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

by Ian Morgan Cron

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.

For me, life is like one long job interview in which I’m trying to impress everyone I meet enough to hire me.

Most of all, a boy needs to be able to look into his father’s eyes and see admiration and delight.

The play date gone wrong had happened months earlier, but it chiseled in stone this thought that I would never find my place in the world.

How do we explain these fugitive graces?

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.

Walking up LeJeune Court, I asked God if he would send down a celestial staircase so I could walk up into the night sky and go to heaven before I had to endure the sound I dreaded more than any other—the crunching sound of my feet on the gravel on my driveway that told me I was home. Sister Rita Marie told us God sent staircases for saints all the time. I stood in the rain awhile to see if my staircase would appear. Apparently I wasn’t a saint.

it was a feeling that I now know was homesickness for God.

I was beginning to make private everything that was good about me.

In me, the drink opened up a place that I had forgotten about, a feeling that until that instant I didn’t know I grieved not experiencing anymore: it gave me something close to the joy and wonder I had felt alone in the woods with God.

I was more at home in my own skin. My apartness disappeared.

If sympathy were a religion, Mark would’ve been an atheist.

For the first time, I was convinced I was seeing things as they really were. How else could I explain the tremulous radiance that emanated from everything my eyes fell upon?

For a few hours I was relieved of the unrelenting self-consciousness that dogged me. For once I wasn’t a problem that needed to be solved or fixed. I was Adam strolling in the garden of Eden.

I was blind to its shortcomings because that’s what love does.

Eyes closed, I would imagine headlining at Madison Square Garden, fronting whatever band I was listening to, frenzied fans cheering me with unrestrained adoration.

If there was a God, he was just like my father,

I became good in the worst sense of the word.

then you’ve never been taken hostage by someone else’s idea of fun.

No teenager wants to see someone whose outside looks like the person they feel themselves to be on the inside.

It would be like God saying the lien on my happiness had been removed.

Life always comes down to who’s driving.

I’d forgotten the goodness of laughter when it wasn’t tethered to cynicism.

Episcopalians pride themselves on restraint and single-digit golf handicaps.

A giant knot made of thick ship’s rope, whose twists had become so complicated that I’d lost hope of ever disentangling it, loosened to the point that I could now see light coming through the gaps.

“love always stoops.”

Addicts are frustrated mystics waylaid by spirits.

The rope tied around my waist never let me forget it was there.

Drinking is fun until it isn’t.

Life is easier when you refuse to know what you know.

A few of them were overzealous. Some were gloomy, and others were way too nice, like Walmart greeters on Adderall,

I didn’t want to parse God—I wanted to be swept up in his glory.

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?

There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.

I was all kite and no string.

Falling apart and failure were synonymous in my book,

Shame, the belief that God regrets creating you, is like a weather pattern that descends upon a mountain. I once believed I was the weather. Turns out, I’m the mountain.

I don’t trust people who tell you everything. They’re usually hiding something.

I had been taken hostage by Willy Wonka.

My self-referential narcissism told me that this was all a sign of my utter failure as a dad.

How can you tell when you’ve crossed the meridian that divides hatred and forgiveness?