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July-September, 2016

Welcome Home

by Rev. Joseph Wolfe, O.M.C.

Many years ago, as a small child three years old, I remember traveling in an old car driven by my father. It was a ‘49 Chevy ( a thirteen year old car) and we were leaving Texas, the home of his father and family and headed for the Chicago area. 

I remember standing on the floor of the rear of the car, hanging onto the front bench seat, my left arm around my father as he drove. My older brother sat in the passenger seat next to my dad. I was thoroughly excited and loved riding in his car. 

But he was sad. My father was always sad during these times. I never understood why anyone could be sad.

I loved looking out on the landscape as we drove north. I loved the adventure of it all and the farms along the way, the stops at gas stations and the nights that we slept peacefully in the car. I loved being with my dad. 

One of the memories that stands out most during our trip from Texas to Chicago was the time when I told him that I was hungry. It had been a while since we’d eaten and many years later I reflected on that time when I could see even more sadness and despair in dad’s eyes when he reluctantly pulled into a road-side diner and bought two hamburgers. Not three, just two. One for my brother and one for me.

Many years later I would understand that he was pretty broke around that time. Back then a gallon of gas was about twenty-five cents and a hamburger cost about half of that. But I remember sitting across from him, next to my brother and wondering why he wasn’t having anything to eat. 

Many years later, when I sat with him the night before he laid his body down, he gripped my hand tightly as I sat next to him, and would not let my hand go. He couldn’t talk, having lost his ability to speak, but I could feel his presence flow into me, saturating every fiber of my being. He was asking me, without words, for my forgiveness. He was telling me that he was sorry.  

Our trip from Texas to Chicago would eventually end at an orphanage where he would leave my brother and me in the care of nuns. Homeless and without work, dad was forced to place us in the temporary custody of kind people who would provide a bed and food for his children. I remember the moments when we cried, my dad and I, when he had to leave us there. It would be several years before we were finally back together again. ‘Temporary custody’ turned out to be five or six years and it was during these times when I would be introduced to a world of misery, pain, regret and hopelessness. I would grow to hate just about everything and everyone in the world, as I perceived it through these five very limited senses.

Those initial experiences evolved into even more. There were years of juvenile delinquency followed by many more years of prison, where the feelings of deeply rooted hatred for the world I perceived grew stronger with every passing year. I was convinced that the world was a cruel place, saturated with pain and suffering and that I was an unwilling victim of it.

The thought of God was farthest from my mind. I had buried any childhood glimpses of God’s love and compassion under a mud mountain of belief in the fundamental teaching of elders and peers who constantly reminded me that I was a prime candidate for the ever-lasting fires of hell and damnation.  So, God and His final judgment were not something I looked forward to, and I began to adopt the conviction that God was nothing more than a fabrication by powers in authority to keep people in line. I believed that only the gullible could be taken in by stories of God.

I would live with these convictions for over fifty years.  But during all of that time something else was going on. There was a distinct feeling around my heart that I was missing something. This feeling loomed up into an impending physical sensation sometimes that seemed to demand my attention. Not unlike the feeling of an idea, lingering just at the tip of the tongue but impossible to grasp. I just couldn’t put my finger on it. But in my determination to find out what seemed just beyond my reach of understanding, I shifted into a state of willingness to learn. And from that state  of willingness, recollections of suppressed mystical experiences of years passed were loosened and recalled with vivid clarity. 

A Course in Miracles found its way to me and for the next fifteen years remained my constant companion. Here were the answers to every question I ever had. Here was what I couldn’t put my finger on, all during a previous life of belief in a world of misery and depression. Finally, I could relax in the comfort of truths like, ‘Nothing in the world I see serves to give me joy’ [from Lesson 128 in the Workbook] and ‘What could you not accept if you but knew that everything that happens, all events, past present and to come  are gently planned by One Whose only purpose is your good?’ [from Lesson 135 in the Workbook.]

Finally, I could embrace the realities that reminded me that I am not a victim of the world I see; I could never be abandoned because I am never alone; that only my own thoughts can harm me;  anticipation plays no part at all for present confidence [Holy Spirit] directs the way; that I am not a body but free and still as God created me.

These gentle reminders, like morsels of nourishment for the soul, lead me safely away from a thought system that could only be alien to the essence of Who and What I really Am, the offspring of God Itself, and onto the lawns of Heaven where a welcoming home has waited patiently in eternity. 

Love, Light & the Peace of God.

© 2016, Pathways of Light. https://www.pathwaysoflight.org
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