed up and move more quickly. After the mass, when I would normally go to my office and return mail and deal with administrative tasks, I decided to go for a walk through the neighborhood.
The church was in the Midtown area of Manhattan, on the west side of the island, in a neighborhood referred to as Hell’s Kitchen. Directly to the east was Times Square, which, when I first started at the church, in the late ’80s, after working first at a church in Newark, New Jersey, was a cesspool of sin, filled with pornography parlors, the streets teeming with prostitutes, drugs for sale on every corner. In the ’90s, it was cleaned up by the mayor, a man I believed to be a fine, moral, righteous Catholic, a man who was holy without being part of the clergy, a man who was a warrior in the name of God and God’s values. Hell’s Kitchen, which had been an extension of Times Square, and a receptacle for the residual overflow of sin emanating from it, benefited greatly from the changes that the
