“Hi, this is Father Sean Mulcahy, I’d like to know if you would come and give a talk at the church? Perhaps you might tell the folks what God has done for you in your life.” He had a real Irish brogue, like one of the Irishmen you’d hear stepping right off the boat! I was flattered and honored, but nervous right away, as I replied, “Yes, I’d be privileged and blessed to have the opportunity to share.” I was nervous because he said “Father” before his name, indicating for me that he was a Catholic priest. I was raised Catholic, so that didn’t scare me, but I’d never before been invited to speak before Catholics, so this would be a new experience for me. What would I say? I don’t remember any lay people speaking a sermon or a “talk” as he called it, from the pulpit in any Catholic church I’ve ever attended. Was this guy the real deal, a real Catholic priest? I found out soon enough, when I met him for breakfast at “Nick’s” restaurant around the corner from his church in Hallandale, Florida.
This little energetic Irishman briskly walked up to my table at “Nick’s” and introduced himself as “Father Sean” as he sat down and wasted no time. “What has God done for you in your life?” I felt like saying, “I think He’s doing something now.” I later determined that our meeting was a sort of ‘divine appointment’, as we refer to it in the faith community. I began to share my testimony with this interesting little Irish priest, though it was slightly annoying that he kept interrupting me and controlling the conversation. I had my own theory on that, especially after receiving his business card days later. The word “addictions” appears on his card, under the title, L.M.F.T., the initials for “Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist.” I eventually learned that he earned two Masters Degrees and a Doctorate too, in addition to being a Catholic priest for 42 years, or since 1962!
He liked what I was telling him about my story, or ‘testimony’ as it’s referred to in the faith, but he wanted to tell me ‘what’ to emphasize and ‘how’ to deliver the ‘talk’ at his church, “St. Charles Borromeo.” I remember telling myself, “This guy’s a control freak, but let it go John.” I was thinking, “This fellow is a cute little guy with a contagious laugh and that renowned Irish sense of humor, a real character. He is that prototypical Irish priest and caricature who can actually get away with it.” He finished with, “So we’ll see you for your talk at the Saturday night service at 5:00, and then again for the Sunday morning services at 9:00 and 11:00, and oh, keep it to twelve or fifteen minutes John, OK?”, as he got up with the check and hurriedly approached the cash register. I never had anyone ever do that before, you know, get up when they were done eating or speaking, and essentially, by their exit, tell you that the breakfast meeting was over. Though it was rude behavior, it was cute and comical, only because it was him, “Father Sean Mulcahy.” He obviously had places to go and people to see.
I stopped at Dunkin Donuts and wolfed down two Boston cream doughnuts and a large cup of coffee just before arriving at St Charles Borromeo Saturday night. I wanted plenty of energy to get up there and do my thing, especially since I’d never given a ‘talk’ from the pulpit in a Catholic church. To be sure, God knew I’d need a lot of energy to keep up with this 67 year old Irish priest. I prayed before speaking, asking God to help me to be as transparent and real as possible with these people. My prayer was answered, as I fell on my sword big time. I confessed ‘in open court’, in that church – from the pulpit - to all these strangers, how I had been a ‘fraud of sorts’ in my relationship with my former client, Gil Fernandez, that I had led Gil to believe that I was ‘saved’ and ‘born again’ in the Faith, like him, all for the purpose of getting hired on as the lawyer for this big media case, for the big publicity and the big money. I told these strangers all about my addictive, toxic behaviors, my ‘Atlanta/recovery’ experience, my hypocrisy as a former prosecutor – prosecuting people for doing essentially what I was doing in my own private life – telling them of my manipulative, Machiavellian machinations before and during my stay in ‘Atlanta’, my struggles with what I then learned to be my ‘imposter syndrome’ … I told them almost everything!
It was well received, according to “Father Sean”, and as evidenced by the number of folks who approached me after the service, encouraging me. A few people said variations of, “That took a lot of courage”, while others told me, “I’m in recovery”, or “I’m in the program”, with a couple more folks whispering ‘recovery’ slogans in my ear as they passed by with a smile. Two women asked me to speak with their loved ones at home. I was absolutely blessed by the entire experience of sharing, and by all the encouragement after all three services! Quite a few of the folks asked me to join them and “Father Sean” at the church’s outside coffee gathering under the gazebo following the service. “John, call me Sean, it’s just ‘Sean’ out here, OK? I’d like you to consider coming on this retreat we’re having this Friday through Sunday, a few hours north of here on a lake. I think you’d add something for some people, and you’d enjoy it too, get away from all the busy chaos and all, whatdaya say?”
This whole thing was either a ‘set up’ or a real ‘divine appointment’, is all I kept thinking as I drove to the lake. Could my wife or one of my pastor friends, have set this up from behind the scenes, or was this whole thing orchestrated by the Holy Spirit? These speaking and sharing opportunities, the retreat thing, and my reconnection with my Irish-Italian, northeast Catholic roots, it was all happening so fast, and right when I needed some real encouragement. Sean is a priest who dares to expose some of the fallacies of the Vatican’s self-serving, doctrinal teachings, the same priest who visits the jail inmates every week and drives his own eighteen-wheeler truck full of food to the migrant farmers and the poor. His voice mail message at the church is his own Irish brogue, telling the caller about ‘Jesus’, and it really does appear as though he’s a radical, or liberal, born-again priest. “This guy’s the real deal”, I was thinking, “a street priest with a heart for the hungry.” I learned at the lake that he was raised dirt poor on a farm in Ireland, often feeling those hunger pains which no doubt drive a lot of his passion today.
Sean was telling us, “When I go to the jail, I tell the guys, ‘I have addictions too, only mine won’t land me in here with you, but I’ve got addictions, everyone has addictions’.” I suppose I started us on that subject at the lake when I told the group, “I’m addicted to ‘more’, more food, more money, more wine, more women in the old days, more power or fame with the media cases, coffee, you name it. I have that addict mentality, ‘if one’s good, two’s better’, which isn’t true. Two isn’t always better; sometimes “less is more”, as my wife, Elizabeth, likes to say.” Sean continued with, “Stop striving, thinking you need to add this, or add that. Growing in spirituality is more about ‘subtraction’. “Wow”, I thought to myself, … “subtraction, subtracting things out of my life, too many pursuits, strivings, concerns … ‘growing spiritually is more about subtraction’, … I like that, I’m going to remember that.” It then dawned on me that on my last prison visit, Gil Fernandez told me to remember that God wants us to cut all this unnecessary junk out of our lives ‘now’, that God is speaking these same things to us ‘now’, in the present. Gil, like Sean, is essentially saying that we’re wrong in thinking that God has ‘spoken’; instead, He is ‘speaking’, and His word is alive as He speaks to us now!
Isn’t that interesting, that Sean Mulcahy would be saying basically the same thing that Gil was telling me? “Is that a word from the Lord to me”, I kept saying to myself … “ yes, I know He doesn’t speak to us audibly anymore, as He once did to Moses and a few prophets back then, but I also know that He’s a God of circumstances, and through the work of His Holy Spirit, could He be arranging to speak to me, now, ‘in stereo’ no less, from the dual ‘speakers’ of Sean and Gil? Wow, that would be just like Him, wouldn’t it?”
My thoughts were racing at that moment, interrupted only by Sean’s ‘coincidental’ allocution? “Don’t forget that God referred to Himself, when speaking with Moses, as the “I am’.” Sean was on a roll now.
“St. Augustine makes the point that He didn’t refer to Himself as the ‘I was’ … so we shouldn’t get hung up on our past mistakes, regrets, failing to forgive ourselves or others … nor did he refer to Himself as the ‘I will be’ …so we shouldn’t always be putting things off until the future, for example, I’ll be happy when this is over, or when I get that job, or whatever, worried about the future, etc. …but instead, He referred to Himself as the ‘I am’ … because He is a God for right now, so ‘be here now’, ‘stay in the moment’, ‘be, don’t do’, OK?”
Speaking of St. Augustine, he was my kind of saint. I was psyched that Sean brought him up in his talk. I wondered then and there if Sean thought to mention St. Augustine because I had just been telling the group of my addictive behaviors. As soon as Sean quoted St. Augustine, my mind went to that old saying, “Every sinner’s got a future, every saint’s got a past.” I thought, “I have a future, thank God, and St. Augustine had a past.” I had earlier singled out St. Augustine for study because I had heard that he was once a real reprobate with the women, struggling with lust and his own addictive behaviors, before finally surrendering in the Faith. He confessed to obsessing over his need for women and the life of the flesh and all of its pursuits, so much that he felt enslaved and shackled to his compulsions and strongholds. His struggles with this addiction didn’t end with his conversion. He tried to fervently devote himself indivisibly to the love of God, forsaking the flesh, but the enemy still targeted him.
St. Augustine wrote, “I sighed and longed to be delivered, but was kept fast bound, not with exterior chains but with my own iron will. The enemy held my will, and of it he made a chain with which he fettered me fast. Out of a perverse will he created wicked desire or lust, my yielding to lust created habit, and habit unresisted created a kind of necessity, by which, as by links fastened to one another, I was kept close shackled in cruel slavery. I had not the excuse I claimed earlier to have, when I delayed serving Thee because I had not yet certainly discovered Thy truth. Now I knew it, yet I was still fettered.”
St. Augustine was right on the money when he described this slippery slope or cascading effect of losing our self control, as he described first the surrender of our “will,” which begins with our “obsessions’ (i.e. our thoughts), and leads to our “compulsions” (i.e. our actions or behaviors), and then invariably, the formation of a “habit,” which then creates that “necessity,” resulting in our very shackling or enslavement to our addiction; but he, like me, took comfort in St. Paul’s epistles describing this war between our flesh and our spirit. As the author said of St. Augustine in “Lives of Saints,” “He learned what he had long felt to be true, that the law of members warred against the law of his mind; and that nothing could free him of the conflict but the grace of Jesus Christ.”
To think that this great Saint was once tortured by the same demons of lust that I war against - in fact the same exact struggle against the same obsessions and compulsions, or as he would say, the same “wicked desire or lust,” “habit, ” “necessity,” ‘chains,” “shackling” “enslavement” and “cruel slavery” - way back in the year 370, amazes me. I read that he transparently fell on his sword in one of his famous books, “Confessions,” a spiritual, autobiographical account of his besetting sins and weaknesses. He didn’t want anybody to think of him as being holier or more sanctified than he was in actuality. Of course, he really did go on to eventually live quite a holy life as a bishop set apart for the cause of Christ, achieving a degree of sanctification experienced by few. According to the author of “Lives of Saints,” St. Augustine sent a copy of his book to a friend with the note, “See now what I am from this book; believe me who bear testimony against myself, and regard not what others say of me.” He was my kind of guy. I could definitely identify with him in his old fleshly days, while I so much wanted to identify with him in his post-conversion life and love for Christ.
I was lost in my thoughts about this great Saint and our common struggle, when Sean brought me back to the present reality with the question, “Do you need to be the ‘big wheel’ all the time, or are you content to be the ‘little wheel’ at times?” Sean asked all eight of us the same question, as he sat atop the old fashioned plow chained to the ground on the front lawn of the lake house. He gestured to the big wheel and the little wheel on opposite sides of the plow, as he metaphorically asked us this very telling question. “Too often the ‘big wheel’ ”, I thought to myself. He told us the story of how his brothers in Ireland shipped this plow to him as a gift, reminding Sean of his Irish homeland and farming roots. I believe I recall him saying that it was his most prized possession. “What seeds are ‘you’ planting?”… As he asked that question, I asked myself, “Am I planting ‘confidence seeds’ in my kids, or am I planting seeds of fear and anxiety, cautioning them too much about everything from germs, to strangers, to everyday risks, am I teaching them to react with faith, and not fear, to recognize that ‘problems’ are to be expected, that a ‘problem’ is nothing but a ‘disguised opportunity’.”
I was deep in thought when I again heard him ask, “Are you plowing along the surface, or are you willing to go deeper?” Next, he gestured toward the huge farming ‘rake’, likewise chained to the ground a dozen yards away. “Back in Ireland”, he explained, “this big ‘rake’ was attached to the tractor and used to collect all the hay and various crops, whenever there was a harvest.” I knew in my spirit that he was going to use the ‘rake’ this time as yet another metaphorical example or parable of sorts, like Jesus would do with the disciples. “What are ‘you’ harvesting, or raking into your life?” It seemed as though the priest was looking right at me as he asked that question. I wondered then, “What is my harvest?… joy?… peace?… love?… good will?… or, by not being with my family as much as I could be, by taking in toxins, or by being disobedient before God ,sinning, giving in to temptation, am I raking in shame, guilt and regret?”
Just as I was ‘processing’ the allegorical issues raised by the ‘plow’ and its two different ‘wheels’, and the farming ‘rake’, Sean said, “I’m a big believer in ‘symbols”, pointing then to the “guideposts” as he called them on either side of the beginning of his driveway. He asked, “What are your guideposts, the guideposts guarding your heart, those posts you use to guide you along as you go your way in this life? … The Bible? … Jesus?…His example? … His word? …His Holy Spirit?… or … are your guideposts different?… the world?… the enemy?… the flesh? Before I could answer one way or another, even within myself, he turned to his outdoor ‘well’ formed of stones, asking, “Do you see my ‘well’ over there? Which ‘well’ are you drawing from in this life? … the ‘well’ of the ‘world’? … or, … the well of His word? What exactly are ‘you’ drawing from the well?” My mind immediately went to Galatians 5:22, to the listed ‘fruit of the Spirit’, asking myself, “Am I drawing out of the ‘well’ of this world, with all the strivings, the flesh and the lusts, or am I drawing from the ‘well’ of His word, drawing out those things I need, especially patience, or ‘longsuffering’ as He calls it, joy, peace, love, goodness, kindness, self control and all the rest? "
It's almost amusing that right when I started debating within my mind and spirit, one of the other guests on the retreat offered up yet another analogy: “I was thinking that the fertilizer makes the flowers grow strong and pretty, so I thought of the ‘word of God’ as the fertilizer which will help my kids grow strong and pretty, as people in this world.” …“Wow, that’s cool”, I thought. Then another guest pointed to the moss on all the trees, commenting on how beautiful the moss can be as it adorns the trees. In a perfect, discipleship moment, Sean reminded us, “The moss can be beautiful, like many things we want to pursue or covet, but in the end these same things are bad for us and can kill us, just as the moss is killing the trees – see how the branches are barren of leaves or vegetation, all dried out and dying, the ones covered with the moss?”
“Wow, these retreats are pretty cool,” I remember saying to myself.
Now if I can only "life-out" some of this good stuff in my every day walk, and not simply parrot it back as though I got the sayings down pat, and that's all it takes to get it. I committed that day to at least TRY to remember to think about these things daily, to give it an earnest effort, lest I morph right back again into that frenzied "human doing," from the "human being" He made me to be.
I pray Lord, that I can finally and belatedly do what you told the disciples (and me!!) over 2000 years ago to do - and this is what Sean was essentially trying to tell us in his own way:
“Get away, by yourself, to a quiet place and rest.” – Jesus (as recorded in Mark 6:31)
I need your help to do this, Jesus, and please remind me to do this every day, in your name I pray, amen.
© 2008 John P. Contini (OK to repost with attribution and contact info)
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