Excerpt from "Jesus, My Father, the CIA, and Me: A Memoir…Of Sorts" by Ian Morgan Cron

This week's guest post is an excerpt from Ian Morgan Cron's acclaimed book Jesus, My Father, the CIA, and Me: A Memoir…of Sorts. Seriously, it's acclaimed. It has 101 5-star reviews on Amazon, and Publishers Weekly called it "Redemptive and consoling with bright moments of humor…this story is chock-full of sacredness and hope. Cron is one of only a few spirituality authors who could articulate these themes as poignantly." Ian is also the author of Chasing Francis: A Pilgrim's Tale, spoke at the Storyline Conference last spring, and is currently completing his doctorate at Fordham University in Christian spirituality. You can visit him at IanCron.com and follow him on Twitter here.

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My fellow first graders and I processed down the nave to receive our First Communion while a woman sang "Ave Maria" with a vibrato that could have been picked up on police radar. I remember almost nothing of the Mass itself except Bishop Dalrymple distributing the consecrated Hosts. He was corpulent, his cheeks and jowls glazed with perspiration, and he was lightly wheezing. He looked like he would have paid a hundred bucks to get out of his clericals, go home, put his tired feet up, pop open a cold Bud, and watch a Notre Dame basketball game.

As I stepped forward and stood before him, he saw tears welling up in my eyes. For an instant, Bishop Dalrymple's pasty white face softened, the corners of his mouth turned upward in a smile of deep knowing. I suspect he knew that I was one of those strange kids who "got it"— who was hungry and thirsty for God, who longed to be full. Maybe he'd been one of those weird kids too. He placed the Host on my tongue and put his hand on the side of my face, his fat thumb briefly massaging my temple, a gesture of blessing I did not see him offer to any of my other classmates. And I fell into God.

I have spent forty years living the result of that moment.

I am told that, in years past, when a blizzard hit the Great Plains, farmers would sometimes tie one end of a rope to the back door of their farmhouses and the other around their waists as a precaution before going out to the barn to tend to the animals. They knew the stories of farmers who, on the way back to the house from the barn in a whiteout, had become disoriented and couldn't find their way back home. They would wander off, and their half-frozen bodies wouldn't be found until spring, when the snow melted.

That day, Bishop Dalrymple, sweat dripping from the end of his bulbous nose, tied a rope around my waist that was long and enduring. How did he know the number of times that I would stretch that rope to its breaking point or how often I would drift onto the plains in a whiteout and need a way to find my way back home?

A few weeks after my First Communion, I came home from school and my mother told me that my father had gone on a last-minute business trip to Northern Ireland. This was a surprise since I didn't know my severely alcoholic father was employed.

He didn't come home for six months.

I learned years later that this was the year the "troubles" broke out between pro-British Unionists and pro-Irish Nationalists. I'm certain he was there on assignment for the CIA.

I have a postcard he sent me from Belfast on which he wrote, "Do you want to know a secret? I love you."

I would have given anything for my father's love to not be a secret. Anything. A boy needs a father to show him how to be in the world. He needs to be given swagger, taught how to read a map so that he can recognize the roads that lead to life and the paths that lead to death, how to know what love requires, and where to find steel in the heart when life makes demands on us that are greater than we think we can endure. A young boy needs a father who tells him that life is a loaner, who helps him discover why God sent him to this troubled earth so he doesn't die without having tried to make it better.

He may not know it, but from the moment he first glimpses his baby boy's head crowning in the delivery room, a father makes a vow that with stumbling determination, he will try to get a few of these things right. Boys with fathers who keep their love undisclosed, go through life banging from guardrail to guardrail, trying to determine why our fathers kept their love nameless, as if ashamed.

We know each other when we meet.

Excerpt from "Jesus, My Father, the CIA, and Me: A Memoir…Of Sorts" by Ian Morgan Cron is a post from: Donald Miller's Blog