Jesus, My Father, The CIA, and Me: A Memoir. . . of Sorts

by Ian Morgan Cron

“Home is a place you grow up wanting to leave, and grow old wanting to get back to.” That’s what John Edward Pearce said. But what if your childhood was a train wreck? What if your memories of home are more akin to The Shining than The Waltons? It doesn’t matter. Home is not just a place; it’s a knowing in the soul, a vague premonition of a far-off country that we know exists but haven’t seen yet. Home is where we start, and whether we like it or not, our life is a race against time to come to terms with what it was or wasn’t.

The boy was calling me to join him on a voyage through the harrowing straits of memory. He was gambling that if we survived the passage, we might discover an ocean where the past would become the wind at our back rather than a driving gale to the nose of our boat.

When I told her that smoking was going to catch up to her one day, she held up her Pall Mall and said, “Don’t worry, sweetheart; it’s the ones with the filters that’ll kill you.” That’s moxie.

It’s easy to get snarky about how archaic this sounds, but if you think you’re going to be hip forever, don’t blink. One day your kids will find your old iPad and use it as a drink coaster.

At the time, my friends were listening to the Jackson Five. When they came to my house, I played them Muddy Waters singing “Hoochie Coochie Man.” Lots of them didn’t come back.

Behind the wheel, Marcus was like a retired stuntman with dementia. The mayhem they left in their wake entertained my father to no end. With Marcus driving down the interstate at ninety miles per hour, my father would bang the back of the front seat with his cane, yelling, “That’s the spirit, Marcus!” It was like a Quentin Tarantino version of Driving Miss Daisy.

Many of my achievements have been a way of calling to him over the roar of an ocean that only widens with the years. I am embarrassed to admit that the question I call across the waves never changes: “Did you love me?” It would be nice if prayer or counseling could resolve this question or lessen its intensity. They haven’t. It would also be helpful if I could keep the effect of it contained to one or two areas of my life. I can’t. The question won’t rest until it’s answered, which—unless my father rises from the dead and tells me himself—isn’t likely to happen. So I’ve come up with alternative strategies to fill the empty space in my heart where my father’s love is supposed to be found.

For me, life is like one long job interview in which I’m trying to impress everyone I meet enough to hire me. The routine is exhausting, mostly for everyone else. I confessed this nutty practice to my spiritual director. He smiled, put his arm around my shoulder, and said, “I never trust a man without a limp.” God bless him.

At seven years old, I could look in adults’ eyes and know immediately if they were fraud or friend. I could tell whether they were hiding some long-held sadness, whether they were lying or telling the truth, and whether they themselves could tell the difference.

But I had always been envious of my family at Mass, when they left me in the pew and walked down the nave to receive the Host and wine from the priests. I would stand on the kneeler to see above the heads of the people sitting in front of me, so I could watch my family. Though I could not possibly have expressed it this way, the harmonic frequency that rings at the center of the heart of God made something vibrate in mine while all this was going on. Something numinous was happening, and I felt pulled toward it, like metal filings to a magnet.

He was carrying brown-leather driving gloves and wearing a black bowler. Yes, a black bowler. He looked like Winston Churchill, only more.

As I stepped forward and stood before him, he saw the tears running down my face. For an instant, his pasty white face softened, his eyes sparkled just like the Virgin Mary’s, and 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.

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. Most of all, a boy needs to be able to look into his father’s eyes and see admiration and delight. Frederick Buechner once wrote, “The grace of God means something like: Here is your life. You might never have been, but you are because the party wouldn’t have been complete without you.” To see delight in your father’s eyes is to see his belief that the party of life would be a bust without you. 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 without fathers, or boys with fathers who for whatever reason keep their love undisclosed, begin life without a center of gravity.

Sitting through an elementary-school music program in which volume trumps intonation is a profound act of human love. It’s like falling on a hand grenade to save a group of friends, except that you have to do it three times a year.

This book is fully awesome...

The performance was to be held in our school cafeteria, which doubled as a small gymnasium. The school administration referred to it as the cafetorium. This word should be stricken from the English language immediately. It signals to children that food should be followed by frolic. At lunchtime we would wolf down our bologna sandwiches and pretzels so we would have time to move the tables out of the way and play basketball. And every day, some kid would blow his lunch.

I felt that night as I felt during Communion—as if we were caught up in something bigger than we could grasp, and somehow the bread and wine were a visible sign of it. Every time I went forward to receive, I was re-upping to play some part in that story. I’m not saying I understood any of this as I lay there in bed that night; I didn’t. As was so often the case in my life, it was a feeling that I now know was homesickness for God.

At one time Tang could be found in just about every home in America, but it’s hard to find in supermarkets anymore. The good people at Kraft Foods offer an interesting statement on their website: We have heard that some consumers have used TANG Drink Mix to clean their dishwashers. TANG does contain citric acid, which can act as a cleaning agent. TANG Drink mix is intended to be a food product and Kraft Foods does not advocate its use for any other purpose. This disclaimer goes a long way toward explaining why it’s not always easy to find Tang anymore. People don’t drink detergent if they have other alternatives. But I digress.

I only went twice, but in that brief time I was given the keys to the kingdom, namely the ability to play G, C, and D chords. Those three triads are all it takes to change a life. I might have disintegrated without them.

Episcopalians pride themselves on restraint and single-digit golf handicaps. They don’t jump, sing, and wave their hands over their heads unless they’re being electrocuted or thrown from a plane. Neither do Episcopalians frolic around sanctuaries, brandishing on raised poles big banners with tongues of fire and doves embroidered on them. Their services don’t include generously proportioned middle-aged women leaping like impalas down the aisles, trailing colored streamers in their wake (“dancing in the Spirit,” as Tyler called it). I saw investment bankers speaking in tongues and women dressed in boiled wool suits who resembled Barbara Bush being “slain in the Spirit.” It looked to me like a mob of well-sugared five-year-olds dancing the hokey-pokey, only less organized.

Catholics don’t sing—we murmur, then look surprised if a melody emerges.

“Son,” she said, rubbing my knuckles with her thumb, “love always stoops.”

Addicts are frustrated mystics waylaid by spirits. —CARL JUNG

He gently lifted the book from the boy’s hand and returned it to a crude pine shelf. Then he looked at the boy. “Sometimes it’s wiser to reverence than to parse,” he said.

I wanted to fit in with them and enjoy discussing apologetics, but it was thin gruel to me. I didn’t want to parse God—I wanted to be swept up in his glory. I didn’t want to understand the Holy One; I wanted to be consumed in his oceanic love. I yearned for heaven, and as long as it remained beyond my reach, my life was tinged with disappointment.

How could I know that my growing attachment to drinking was nothing more than a displaced longing for this kind of ecstatic experience of God? Besides, what would I have done differently if I’d known? I would have tried to figure out a way to have both Spirit and spirits. How else can I explain a twenty-year-old trying to swim in the depths of God, while clutching a glass of Scotch over his head?

Silence is the language God speaks and everything else is a bad translation. —MOTHER TERESA

“Ian, look at me,” he said. I raised my head and turned. I expected to find Dan’s eyes spilling over with empathy. Instead, I found something more: the sort of eyes God gives only to seventy-year-old men who have faced their own demons and survived. “I see you,” he said, “and you’re beautiful.”

I stop cutting parsley and remember that she taught me how to ride the Dragon Coaster and what to do when you’re flung into the mouth of whatever it is you think will kill you. Throw up your arms and laugh until you come out the other side. That lesson has saved my life once or twice.

There is a big difference in life between a jump and a fall. A jump is about courage and faith, something the world is in short supply of these days. A fall is, well, a fall.

The Eucharist has followed me through life like my own shadow. It is the string on which the pearls of my life’s experiences, burnished white and dirty gray, have been strung. I still feel out of true. Is there any other way for us to be in the world? Yet when I kneel with palms upturned to receive the bread and then drink deep from the chalice, I feel the crooked made straight, the uneven made smooth, and the torn, patched. “Man is born broken. He lives by mending. The grace of God is glue,” wrote Eugene O’Neill. This is my glue.