by Jim Sano
Afterwards, David told Tom that he was ready to make his confession and receive the Sacrament of Reconciliation, something he’d been hesitant to do so far. Ben had talked to David about his own first confession, saying “Definitely not something I wanted to do, but I figured that the more you need it, the less you want to do it, so I just followed Father Tom’s lead, and you know what? I’m glad we have Reconciliation. It was quite an experience. I felt lighter, cleaner, almost like I had a fresh start and a heavy weight had been taken off my shoulders.”
That Wednesday, David sat down in Tom’s office while Tom heated up some tea. Instead of David’s mind being flooded with a list of things he needed to confess, his mind was almost blank. Tom came in and handed David his cup and sat down saying, “Is it hard to believe it’s already here?”
David tried to think of what Tom meant. “Oh, you mean Easter?”
Tom smiled. “No, the Red Sox home opener is on Monday!”
David nodded, knowing Tom was trying to put his mind at ease.
David said, “So what are we supposed to do here?”
“Well, it would be good to have a sense of what the Sacrament of Reconciliation is all about. The Church believes, and I believe, that it’s an important habit to examine our choices and actions in life and to see which ones are healthy for us and for our relationships, especially our relationship with God. David, how do you feel about Amy and James?”
“What do you mean? I love them.”
“Do you want the best for them?”
“Sure.”
“And would you try to pass on your wisdom and give them guidelines you know would be the healthiest for them?”
David nodded.
“What if they defied your teachings, and you knew they were heading into unhealthy or dangerous territory because of it, would you turn your back on them or welcome them with open arms if they recognized it and apologized?”
David said, “Welcome them with no hesitation.”
“And that is how God feels about you.”
Tom got up and walked to the window, where he paused and then turned to David. “Who are you?”
David lifted his shoulders, puzzled. “What do you mean?”
Tom asked again, “Who is David Kelly?”
“Um, I’m ahhh… I’m me, a father, a salesman, a friend, what do you mean?”
“At your very core, who are you?”
David shrugged his shoulders, confused. Tom sat on the edge of his desk and said, “Who created you?”
“Oh, okay. God created me, and as He did you, by the way.”
Tom said, “Who was Jesus?”
“Jesus was the Son of God.”
“What did Jesus call God?”
“He called Him Father.”
“And when He taught us how to pray to God, what was the prayer?”
David thought for a second. “Our Father.”
“Perfect. What is the first word?”
“Our.”
Tom said, “Exactly. You, David, are the Father’s son too. To God, you are His son, and He knows you better than you know yourself, and He loves you unconditionally—even more than you love and want what is best for Amy and James. With His love also came His plan for you and His commandments to help you live the life He knows is best for you. When we break those commandments or don’t trust God and choose our own will over His, we are turning away from God, as did the Prodigal Son when he didn’t honor his father. He knows we are human and will fail over and over again, so we need His mercy and grace on the journey. When the apostles asked Jesus how to love Him, He told them: ‘Whoever keeps my commandments and observes them is the one who loves me. And whoever loves me will be loved by my father, and I will love him.’”
“I’m not sure if I could even name all the commandments.”
Tom said, “We can review them. We can only sin when we are aware of what we are doing, but we’re also responsible for forming and developing our conscience, to find out what is right and wrong. Remember, no matter what we do, no matter how bad we think it is, God will always forgive us because He never stops loving us and wanting us to know that.”
David said, “I would think there are some things we can do that couldn’t be forgiven, even by God. What about the people who killed Jesus?”
Tom said, “On the cross, Jesus said, ‘Forgive them, for they know not what they do.’ So, even that was forgivable. When you think of God, think of His mercy so you never have to hide or think you are no longer acceptable to God. Think about how much you would want Amy and James to be reconciled, no matter what.”
Tom sat back down. “Jesus taught how life on earth was about love, mercy, and forgiveness. You can see that Jesus gave His apostles the authority to teach, baptize, and even to forgive sins in His name. ‘Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you. Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.’ When we do sin, we should apologize directly to God as well, but He has given us a gift of this sacrament to receive His grace and forgiveness in a tangible way. Jesus knew we are human and need to make our confession verbally and to hear we are forgiven through our ears. The priest can help us with our examination of conscience, provide guidance and support, and acts in the person of Christ in absolving us from our sins. The more we sin, the less we tend to see that we are in sin because we are turning away from God. It is a lot like a pane of glass that is dirty. If we hold it up to the light, it’s pretty clear where the spots are, but if we turn it away from the light, it’s hard to tell where those spots are.”
David talked to his father about his examination of conscience, and he seemed happy to hear that David was taking this sacrament to heart. When David came back on Friday, he felt nervous but ready to meet with Tom for his first confession in over thirty years. As he talked through his life and his stumbles, David found himself to be surprisingly open and honest to a fault with Tom. David wasn’t proud of how he had treated people along the way, how he had often ignored those in need, abandoned his own family after feeling unjustly abandoned by his own parents, how he had been dishonest with himself for so many years, how he had hated God and not loved and honored Him throughout his life, how he had used women in relationships and in thought, and how he hadn’t used his gifts, resources and time to make a difference in the lives of others as he had been completely self-focused and selfish for most of his life. It was an act of great humility for David to be so forthcoming about his choices and actions, and to his own surprise, truly repentant about each sin he had confessed. Tom asked David if he were truly sorry for the sins he confessed, and David bowed his head. “Yes, I am.”
Tom had David recite the Act of Contrition. Then, putting his hand on David’s head, he said, “God, the Father of mercies, through the death and resurrection of His Son has reconciled the world to Himself and sent the Holy Spirit among us for the forgiveness of sins; through the ministry of the Church may God give you pardon and peace, and I absolve you from your sins in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit."
David was trying to let what he just heard register in his heart. He was truly forgiven. He was starting with a fresh slate with God and with himself without the growing burden that had weighed on his conscience for so many years. He had expected to feel nothing, but there was a definite feeling of freedom and desire in his soul.
“Tom, despite believing I’m forgiven, I’m still struggling to know what the right thing to do for Jillian is. It’s a casualty of my selfishness that I don’t know how to make it up to her without hurting her more.”
Tom stood up and opened his desk drawer and pulled out an envelope with only David’s first name written on the front. “I was asked to give this to you at a time that seemed right.”
David tightened his forehead, confused as he took the envelope from Tom and unsealed it to find a letter from Jillian.
Dear David,
&nbs
p; I’m writing this letter to let you know that I’ll be moving to Pennsylvania and on with my life. I won’t say that I wasn’t deeply hurt when I was feeling very much in love with you, but Father Tom has helped me to get to a better place. I‘ll continue to work on myself and avoid some of the relationship pitfalls I’ve found myself repeating. I want you to know that I’m not angry with you and now know that you were never free to be mine in the first place—something I didn’t understand before. I don’t want you to blame yourself since we were both coming to the relationship without a healthy understanding of a lot of things. It’s important to me to move forward and for you not to try to contact me. It would hurt much more than it would help me, and I hope you can respect and understand that. I hope and pray that your life is full of everything you deserve and I’m confident now that I’ll be okay.
Take care and bless you,
Jillian
When Tom came back into the room, David was deep in thought about Jillian and how he wished he hadn’t hurt her so deeply. She deserved so much better than being a victim of his ignorance and self-preoccupation. His sins may have been forgiven but the consequences to others hadn’t disappeared, and Jillian was telling him that he couldn’t fix this one with her. He could only make sure he treated those in his life with dignity and self-giving love.
Chapter 55
David took his father to the Palm Sunday service to start Holy Week. After Mass, they walked over to the Eastside for breakfast, where David introduced Gianni to the harried Linda. Linda just looked at Gianni and said, “I guess this explains things,” to which both David and Gianni laughed.
David said, “Pop. You’ve been feeling pretty good lately, right?”
Gianni nodded. “I can’t complain.”
“I know it’s early in the season, and I know it’s Holy Week, but I heard the temperature is supposed to get to 81 degrees on Tuesday, and I wondered if—”
Gianni interrupted David. “I’d love to go to the game with you. They’re playing Tampa Bay. What kind of baseball town is that?”
Tuesday was a warm spring day for the game and it happily reminded them both of the time they sat together at Fenway when David was just a boy. Later that day, they sat in the den relaxing while David asked his father, “Pop, I want to receive Communion on Holy Thursday. Tom spent a lot of time teaching us about the Eucharist. I get it in my head, but when I see you at Communion, it seems as if it touches your heart. What am I missing?”
“It might be one of those things that will make sense when you receive. There are a lot of things we can’t really understand on our own, which is why we need Christ as a real part of us, in our hearts, in our souls, and in our bodies.”
David said, “Maybe. I guess I’m like a doubting Thomas; I need to see to believe it.”
Gianni chuckled and asked, “Have you ever been to Italy?”
“I did visit Rome for a sales meeting several years ago. It’s a beautiful city. Why do you ask?”
Gianni said, “Just a few hours east of Rome is a town called Lanciano. It was the birthplace of Longinus, the Roman centurion who pierced the side and heart of Christ at the crucifixion. The name Lanciano means ‘lance’ or ‘of the spear’ in Italian.”
David asked, “Pop, is this connected to what we’re talking about?”
Gianni answered, “I hope so. In 700 AD, there was a priest-monk at the Monastery of St. Longinus who was having heavy doubts about the true presence of Christ in the Eucharist. So, it’s okay to have doubts or questions. One day, the monk was saying Mass, and as he raised the host up at the consecration, the host turned into actual flesh and the wine into visible blood. The flesh remained intact, and the blood divided into five clot globules, some believing this related to the five wounds of Christ, two in his hands, two in his feet and one in his side.”
“Pop, how do we know what really happened 1300 years ago and that this isn’t just a story or hoax?”
“Fair question. Both the flesh and the droplets of blood still exist today, not changed in appearance or corrupted. Neither of those things can be explained by science even to this day. In 1970, the most detailed tests were made by noted scientists—hematologists, anatomists, pathologists, histologists, biochemists, and on and on, including the renowned Dr. Odoardo Linoli, an expert scientist on anatomy and pathological histology.”
David said, “Okay, I’m impressed with the expertise and objectivity of the scientists, but what did they find?”
“They found several things that confirmed that the flesh was striated muscular human tissue from the heart of a male, and without being hermetically sealed or with any traces of preservatives, it hadn’t decomposed. Nor could a human hand have cut this sample that encircled the decayed bread at the center. The team found that the five globules of blood were also not corrupted and had the same proportions of proteins, chloride, phosphorus, magnesium, potassium, sodium and calcium as fresh blood, which is normally gone within twenty minutes of exposure. The five pellets of blood weighed the same as one pellet or any combination of the globules, again not scientifically explainable. The possibility of fraud was conclusively excluded.”
“If what they found wasn’t scientifically possible and there was no fraud involved, how can this miracle not be huge news?”
“For those who don’t want to believe, they dismiss it and move on. For those who do believe, this is a simple confirmation of what they had faith in all along. For me, I trust the words of Christ and the beliefs of the early Church guided in truth by the Holy Spirit. The apostles believed in the real presence of Christ in the breaking of the Eucharistic Bread because of divine revelation. The Miracle of Lanciano might be helpful to a Doubting Thomas because it shows that anything is possible with God, even the seemingly impossible.”
On Holy Thursday evening, David attended Mass at St. Anthony’s. It was the end of Lent and the beginning of the Triduum, something that was never previously a part of David’s conscious world. David sat in the second row with his father and sponsor. Ben, Mike, Pooja, and Marge all sat with them as well, as the church began to fill up to celebrate the Lord’s Supper. Throughout the Mass, there was a sense of simplicity, peace, and beauty that brought David into the present in a way he hadn’t experienced before. When Tom washed the feet of twelve parishioners, there was something profound about the humble act of service that Jesus wanted to show by example to his apostles.
As the naked altar was covered with cloth and the simple gifts of bread and wine were brought up and placed upon it, there was a sense of expectation that Jesus would be there with them. David remembered that Tom had said, in that timeless moment, Christ was present in his sacrifice with the entire community of the Church on earth and in heaven. It was a powerful moment for him as a tingle ran up the back of his neck and his eyes welled up at the moment of consecration.
When David approached the altar to receive Communion after his father, he felt an impulse to bow in recognition of Whom he was about to receive into his very being. At that moment, it made so much sense and he was glad he had made his reconciliation. Tom smiled as he held out the host to David. “Body of Christ,” and David said, “Amen,” as he held out his hand and took the Eucharist and placed it in his mouth and made the Sign of the Cross.
On Good Friday, Gianni asked if David would bring him to the church at noon to walk the Stations of the Cross. The Stations depicted fourteen moments of Christ’s passion from conviction to crucifixion and death for our sins. David took a half day from work and went to the Stations with his father, and for the first time in his life put himself in the footsteps of Christ and what He actually went through out of love for us and trust in His Father. David hadn’t had a moment of revelation like this in his entire life, simultaneously feeling a sense of shame and incredible gratitude. He had simply come to see to his own father’s wishes and was taken by surprise to think about the human person of Christ experiencing betrayal, abandonment, false accusations, mocking torture, aloneness, and t
he most painful form of execution devised, and all for love and mercy for him. This experience made the Good Friday service and passion readings all that more moving, and David felt exhausted when he returned home with Gianni afterward.
Saturday was a quiet day. David made a late breakfast for Gianni and himself, which they ate at the sunlit kitchen table. Gianni had sent letters to Bobby and Abbie, to see if they could either come to Boston or he could travel out to see them, but there was no response. David had called Abbie, and she was hesitant to open up the wound again. Gianni said, “David, I know I’m doing pretty well at the moment, but things can change quickly. I can’t force anything on your sister or brother, but I do want to try to see them somehow this spring.”
David said, “I spend my days convincing people why they should do things; I’ll see what I can do. I think there’s a lot of pain there that they don’t want to face. I’ve tried to let them know the truth and how lucky I am to know the man I’m blessed to be with now.”
That evening, anticipating a large crowd for the Easter Vigil, David and Gianni got to the church early. Pooja, Marge, Mike, and Ben arrived with their sponsors early as well, so they were all able to sit together. As Kathleen, Amy, and James arrived to sit behind them, David could feel his emotions breaking out of his normally controlled nature. Then Izzie and her children Joseph, Isabelle, and Jenny came in and sat with Kevin Walsh, who smiled at David in a way that broke the tension. Angelo came and sat with Kathleen. David was most moved when, to his surprise, the entire boys’ basketball team came in, all wearing dress pants, shirts, and ties. Despite the respect and popularity he had, in reality, David lived a life alone, without true intimacy or friendships. Seeing these people he had gotten close to and now cared about sitting together at the Vigil overwhelmed him and made him feel anything but alone.