Monthly Archives: December 2012

• [Part 1 HERE - suffering a failed but violent rape]
• [Part 2 HERE - unwitting stardom in kiddie-porn films]
• [Part 3 HERE - a suggestion]
• [Part 4 HERE- angels!]
• [Part 5 HERE - responding to some comments.]

CHAPTER SEVEN

~ Being stalked as a seven-year old ~

The following Winter, when I was still seven years old, I had made a habit of going swimming at the local Junior High School. The pool was opened up to younger kids like myself at night. It was a pretty good hike to get there, three miles. Bikes were impossible on the ice and snow at night. I know. I tried many times. It’s a good extreme sport, but it really was faster just walking. No one from my neighborhood wanted to brave the hike, but there were plenty of kids to meet there. The trip was worth it for someone who could swim like a fish, and I was just such a one. I think I once did five lengths of the pool underwater without once coming up for breath. I was a bit of a show-off, looking for some competition in this way. Competition, if it’s just for the sheer idiocy of it, is always hilarious to those involved, and is its own reward. I found out that half-crippled legs didn’t matter so much in the water.

Also, I was used to the cold enough to know that when it’s way below zero and one’s hair is still wet, the walk home will be cold only at the beginning. Wet hair freezes into a helmet as hard as rock, keeping one’s body heat insulated. I would let my hair freeze for a minute or so, and then put my hat on over that. Only I would do that, of course. But one has to know how to survive!

On my way home from a great swim, but on a particularly cold night, way below zero on the Fahrenheit scale, a very expensive black Cadillac Limousine started following me at my walking pace, about forty feet back. At the time, the sidewalk was set back from the road about twenty feet, and was protected by great drifts of snow piled up by the city’s snow plows. But this fellow knew what he was doing, for I was just at a point where the sidewalk ended in front of a deep, culverted ditch that was being filled in with construction rubble, and so was packed with jagged metal and unstable blocks of cement that poked through the snow and ice in small hills. I had to walk out on the road, right where he would be able to grab me. Back in the day, there were no houses in any direction for about a half a mile along that stretch of road. The field next to me, blanketed with about three feet of snow, stretched all the way to a forest, also about three miles away. It was pitch dark. I thought I was dead for sure.

But, if you can’t run, you can fight, even if you are only seven years old, as I had learned some months previously. I was braver than I was smart. I turned and walked straight to the car and, when offered a ride – just as I thought – I took it. This seemed stupid even to me, but it also seemed like the only option. I thought I was going to end up in the car one way or the other, but if I took the initiative, the psychological dynamics were such that I could have the upper hand, at least for a while, until I figured out a definitive escape. What a stupid seven-year old! But I was filled with adrenaline once again. And I had not forgotten the bit [mentioned in an earlier part of the autobiography] about letting people hang themselves if that’s what they wanted to do. I learned later on what our Lord did with Judas.

This fellow in the Cadillac Limousine was in his fifties and filthy rich and, as I say, he knew his business. Today I would conjecture that he was in the mafia. More kids disappear from the streets of Minnesota (where I grew up), getting sucked into the sex industry, than from any other state in the Union. At any rate, this fellow interrogated me about exactly where I lived in town and then what my name was. When he heard the name, he asked me to repeat it, again and again. I told him, and said that my dad had been the mayor of the city (of 48,000 people at the time) and was now an attorney at law, and in the State Legislature, heading up the biggest law firm in central Minnesota. I also mentioned my uncle by name, since he was the chief emergency responder in the city. At that point he stopped the car abruptly. As he pushed me out, I mocked him with a sing-song voice, saying he could meet my dad if he wanted to drive me the rest of the way. That wasn’t very intelligent on my part, but he sped away, thank God. I tried to get the license plate number, but it was too dark. I wonder how many youngsters’ lives he had destroyed and was still destroying. I wonder if my ever so troubled friend had been a victim of his. I told my parents right away, and my dad got on the phone immediately. I can only think that this fellow was run out of town for a while, but, in those days, I suppose, only that.

~ My stardom in kiddie-porn films ~

That swimming pool at the local public Junior High School would be a source of trouble time and again. A couple of years later, the older neighborhood kids were saying that swimming trunks were not allowed by the gym teacher. Everyone had to swim, and swim naked, saying that this had already been going on for some years. Many schools were starting to do this I was told, so no adult questioned it in what was now a Woodstock society. But don’t be fooled, all the kids hated it, at least at the beginning. They thought that the instructor was going after the boys. But I thought that I could handle myself, and there was no question that I had to go to school, and to that particular school. When the time came, I did go.

What I found, at twelve years of age, was that the teacher’s office, with its large bay window overlooking the locker room, was always jam-packed with naked boys, whom he seemed to be totally ignoring. But then I saw a very expensive movie camera – very professional looking – set up on a large tripod facing the bay window from the locker room, with its on-air light lit up. He was filming the whole thing. The boys, so eager to be around him, were part of a “secret club” that – as one boy told me as if I were entirely stupid – could only be opened up to membership by the gym teacher himself.

Just me, at twelve years old, sitting between my mom and dad, with my brother at the far left. I was a happy little kid, regardless of sometimes trying circumstances.

Poor kids. They fell for what they thought was the excitement of immodesty and the sense of belonging to a group. I was disgusted by the kind of spirit that seemed to have blinded them to all but a tiny set of arrogant, self-centered emotions, which were lit up so brightly in them that they were blind to everything else, having no agility of spirit whatsoever. They were like deer willingly mesmerized by their own headlights, being shot down by an unscrupulous predator.

I knew that something was terribly wrong with all this, and was taken aback by the very public nature of it. It was the old trick of flaunting it like its normal so that people will think that it is normal. It worked in society then just as it does today. Some of the kids didn’t fall for it. Neither did I. But what could a little kid do back in those days, so very different from today?

I could try to avoid that camera. But the cameras were everywhere. There were more cameras throughout the locker room, with heavy cables all over the floor. There were cameras in the open room showers, and out in the pool area. There were very large movie cameras up in the empty swim-meet bleachers above the pool, lights blinking away, another in an open storage room at the end of the pool next to the locker room door, and, it seems, below, inside the underwater window at the deep end of the pool. A mafia operation with the school being paid off to turn a blind eye? I think so.

The gym teacher made everyone march around naked, sit in certain areas facing certain ways, sit in groups on the diving board, dive from the board in certain ways, and so on, like scripted scenes that would fit some sort of porno story. He even had us swim to the bottom of the deep end of the pool two at a time in order to fetch a block of heavy rubber matting, asking us to fight for it underwater.

He must have taken thousands of reels of film over the years that this continued, from the mid-1960s into the mid-1970s. I can only guess that this was a fraction of the operation, another part of which was surely the “secret club” of the gym teacher’s naked boys. I can only guess that the fellow with the Cadillac Limousine was financing all this. I can only guess that these films are still circulating among pedophiles until this very day throughout the United States and around the world, surely in super-8, still photos, VHS, DVD and now a multitude of internet formats.

I had been prostituting myself and didn’t even know it. I was a kiddy-porno star and surely I still am so today, but it only hit home when it was too late. When you’re a kid, it really is hard to imagine the immense evil of some adults. Sure, I saw the cameras. Yes, I knew they were rolling. So did everyone else. But I just could not imagine for what reason. It just didn’t make any sense. None of us could fathom the depths of the evil at hand, and so mindlessly went along with it. I had told my parents about it. I think my dad tried to do something. But the power behind this operation seemed to be beyond anything he could do anything about. I have to wonder just how many people in law enforcement were also being paid off.

There was some grumbling among the boys, but only one bit of real, though only momentary rebellion. The occasion for this was one boy being singled out. I felt so sorry for him, and angry and confused right along with him, as did we all. He was made to climb up an inordinately tall life-guard chair and stand there, naked, standing, the gym teacher insisted, with his hands to the side. This boy noticed the cameras up in the bleachers, and mentioned them, pointing to them. You could see the scars of hatred being seared into his heart, as if someone was dragging a dagger right through his chest, deeply, right through his very soul. Overwhelmed, he threatened to jump from the chair so that his head would hit the tile edge of the pool, breaking his neck, smashing his skull open, killing himself. “No! Don’t do it!” we said, almost inaudibly. “No!” We just couldn’t believe what we were witnessing. We almost lost our voices. He didn’t jump, thanks be to God.

With that, the “game” was over for the day, even though there was still some twenty minutes left for this “class” in the school schedule. The gym teacher knew that if he didn’t let us go now, he himself was going to pay a heavy price. He let the boy climb down. I don’t know how the boy didn’t fall while climbing down, so much was he shaking with anger.

There was a big difference, thought I, between this gym teacher/kiddy-porno-film director, and my friend with the switch blade in the previous chapter, though both may have had similar histories. I want to think my friend had remained with a shred of hope in his soul, even in his darkest moments, a hope which manifests the power of the grace of God in the midst of the hell some live through on this earth. The porno director, instead, had chosen not to have any hope. It is how low the human soul can sink.

~ Almost raped, but then he committed suicide ~

Some years later, now the Summer before entering my sophomore year in what was already my second high school (we had moved), I was in a sauna with a couple of students of the same school, older than myself, with whom I had been swimming at the University’s new athletics building. One of them all of a sudden got aggressive and was getting ready to do the rape thing on me, saying that I needed to be “initiated” into my new school, but his friend, horrified, screamed at him and stopped him.

Poor kid. He was killed in what was reported officially as an accident the next Summer in an equally untoward circumstance. People conjectured that he might have taken his own life. They should know. He had done what he did right in front of them.

People suffer in hidden agony, trying to draw others, for self-comfort, into their misery, sometimes with great alacrity and niceness, sometimes with violence and aggression, almost always, if young like this, in an effort to make sense of the hell they are living in. He was one of the most popular kids in that entire region. All that those who suffer need to know is that any misery, however hidden by popularity, can be understood and thus sorted out by letting Christ into one’s life. He’s always with us. Always. We need but look up. And speak to Him.

The stats are now – what? – one in thirteen kids attempting suicide in the United States? Yep. That’s skyrocketed proportionate to the sexualization of kids from pre-school onwards, right?

~ Stalked, until I got a rifle ~

The following Spring there was a man in perhaps his late forties or early fifties who had been stalking me for some months. You have to understand that this was all perfectly legal back in the day. No longer, thank God. Now that we had moved out into the country, with rolling hills and forests and dirt roads and long stretches between houses, this kind of thing could easily happen. If I would be walking in the forest, there he would be. If I would be walking along the road, there he would be. He had attacked a neighbor boy (a few miles away through the woods) a couple of years earlier, dragging him off his horse right on the front lawn of the boy’s own house. The police were called but nothing much came of it.

I was wary. He was a real predator. For the umpteenth time, he was now trailing me along a dirt road cutting through the forest. He was driving an unbelievably filthy red pickup truck only as fast as I would walk. If I stopped, he stopped. If I ran, he sped up. I hoped he didn’t have a gun.

I was really getting sick of these shenanigans. I had already evaded him many times by running into the woods, almost literally flying around trees, down ravines, across swamps and creeks. But every time I did this I would be covered with a severe rash of poison ivy, which was pretty much everywhere in central Minnesota. That might not sound so bad, but I really suffered from it, with whole patches of skin falling off, oozing with clear yellow liquid. And besides, running on the wings of the wind with my somewhat crippled legs didn’t help my mobility for quite a while after any such escape. So this running was just no longer an option for me. I had to end this, right here, right now.

I figured I could just beat him unconscious with my bare fists if I had to, leaving him to be found by the police. As in years gone by with the Cadillac Limousine stalker, I turned and walked straight to the truck. Stupidly, I figured I was getting good at this kind of thing. The first thing I did was taunt him to run me over. I knew I could easily jump out of the way. Things could then turn ugly, but I was again filled with adrenaline. I really was very sarcastic.

When he offered me a ride – as I had suspected – I jumped in and he immediately started driving just a bit faster than I could run, making jumping out quite dangerous. His driving slowly was a thousand times more annoying than my being followed. What a horrifically filthy vehicle. I tried in any number of ways to interrogate him as to why he was always following me, but he never said a word. But then I gave him what was perhaps the lecture and reprimand of his life. But then my mind was racing as to what to do when we came up to where my house was another mile down the road. Would he stop? Would I jump, regardless of consequences? To my surprise, and dismay, he turned up the long drive. This could get nasty, thought I. We had guns at home. I knew how to use them.

As soon as we arrived I got out, but so did he. I continued lecturing him, and told him to leave. He didn’t answer. He refused to go. I went into our garage. But he wasn’t going anywhere, not for five minutes, not for ten. What was he plotting? I had a family to protect. I should have called the police, but we lived way, way out in the middle of nowhere. And stalking was not illegal. And I had accepted a ride. Right? I’m so stupid.

So, instead, I got our trusty Remington .22 and brought it outside, filling the rifle with plenty of bullets in plain view, inviting him to leave and never come back. He wouldn’t go. Just as I was raising the rifle to shoot the gas tank of his pickup truck for as many times as it took to make it explode, my mom called me in. Rats! Ever obedient, I went in. Her presence, after all, put him off. Just when I was starting to have a bit of fun. After that, I never saw him again. That was smart on his part. Yet, I still regret not having pulled the trigger a few times. Sometimes people need to be woken up. And it would have been cool to watch a vehicle blow up.

Now, having said all that, I actually didn’t want to hurt him if I could help it. I had met enough hurting people in my life to know that he might well have suicide on his mind. Indeed, I think that this was his bid to commit suicide, you know, like someone who aims a plastic water pistol, though realistic looking, at police officers, threatening them, charging them, aiming at them with obvious intent to kill, only to get shot to death, just like they wanted.

I told my father about all this, and his response surprised me somewhat, but what he said was good advice. The sum total of his remarks was this: “Pray for him.” He said this with a bit of sternness. It was not a suggestion, but a command. My father, you have to understand, knew something of the power of prayer. O.K., so… Our Father, who art in heaven…

I think that if victims of sexual abuse would pray for their abusers, there would be a great deal of healing going on, at least for the victims, whose act of charity would bring them the blessing of no longer being controlled by any emotional scarring that whatever abuser left behind. Just a thought.

~ Some concluding remarks ~

I suppose I could recount another hundred stories just like these, all so very different, some with boys and girls my age, some with people who were middle-aged, but all these stories, however diverse, are all so very much the same. But perhaps I should add a “Part 3″ for the blog, but I think that these are enough for you to get the idea. As I write this, any number of stories, some quite wild, come to mind. What a distraction! Gagh! I’m sure our Lord had something in mind for each and every one of these experiences, both for my good and the good of others, both at that time and forever after that.

I can’t help but thank my guardian angel for giving me the wherewithal to know what to do in such situations. I was escaping one drama after the next and at the same time learning so much about the fallen human condition and how the Lord, nevertheless, wants us for Himself. My guardian angel was guarding a sense of the greatness possible to the human soul within my own soul. There is hope. God loves us. I know He loved me. He loved everyone. I wanted to see His love in others. I wanted to see the greatness possible to the human soul in this way in everyone I met.

Faithfulness in His friendship is always the way. Later, as a priest, I was to see the Lord’s love in others from up close, seeing the greatness possible to the human soul, especially when I would impart the absolution during their confessions. The Lord is so good to people in confession, bringing them back to Himself. What great dignity people have in their friendship with the Lord. I can’t think of anything more noble than someone making their confession, even of the very worst of sins. Look at how they are being carried along by the Lord’s grace! The Lord’s work in the Sacraments brings light into the darkness. I thank God that I’ve witnessed His work among those He brings to Himself. He is so good, so kind.

Just to say, it was my father, who, as a kind of last will and testament, insisted with me so very many times during the last years of his life, saying, “Goodness and kindness, George, goodness and kindness!” I like that. That’s why I repeat it all the time. It’s not worthwhile living any other way, no matter what happens. The only way is the goodness and kindness of Jesus. And yet, as we know with our Lord’s exclamation…

Jerusalem! Jerusalem!

Just me, just another little kid, into whose life the Lord would intervene in a powerful way. Thank you, Jesus! You are just so totally cool! I can’t wait to meet you in heaven. I’ve already taken note of you in friends here on earth.

• [Part 1 HERE - suffering a failed but violent rape]
• [Part 2 HERE - unwitting stardom in kiddie-porn films]
• [Part 3 HERE - a suggestion]
• [Part 4 HERE- angels!]
• [Part 5 HERE - responding to some comments.]

~ Introduction ~

So, what’s the point of rehashing such things as any abuse one might have suffered in the distant past? Well, I think many people are hurting or are simply unaware of how people can suffer, and how our Lord will intervene in such horrific circumstances. Some words of encouragement about the Lord’s goodness and kindness are in order.

This is a rough draft of what are now chapters six (Part 1) and seven (Part 2) of the autobiography. What a fright. But don’t worry. There is no provision of untoward details. I believe that untoward accounts are no more than a ludicrous invitation to voyeurism for would-be readers and a prolongation of the abuse for the victims. One can still get across the full story without descending into that which does no service to anyone except the Evil One. So, instead of all that, again, I hope you will be encouraged to rejoice in the goodness and kindness of Jesus by way of what I will relate here.

I’ve hesitated to include these chapters in the autobiography, since the mindless “they say” crowd have it that they say that the one who has any experience at all with having been abused is surely, absolutely, beyond any doubt, certainly to become an abuser himself. That kind of pop-psychology approach would therefore endanger the exercise of my priesthood, would it not, what with such fear of priests being abusers (even though it is a demographic fact that Catholic priests today are by far, indeed, altogether incomparably the least likely group to abuse)?

I’ve never hesitated to say what I think before, so why start now? Because of fear of so-called victim-advocates who merely condemn victims as likely abusers. Pah! It is to laugh! One only needs a bit of common sense. More on that just below.

Now, just to say, the attitude of psychological determinism championed by the Brits and Aussies with the statement of someone being “damaged” and therefore a risk to others, is rather suffocating of anyone who would like to come forward with statements of abuse, right? Is that the message one wants to provide? Really? This would be further abuse. Kick the victim while he’s down! Damn that victim! Right? Such pundits, who are trying to sell you something, might want to get to know the Great Pornchai Moontri: HERE, just to get you started. Pornchai never got to tell his story in court because such attitudes made his testimony apparently irrelevant  or worse. A little bit ironic, no? I think that those who make generalized condemnation of victims are either guilty of committing abuse (Hey! There’s a thought!) or are afraid to point out the abuse to which they were subjected (Sadly), or are just incredibly arrogant, as an escape from something about themselves.

Having said that, well, of course, some of those who have been abused are indeed at some risk of becoming abusers in an attempt to figure out by first hand experience from the other side of what happened to them when they were youngsters. Sure. But this is reversed with a heavy dose of common sense.

Just to say, the ones who are especially open to noticing common sense are those who remain open to an intervention of the Most High in one’s life (which is common sense), so that one is not figuring out life by mind-games (as the “they say” crowd demand), but by way of Him who is reality. Our Lord is always but always shaking us up to take note of His magnificent interventions. We can be expert at ignoring those interventions. But He keeps working on us. It’s imperative to know how to look to the Lord.

Dawn Eden, who found out how to look to the Lord, has done a magnificent job with her book on the healing of sexual abuse with the examples of the saints. Also, if you haven’t already done so (where’ve you been?!), read over her absolutely delightful Master’s Thesis defended at the Dominican House of Studies in Washington, D.C. That eminently enjoyable thesis provides a hermeneutic of continuity for John Paul’s Theology of the Body over against its lewd and blasphemous interpreters. You can find links for all these things at another post on this blog: HERE.

Another voice of reason in all this is that of Father Gordon MacRae (ABOUT) over at These Stone Walls: HERE. If you don’t know Father Gordon yet, you don’t yet understand what is happening in our culture and the Catholic Church in America.

Now, as it happens – thanks be to God – in my own case, I noticed quite immediately the gracious interventions of the Lord when I was suffering a bit of abuse, as you’ll see.

Such experiences with the Lord’s kind and gracious interventions, have, of course, had an effect on the way I perceive things, that is, for the better, for I am quite adept at seeing, for instance, the abuse inherent in some so-called child-protection-programs which shove even pre-kindergarteners’ faces into graphic sex education programs as a way to pretend that a bishop can therefore make the claim that he’s “done something” to protect youngsters by thus attempting to make little children legally responsible to protect themselves by raping their young minds with such images. Just an illogicity there, or two or three, don’t you think? How sad. At any rate…

Such experiences have also prepared me to see more clearly the real motivation of some so-called abuse-victim advocacy groups such as SNAP and TNCRRG which has little to do with advocacy. See, for some of this, A Ram In The Thicket blog, especially HERE and HERE.

This has also brought me to spend time in supporting due process for the accused, which ultimately protects the voice of real victims. Instead of “You’re guilty and you can’t prove yourself innocent,” it’s to be “You’re presumed innocent until you’re proven guilty,” with the emphasis on “proven”. For more on that, see the rather ferocious series on The Judas Crisis in the sidebar of the blog: HERE, especially this post, HERE.

Despite all that, there will always be the super-self-righteous who, in reading this article, will hold me in disdain, dirty, uncouth, unclean, unworthy, the scum of the earth. Whatever. May the Lord forgive them.

At any rate, our Lord uses all our experiences for the good – including being condemned by idiots – if we but go along with Him. Here are some of my experiences. Let’s start with a failed, but especially violent rape at just seven years old.

By the way, none of what is recounted here is the result of farcical recovered memories. It’s all instant recall here, like it just happened. No nightmares, ever; no trauma; just a steep learning curve at the time, and reflection on all this later, now and again.

~~~ O.K. LET’S BEGIN WITH THE REMINISCING ~~~

CHAPTER SIX

~ A failed, but especially violent rape ~

However knocked about I have been in my life, however stupid I have been, I have never lost sight of the greatness to which each individual of whatever age or circumstance is called. Each child bears within himself, within herself, an entire universe of wonder and greatness, and more, so much more, needing to be filled to bursting with the indwelling of the Most Holy Trinity, being able to rejoice in all humble thanksgiving in the enthusiastic friendship of Jesus with them.

Children are bearers of the weight of the glory of God, called to love with God’s love, with that love I first knew consciously at two and half years old when I received my vocation to the priesthood. It is this love – greater than all the heavens and earth, a sovereign, personal love – which gave me hope, which gives me hope, for myself, for others. God is so good and so kind, however much people can otherwise be just so very evil. It is such a crime to shatter innocence.

And if I myself had not been destroyed, I did see much destruction in others, how their innocence had been shattered. The Lord does permit real evil to happen to us, though only so as to draw an incomparably much greater good out of the evil, all for our benefit and that of others.

Let’s skip ahead a few years in this, my life story, to when I was about seven years old, I remember a boy from my part of town, who must have been terribly, violently abused, perhaps by his own brothers, his own father. There was always something tangibly scary about his brothers and father. I had never even met them. But I was warned again and again only to come there when they weren’t around. This friend of mine was always on the lookout for their arrival, and would grab me frantically, telling me to run with any noise he heard, his eyes filled with fear. This frightened me, but I didn’t want to abandon him. Friends don’t abandon friends, do they?

We were the same age, though he was quite a bit stronger than I was. Their family had exercise equipment in their basement, and he used it pretty constantly. The basement was his favorite place in his house. At any rate, whenever we would go on an expedition to look for innocent trouble, so to speak, climbing the steep banks of the Mississippi or investigating construction zones, he would erratically run away. Perhaps he was afraid of being punished for making trouble. Perhaps he was afraid of real friendship.

He once stole my little Schwinn Stingray – perhaps to run away from home – and then returned it two weeks later, letting it drop on the driveway in a heap in front of me, almost as a kind of challenge, looking at me defiantly. He didn’t know that the bike was good for doing things like THIS. He insisted with a strained, high-pitched and loud voice that he wanted to go to our basement. “Basement…” thought I to myself. I hesitated, noting a sort of madness in his eyes, a madness I didn’t give much heed, however, since I wanted him to see I was looking indignantly at the condition of the bicycle. He ignored this, as if nothing material in this world had any relevance to anything. More than this, he was incredulous that I would waste time on the bicycle. Odd for a seven-year old, thought I, seven-year old that I was. He was hardly able to contain himself, glaring right into my soul, almost shrieking that we had to go to the basement… now!

So, O.K., I led him down to the basement, never having had experience with such behavior. I admit however, that my adrenaline levels were maxing out as I led him down the steps. I showed him the small chest of toys that I myself hadn’t looked at for a number of years, but he didn’t even look in that direction. He was scanning the room for something else. I opened the cover to the keyboard of the small upright piano we had, explaining that some of the keys didn’t work. He slammed the cover back down shaking his head in disbelief at my lack of comprehension. As he scanned the room again, I had a sinking feeling that something very bad, very evil was about to take place that very instant.

I tried to ignore this, stupidly, opening the cover to the piano once again to see if there was any damage. That’s when I saw, out of the corner of my eye, that he was reaching out to the light-switch with one hand even while taking a switch blade out of his pocket with the other, lunging for me at the same time, wildly swiping the blade this way and that. Thank God there was a tiny window high up in the adjoining laundry room, which let in just enough light to enable me to evade his slashing.

Although I would often fight with my older brother, this was something altogether different. I didn’t know how to jump into this fray without getting killed. If I ran, I would get stabbed in the back. That was certain. Going into battle was the only way. As he lifted the knife to his shoulder so as to plunge the blade into my chest, with both hands I somehow grabbed his hand, and immediately commenced smashing the back of his hand, ever clenching the knife, against the metal corner of the chest freezer we had next to the piano. I was using up all my strength, as this went on for some minutes. He would switch from hitting me with his free hand to using both hands so as to try to stab me. He had an iron grip on the knife, which, incredibly, he turned in on my forearms as I continued to smash his hand against the corner of the freezer. I thought I was a dead man, that I was going to die right then and there in a pool of blood like any gralloshed deer such as I had seen hanging in the garage of the neighbor. I couldn’t believe I was holding my own. He was either not a very good fighter – though he was much more practiced than I – or fighting was not his purpose.

At one moment, when he was punching me with his free hand, he dropped the knife on top of the freezer with the other. I must have broken quite a few of the bones of his hand on the corner of the freezer by this time. I managed to push the knife behind the freezer, but that made him go into an absolute frenzy of hitting and punching, at least with his one good hand. In the midst of this, he tried to rip my jeans off. At first, I thought he was after the few coins any seven-year old might have in his pockets. But then I was utterly stunned. This fight was not in the least about fighting, though I think he would have repeatedly stabbed me, right to death, if he had had the chance. This was, instead, about something that, at that time, I could not understand. I was completely flummoxed. I listened, but I could not believe my ears. He was begging me again and again – with such a hellishly despairing desperation in his voice – begging me, half mumbling, half shouting, half shrieking, half crying out for help, begging me to hit him even as he continued to flail away with incredibly powerful punches. It wasn’t the violence that put me off so much as this beastly spirit inside of this, this… seven-year old.

This wasn’t about wanting a sparring partner. He was fighting for his own life, flailing away in trying to get my attention as he was doing so. He was trying to let me know that this was his last-ditch effort to be understood. He was at the end of his life right then, right there. He knew it. He was screaming for help. Screaming. For help. He could not go on anymore, not like this.

In all of this – however filled with adrenaline I was, however stressed all my muscles, however turbulent my emotions, however many stars I saw under the continuous rain of blows – I remained with a sense of calm, a recognition of God’s presence. “God help us! Guardian angel! Help!” And God did intervene, letting the horror take its course even while preparing to draw such good out of such evil.

Mom is eager to fry up some of the fish being held by my brother and father, with myself, being the baby of the family, always, holding up a snake I had just caught. Typical seven year old. This is on Burnt Island, in Lake of the Woods, directly on the border with Canada, as pointed out by a heavy border stake driven directly into the bed rock high up on the little island. This is during the 4th of July, warm enough if you were running around, still pretty cold if you weren’t. Bears and wolves and moose all around. Hearing the mysterious loons was always a treat.

Since the knife was out of reach, I tried to back off and run up the stairs, which took another few minutes, during which he tried to rape me – a seven-year old trying ever so violently to rape another seven-year old mind you – though he had never succeeded in pulling my jeans off nor did he ever lower his own trousers. This wasn’t so much about sex as it was about him trying to figure out what happened to him. He must have been raped for the umpteen zillionth time just minutes before coming over to my house and was using me as a substitute for what he wanted to do to his (I suppose from what he had said previously) brothers and/or father, role-playing them over against me, all the while trying to get, if possible, a reaction of goodness and kindness from me, proving to himself that even if he showed his absolute worst, there was someone who would nevertheless hold out hope for him. Goodness and kindness isn’t the passive bit of passive/aggressive rubbish. Goodness and kindness is simply real goodness, real kindness. Goodness and kindness provide hope. Should you doubt this, keep reading. Meanwhile, I escaped.

I waited at the top of the stairs for him, not a little upset, letting that sense of calm, of God’s presence, slip away a bit, in pain with so many punches to my head, and flustered that I had no idea what had just happened. Some minutes went by. I didn’t want to let him find his knife, but there was no way I was going down the steps again. My only objective now was to get him outside of the house. I was on edge in anticipation of his coming up from the basement, but this time I had no fear whatsoever. I would certainly get the job done. Eventually, he emerged and asked to take the bike again as I kept him moving to the outside.

His question about taking the bicycle angered me for some seconds, but then, as we got outside… it happened… a terrifying rush of understanding, an enlivening dread terror before the magnificent, awesome, crushing weight of the glory of its truth, ripping me up into heaven even while shoving my face into the reality of man’s horrific situation before God all the more violently, a new kind of extreme sport for me. It was not a brightness. Yet, it was. The only way I can describe this glory is by praising the agility this truth had in letting itself be carried in all charity right into the midst of the hell I now saw. My guardian angel, it seems, was enlightening me about how he saw things. Yikes!

The turmoil of the past few minutes was nothing compared to what I now beheld in front of me. Looking at this friend of mine, into his eyes… oh my… I can see them now, absolutely wide open, and him, sitting on the bike… disheveled, bleeding a bit, holding on to the handlebars of the bike with but one hand, holding the other, badly injured, in front of his chest that was heaving with hoarse, deep breathing, silent tears screaming with emotion streaming down his face, his whole body shaking quite violently. He was suffering all hell’s minions attacking whatever hope he had left. I hadn’t noticed his face so very much when he had arrived, being more interested, as I said, in the condition of my bike. But now, looking at him just as intently as he was looking at me, I realized that I was afraid for his life, as was he for his own life. His words about riding the bike, with his one remaining good hand, into the front of a speeding eighteen wheel truck just one street over as soon as he left me added nothing to what I could already see of his spirit. He was utterly shaken – a mere shell of a little boy – at a loss now as to how to keep any shred of conscience he still might possess, at a loss of how not to take his own life. And he was looking pleadingly into my eyes.

My sudden understanding in such horrific circumstances did not come from a been there, done that, condescending projection of self as is always hailed by psychologies of the lowest-common-denominator of stupidity. Instead, I understood because, then and there, I was drawn to put all this before the love of God that I had already known for years. God always uses our experiences – and I also had suffered some bad things – but what God uses is not anything that we suffer, but the hope we have gained in being brought into His love and mercy. He has us put others before that love and mercy, before that hope, not before our own ineptitude. This friend of mine knew all of my ineptness, and could not have cared less about that. He saw something else in me that he was trying to get to understand. The living hope which guides us is not distant, not cold, not ideological, not a mind game, but is ever so personal, so… true. It is a friendship with God that cannot but be manifested at such times despite our own idiocy. God wins out. Every time. If we are at all with Him.

We ended up in a long, but halting discussion, full of awkward silences, about family life and encouragement. The silences seemed so graceless precisely because they were filled with grace, leading, as they did, to honest, if only half completed remarks, which were cut off by his heart almost visibly being jammed hard into his throat with such a roller coaster of emotions.

It was one of the single most painful conversations I have had in my life, truly excruciating, because every word of understanding and advice that I was offering was coming to me for the first time, second by second. I was very conscious of my inadequacy on the one hand, but had a very strong realization that God Himself was helping me on the other hand. My emotions and my brain were working way, way overtime. There was a life and death urgency and, of course, I myself had come literally within inches of having been stabbed to death.

But God is good. He made the conversation at least a temporary success. I knew something of the angels at that time. I guessed that they had everything to do with anything good that came from this encounter, not the least of which goodness was the saving of his life and an introduction to the goodness and kindness of the Lord. This conversation, this encounter with heaven visiting earth, went on for a good half hour. He didn’t want it to stop. He was changed by the time he left. Much calmer. Overwhelmed. He got what he was looking for. Hope. The problem was that he was headed straight back into hell. But he had a temporary reprieve.

Friends are not so easily offended when they can distinguish between being dissed as opposed to someone crying out for help, for life itself. We stayed friends, of sorts, in that seventh year of my life. He didn’t ride himself into a speeding truck, not yet anyway.

There was nothing at all heroic on my part about any of this. I’m sure my guardian angel helped me fight. And any understanding I had, came directly from the Lord by way of this great angel of God. If the Lord wanted to use me, that was up to Him. I had no say in the matter. And this gives one a certain freedom. I imagine that this is what makes martyrdom possible. It has nothing at all to do with our strength; everything is from the Lord while the angels rejoice as they witness love that is stronger than death. This love is made clear with the forgiveness that the martyr holds out for the taking. It’s all about humble thanksgiving. Any of us could be in anyone else’s circumstances. There, but for circumstances and the grace of God…

We are all nothing before the love of God, we who so love to be enslaved to the circumstances in which we find ourselves. I must insist: what if we lived the circumstances of someone else? Again, good circumstances can easily lead to delusion about ourselves. Anyone holding himself out to be better than others lies to God, to others and to himself, and is a danger to himself and others. I did not “identify” with this friend of mine. What rubbish! Instead, I saw how we are all before the throne of God, how much the Lord loves each of us.

This friend of mine was pretty normal after this, and we would go on long bike hikes even of forty and fifty miles, even at such a young age, but then he tried to do the rape thing once more when we were swimming in a lake dozens of miles from home. He failed, since I made my objection with some force. That was the end of that friendship, then and there, instantly. It’s not that my understanding was at an end. He just had to learn that other people were not his play things that he could abuse at will with no consequences, a lesson I’m sure he didn’t learn at home. Had I done anything else, it would have become a passive/aggressive relationship. Not good, that. My final act of friendship was to ditch the friendship.

Does all this mean he hadn’t learned anything from the previous incident in the basement? Not at all. He had gone back home, and, I’m sure, was subjected to more hell. He just had to repeat his attack, laying aside the hope he had been given previously. Not good. Really, not good. At all. I don’t know what became of him, if he even survived another year. It seemed like he disappeared from the face of the earth. I had asked some friends about him now and again, but they only repeated with much darkness that something unspeakable had happened in his house. None of them would say what it was. They were visibly frightened at the topic. Poor kid. It’s just my conjecture, but if he wasn’t killed by his own family, or if he didn’t kill himself, he might have been snuffed out in a porno film. Indeed, as I was to find out, there was much of that going on in town, indeed, in that end of town. But that’s for the next chapter, where you can read about how I became a kiddie-porn star for the local Mafia.