Here’s a report by Robert R. Schwarz, a retired newspaper editor and former leadership trainer for a worldwide volunteer service organization. A few years ago, I interviewed a few freedom-loving individuals--good friends of mine-- about the freedom they most cherished and struggled to win.
1. A working mother raising seven children
2. A retired U.S. Army general wounded in the Vietnam war
3. A homeless man
4. An ex-convict and devout family man before his death
Said the custodian to the college professor of psychology as the custodian began mopping the classroom floor, "please enjoin your weekend, sir."
Dr. Stein replied, "And you, too, Fred. It's a free country you know, so, have fun doing whatever you want to. " Fred smiled , and looking kindly at the professor, replied, "I afraid, sir, that if I enjoy that kind of freedom I'll be on my way to hell."
Dr. Stein looked confused from a moment, then smiled, sort of.
There is no true freedom nor real joy except
in loving God and in having a good conscience.
( Thomas a' Kempis, from his world-acclaimed
book he wrote in the l5th Century, The Imitation of Christ. )
MARY
PASCHALL is
the 54-year-old mother of seven children and the business manager
for her husband’s law firm which operates in their suburban home
of Arlington Heights, Illinois. “My
office is here, on the first floor and Jim’s is upstairs,” she
says. “Does he boss you?” I asked in humor. Smiling, she replied,
“No. I boss him”, then quickly added, “We came into our home in 2019, MY
work zone. But I love working for my husband. I
would never want to work in a [real] office because the pulse of the
family is here.”
"Freedom Is a Gift God Gave Us”
I asked if 25 years of motherhood and almost three years of managing a real estate law firm has altered her faith life. ( Besides her volunteer church work, Mary belongs to Opus Dei, a Rome-based prelature of the Catholic Church whose members seek Christian and ordinary life holiness and strive to imbue their work and society with Christian principles.)
“No,” Mary said, "It’s enhanced it. I really feel blessed that we have this autonomy. Having your own business, means you don’t have those limits like with a salaried job.”
We talked more about freedom. “Freedom comes in all forms,” she said, and mentioned freedom to have the money to buy your own home (like the Paschalls did), money to give to charity, and helping one’s children to pay off their student debt. Mary then paused and said, “And the freedom to choose to love. Choosing a spouse gave me a great sense of freedom. Freedom is a gift God gave us.”
Another important freedom, she said, was choosing to forgive a person who has harmed you. She admits that at times she struggles to do this. “But freedom to harm another is not freedom,” she added.
We both agreed: Freedom is not free. We also agreed in the widespread corruption of morality by which too many people of all nations believe, that the best kind of freedom is being able to whatever you want.
We also agreed that too many of us are in a state confusion today about the best kind of freedom—due to widespread violence, a war here and there, political corruption, and even the Covid epidemic and global warming.
Mary ended the conversation, saying: “The devil is king of lies. He creates confusion and chaos. That’s when people take their eye off God because they’re too busy wading through this chaos. That’s why I go to daily mass and go to confession—to stay as close to God as possible.”
GENERAL JAMES H. MUKOYAMA became one of the youngest major generals in the U.S. Army soon after the Vietnam War in which he was seriously wounded by Agent Orange, a lethal spray used to exfoliate jungle trees to expose the hidden enemy. Moments after a jungle firefight between the Vietcong enemy and the three platoons that General Mukoyama, then a captain, was leading, there were three dead Viet Cong men lying at his feet.
"I stopped and looked at this body at my feet and realized something had hardened my heart," he told me years later when I interviewed him at a coffee shop in Glenview, Illinois. It was a kind of confession for him. He went on: "Only moments earlier all these dead men were live human beings , children of God ; they had families, loved ones, emotions, and yet I was treating them like they were bumps on a log. Then I remembered Jesus' Sermon on the Mount, where He told us to pray for our enemies. So in the middle of all this stuff going on, I just said a silent prayer for the three Vietcong men and their families—and for myself. I didn't make a big ceremony out of this. I didn't get on my knees. All of this maybe lasted 45 seconds, but it has remained me with me for the rest of my life."
Today that captain, now a retired and decorated two-star general, will tell you or anyone, and with ageless joy on his face, that by coming to those painfully honest terms with himself, he had avoided being permanently wounded— morally. It was a grace which he admits was to shape and enrich the rest of his life.
When I recently interviewed the general a few days before his 78th birthday, I learned that he lives a very active life civilian life with his wife of more than 50 years, Kyung Ja ( K.J. ) of Korean descent in the upper-middleclass Chicago suburb of Glenview. When asked what he does for fun, he laughed and mentioned a list of volunteer activities that included Military Outreach USA, a faith-based organization he founded . It cares for veterans with moral wounds [ www.militaryoutreachusa.org ] and provides free resources and education to houses of worship. He also is an executive board member of "Friends of Fisher House Illinois [ www.fofhil.org] , which provides help and healing for military families. And he also is an active member of a small, Christian men's group. Then there is an autobiography he has recently completed.
Fr. Foley and Gen. Mukoyama
When asked what he believed is the most important or best kind of freedom, the General said: "It's a personal choice. My idea of freedom is for individuals to make choices in their life about what is right, what is wrong , and what are correct actions and what are incorrect actions.” When I replied that this kind of freedom is abused so much world-wide, the General shot back, "Well, that's why we have the Ten Commandments. "
Kevin
Ray, age
61, has been homeless for
several years. His childhood home was
on Chicago’s West Side. He
was once
employed by
a bakery and later, he told me, he did “some cooking. “ My
friend was never
married and has a brother and two sisters. Today
he shares a room with another homeless man in a government subsidized
apartment building.
I took some notes from a conversation we had during our drive to a Veteran’s Administration in Maywood, Illinois, where we met a mutual friend and an elderly veteran, Ron Harstad. On the drive back, I asked Kevin for his thoughts about freedom. He was, I believe, quite transparent with answering my questions while at the same time giving me driving directions for our shortcut home.
" I was free from things that were not right "
“The best freedom I ever had,” he said, “was getting out into the community and meeting people. I was free to cope with anxiety and depression and stress. ( Kevin has been in a treatment program for the last six years.) I can get out now and enjoy life. I get to the park and relax, go to the library and sit back and enjoy a book. Before that, people were giving me problems, but now I feel free to turn them over to God. He moved my enemies away from me.”
I asked my friend what he considered as the perfect freedom.
With no hesitation, Kevin replied, “Bob, the perfect freedom is in Jesus Christ because He is the pefect peace and the answer to all the problems we face. Without Him there is no peace.”
Prison, Hell’s Kitchen,and a Dream
From Hell This particular report is about an exodus to freedom of a man away from the common bondage of sensuous demands of the flesh, coercive lies of the devil, and the dynamic corruption of the world.
The family is the privileged setting where every
person learns to give and receive love….Nothing
can completely take its place….The family is also
a school that enables men and women to grow to
the full measure of their humanity.
(Pope Benedict XVI )
I... Sam Flannery was raised in a gang-tough Boston neighborhood and, as a teenager, went to prison twice for armed robbery. As his friend years later in the 70's, I saw him as a large and very strong man whose first job (after finishing his second sentence ) was being a strike-breaker on the New York City docks. When he laughed, his belly would shake for dear life; he resembled the storybook Shrek. Sam's speech was peppered with creative obscenities and tinged with crude yet insightful philosophy about humankind.
My late wife Judith and I first met Sam in the Hell's Kitchen neighborhood of Manhattan, where Sam had a small apartment and a coterie of friends , each living on a razor edge of the law. Sam skin was yellowish; at a party he might pass himself off as Mexican, Jewish, or a native Nigerian. I got to know him as cheerful man who avoided hard work by gently manipulating someone to do it for him. Whenever he could. Sam deftly avoided the constraints of time and space. Only once did I see Sam's face show a meditative expression. (The memory of it still haunts me… It was during a shopping trip with the three of us in Times Square. We had walked from 55th Street to 42nd Street when Sam suddenly halted to gaze at something two blocks away .For a long moment he was motionless, as if paralyzed.
I finally said, " Tell us, Sam, what's up ? "
"Nothing," he said. "Just looking down there at my Times Square His focus was on the marquee of a porno graphic movie house. Some Evangelist might say, with some humor, that Lucifer was licking his chops for Sam. My friend's particular emotion that day in Times Square was to be ominously prophetic...
One night while Sam slept in this hotel room a few blocks from Times Square, he was jolted awake by a hellish dream of being skinned alive in a slaughter house filled with hogs hanging from hooks squealing as the waited their turn. Sam related this to me with mocking yet fearful laughter.
"Then came the fire alarms in the hallway," With empathy that surprised me, I twice closed my eyes as my friend continued. “I ran down three flights of stairs. I stood almost naked on the sidewalk. There were rats, dozens of them running out from the foundation.“
Though Sam would never even come close to processing in his mind this trauma as a defining moment in his life-- as Judith and I eventually would—it would profoundly liberated something in Sam’s heart and, yes, his soul. (Sam, I felt, always wanted to be free from the dimensions of time and space—perhaps a yen he acquired in prison. At our age, though, neither he nor I knew that freedom without restraints eventually confines us in some kind of prison without any exit...
A year or so later it was time for Judith and me (still two “innocents” ) to return to our home near Chicago). After long hugs and affectionate words at a Hell's Kitchen curbside and re-affirming our friendship of dinners together tastefully prepared by Judith and our arm-holding sidewalk window shopping, Judith and I stepped into a taxi for the Idlewild airport..
II Judith and I had no contact with Sam for more than a decade. Then one day,we got a phone call from a woman named Doris, who tells us she is Sam Flannerys' wife and that Sam has told her all about our past friendship with her husband.
" You know”, she said, trying hard to boast a bit, “he was the manager of some porno movie house in Times Square, and he was the boss of four employees. He was very, very happy and making lots of money…maybe too much," she added with some sarcasm. Her tone was flavored with some Latino language, though at first it was politely cheerful, sadness now took over.
She related that three months ago, she and her three children had left Sam in Hell's Kitchen and moved to her current apartment in Chicago. "I never wanted to say this," she said biting off each word , “but we had to leave my husband because Sam was occasionally snorting cocaine and being abusive to us ," Doris began to sob. "I'll call you back next week,"she said and hung up.
Doris called three days later , very excited. “He's home, he's home! " she exclaimed , first in Spanish.
Judith and I made a date later that week to meet Sam’s family .
***
Judith and I are sitting with Doris in the Flannery apartment. It's in a run-down neighborhood in Chicago's South Side, and we are nervously waiting for Sam to come home from work. We have this thought: if after all these years, will we now see our dear friend as a stranger, perhaps even as a bad dude we might want to shun? The thought embarrassed us..
Sam will be so happy to see you," Doris , says. "He's at work--can you believe!"
Another negative thought: Had Sam had come to Chicago to connect with a drug lord or to open his own porn theater here ?
" The children are in the kitchen playing some game ," Doris says . "You'll meet them later. "
While Doris talks, I look at the unmatched furniture surrounding us and at a ceiling patched here and there. My journalist reflexes ( I was now the executive editor of a chain of weekly and semiweekly suburban newspapers ) take note of Doris, a tallish, large-framed woman in her late forties with an optimistic bent towards life. When she rises to pass a plate of mixed nuts, she moves with a model's grace , and when I compliment her on this , she tells me with a modest smile that she once danced professionally in a small, now defunct New York City ballet company.
Doris remains transparent in conversation and impresses me as a humble woman with motherly fortitude for forming good habits for her children. She shows trust in our burgeoning friendship by admitting, "I had to leave Sam …his ogre shouting fits rattled our bones. But, you know something unbelievable ? When Sam called last week to say he wanted to come back to his family , the kids and I simply said yes--and meant it ! I cried, then they did!"
Sam come back to his family ? Leave behind the joy of his life? Judith and I stare at each other.
Doris calls the children and introduces us to Charles, 15 , Matthew, 7 , and Gloria, 12 , all of whom we were to learn had been designated --without our knowledge-- to be our "godchildren". It was a typical Sam breech of protocol. All three trot into the room, displaying traits of their father's social behavior by giving Judith and me bear hugs and boldly asking personal questions about our lives. Within an hour, all of us are snug in companionship.
I am now uncomfortably curious (and skeptical ) to know what earthquake it took to jolt our Shrek buddy out of his Pleasure Island in Times Square. Recalling how Sam often made fun of any 40-hour job and fatherhood itself, I wondered what motivated this man to voluntarily give up his kingdom for traditional family responsibilities and a humdrum neighborhood, all being the polar, sensual opposite of Sam himself. Had Sam returned to fetch some secret treasure like a thieving friend he had planted in Chicago to work for him? Surely there had to be some lucrative payback for one so willingly transplanted into an alien environment.
Doris exits to the kitchen and returns with some candy for the kids, and, I head for the kitchen and a drink of water. Crossing the living room's slightly sagging hardwood floor spotted with remnants of old varnish, I enter a kitchen with cracked linoleum spread over its floor and a sink full of mismatched dishes and silverware. Water is dripping defiantly from the sink faucet.
Doris spends the next fifteen minutes relating how Sam appeared one morning on her doorstep grossly overweight from Type One diabetes . She tells us how she and the kids did a barefoot jig when Sam , two days later, told them he had been hired as a school janitor .
"Sam is due any second now," she says. " He takes a streetcar home from the school , you know."
"Daddy's a custodian there," Matthew announces with pride.
We hear Sam opening the front door. Judith and I go to him and exchange lingering hugs reminiscent of that day we parted company in Hell's Kitchen. Sam is more Shrek-ish than ever, still a giant with a big, un-corralled heart and a belly full of laughs.
I joke about his streaks of white hair, which slightly irritates him. "What do you expect for a guy my years," he says, trucking abruptly to an armchair and crashing down on it. I notice he limps, and I suddenly see a man living out an epilogue of a riotous life like some trench-fatigued Foreign Legion soldier.
Charles leaps upon his father's lap, onto heavily stained coveralls. Sam, his face patched with at least two days of whiskers and spotted by the grime of his work, plants a smacking wet kiss on both of his son's cheeks. He rubs a large calloused hand up and down Charles' face. Judith and I see bone-deep weariness etched on Sam's face .
We wait while Sam tries to mentally swat away his workday thoughts and reconnect to his family. Doris brings in glasses of water. I try to recapture past rapport with Sam but say the wrong thing: "How'd it go today, big guy?"
Sam grimaces. I have irritated him."Cleaned ten shit bowls. You wanna know more ."
Doris adds balm to the scene by telling the children, "Show Aunt Judith and Uncle Robert how well you play your instruments . "
Blonde and cute Gloria holds a banjo impetuously as do Matthew with his flute and Charles with an oboe more than half his height. They play a piece from Mozart. Doris and Sam beam. Judith and I love all of it and surmise that no little sacrifice was made for the children's instruments and music lessons. Charles hits a sour note. Sam shouts his disappointment: "Mother of Pearl!”
The music stops, and Sam makes us laugh, and our brains dance with his assorted , street-wise insights and metaphors, colored as only Sam can say them. Laughing from the depths of his now considerably expanded Buddha belly, he describes the comedy of people he daily encounters on Chicago public transportation.
Doris brings out a two-pound box of Fannie May second- day candy. "None for you, husband Flannery," she politely admonished. " And you know why." Sam grabs five pieces. “Sam please... don’t!”, his wife pleads. "You know what the doctor warned you ." Doris winces, takes a deep breath and then tells us how much the family loves fresh asparagus and strawberries. We eat them all the time. "
Finally, I ask the big question: "Sam, we want to hear why you really left New York."
Sam pauses for serious deliberation. I recall how in Hell's Kitchen he wore this same expression when aware that his listening audience might scrutinize his honesty.
Doris tells the children to go play in their bedroom.
Sam now rubs a finger under his eye as he did in our Ninth Avenue apartment whenever he was determined to tell the truth. ( I always wondered if his police interrogators took notice of this.
"I had a dream one night in my Times Square pad..." Sam begins and proceeds to retell about the dream, the fire, and the rats. He ends with, " The next day—and I swear to sweet Mary [ i.e., mother of Jesus ], and this is the truth─—my apartment building begins burning down , burning down while I'm in the raw. "
He pauses, then, and roars with laughter salted with his usual imaginative obscenities, intended, of course, to turn our frowns into grins of acceptance. "You should have seen the rats run out all over, thousands of them!"
Now pleased with his testimony and with us ,his audience, Sam roars again with belly laughter. Judith and I exchanged smiles. No more skepticism about our Hell’s kitchen friend.
***
I was to always think of Sam's dream as a preternatural preview of a kind of fate that might await him if he had continued with his Times Square life style. The dream, I am positive, terrified him like nothing—or anyone---could perpetrate . It was, I believe, an absolute final warning that my friend had strayed too far down a no-return alley on his way to Gehenna ( an Old Testament name for a continuously-burning dump for Hell-bound souls) . The 14th Century German mystic and preacher John Tauler perhaps would diagnosed Sam's issue with this Satanic warning:
Sometimes the devil's readiest temptation is to [ encourage ] despondency . He shows a man his native frailty and his sinfulness, and he tries to make him heavy-hearted on that account. And then he roars in his ear: 'Are you so foolish as to spend your life in anguish and in penance ? No! No ! Live in joy. Enjoy your carnal pleasures. Almighty God will give you time for penance at the end of life. Have your own will, enjoy creatures while you are young and strong; when old age come, then shall you become pious and serve God.
And these hopeful words of mercy from God as written by the prophet Isaiah : " Do not be afraid; you will not be put to shame. Do not fear disgrace; you will not be humiliated. You will forget the shame of your youth ." (Isaiah 54:4 )
During the next six months we continued to visit the Flannery family, inviting them into our home for a meal served on a table decorated with fresh cut flowers and napkins which Judith had stitched herself. Sam swooned at this. Our get-togethers were a badly needed reprieve from the Flannery family's daily stress in being steadfast with parental love that never asked for a payback —otherwise known as agape love.
It seemed that as one Flannery crisis was resolved, another flared up. Sam worried about the Chicago neighborhood gangs and their influences on his children . His eye had lost much of its vision when pierced by a nail he was yanking out from a classroom ceiling. Family medical insurance, Doris once mentioned, was a "luxury". Her husband's salary was just a few dollars too high to qualify for public aid, which caused her to worry about the food budget going bust and her diabetic husband being forced again to delay a purchase of insulin. And, of course, always there was that threat of a utility being turned off because of unpaid bills.
We never heard another word from any family member about Sam's hotel fire nor that nightmare and, most comforting of all, did we never got the impression that Sam missed his Times Square “paradise”. Though we often heard weariness of mind and body in Doris’ speech and saw it on Sam’s face, Judith and I never saw their fortitude crippled. Though family joy appeared often as a constant tonic for the entire family, I couldn't help wondering how the children's futures would be shaped by their parents' many past road bumps and entrenched human flaws of Sam.
III On a Saturday afternoon when I knew Sam would be alone, I drove to his apartment and invited him for a walk around the block. I had no agenda, I just wanted to pal with him.
"No walk today, Robert," Sam said in a tired voice on a razor edge to remain firm and steadfast as a family leader. "Gotta save fuel for Monday." He made no eye contact with me and made me think of a Hollywood war movie I saw a long time ago about a battle-fatigued sergeant losing hope of advancing one more yard to help a buddy wounded at the front lines.
I teased Sam into taking the walk until finally, like an older, kind brother, he grabbed the nape of my neck and steered me from the doorway down to the sidewalk. We walked for a half-hour saying little to each other. Sam kept his head low and shuffled his steps .
My mind wandered back to our evening strolls down Ninth Avenue in the "Big Apple "( as the city was nick-named then ) when . on more than one occasion, I grow anxious when spotting a shady looking character standing motionless in a darkened doorway ahead of us. But within a second or two, I felt guarded by Sam, who could—as we claimed in my high school days about tough guys— "take down any guy on the street. "
Suddenly, I just stopped walking and turned to Sam and said, "Sam, I want to ask you something."
He halted and stared at me with his Hell's Kitchen street instincts that always warned him of an imminent confrontation with another person.
I blurted out a question which I had never asked anyone: "Look, Sam, would you mind if we prayed together? " I had no idea where I was going with this and , with some dread, recalled how Sam had always expressed with mocking humor his sentiments about religion. Was I paddling in water over my head? Yet, I knew Sam had seen enough of my " "good "side in Hell's Kitchen to see humor in my friendly evangelical effort.
Sam put me at ease and softly jolted me with his simple soft " Okay". Nothing more was said. When we returned to his apartment, we entered Charles' and Mathew's bedroom. I closed the door. Sam remained motionless and very still.
"Let's kneel, Sam," I said. Sam kneeled and remained motionless. I don't know why I didn't think it a miracle. I just asked God to take over. I whispered a suggestion to Sam that he open his heart to Jesus. "Simply talk to Him—about anything─silently if you want." I heard a word or two, maybe a few more from Sam's lips .
***
It seemed, we both remained motionless and silent for uncountable minutes in darkened silence. I was nervous and felt this was a winner-take-all or lose- all confrontation between Sam , the Devil ( the Evil One), and God. I hoped Sam's free will given to Him by God had not been severely crippled by so many wrong choices in life, that he was still free to say yes to good and no to bad. During my early years as a crime reporter for the Chicago City New Bureau , I had seen the tragedy of wrong, self-centered "free" decision-making among drug addicts and alcoholics. Yes, Sam wanted to live for the love of his family, but did he have the necessary faith and courage to let go and let God?
I now prayed that Sam was not reflecting on the enormity of his past sinful behavior in life nor doubting that God could love a man like him. I deeply regretted that I had never told him that God could wipe the slate clean for ANYBODY. I also regretted never telling Sam about that Good Thief on the Cross who turned to Jesus on an adjacent cross and pleaded: Jesus , remember me when you come into your kingdom. And Christ replied, Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in paradise.
Sam now rose and headed slowly towards the door. He was smiling. I got up, my heart still in prayer. Sam looked at me and said, "Bob, I think, I sort of surrendered to the boss." With a whispered chuckle, he added, " You know, I put my hands up a little just like I did for those cops one night in Boston.”
I did not follow him out to the street, but left for home, anxious to tell all to Judith.
Three days later, a weeping Doris telephoned us to say that Sam had enjoyed a cheerful pot roast dinner she had cooked for the family the previous night. She was silent for a long moment, then added: "Dessert for him was an enormous helping of apple pie alamode. " She added in strange tone, "Very, very sweet...Then my husband, the father of my children went to bed reading his daughter's Bible and never woke up."
IV Judith had a single red Irish rose delivered to a simple and very brief church funeral. We went to the casket and saw my friend lying in an ill-fitted suit and drab tie, his hands clasped around the rose. An appropriate eulogy could not come to my mind nor was any of substance spoken . Neither was there an obituary in any newspaper. When I sat down to write this report several years later, I thought of Sam while reflecting on these words written 2,000 years ago by a man who had described himself as the "chief of sinners" and who, despite "thorns" in his flesh, went on to live a saintly life of profound moral strength and courage. In his Biblical epistle in the book of Romans, this apostle Paul wrote these words that turned human thinking upside-down throughout the world : For I do not do the good I want, but I do the evil I do not want….Miserable one that I am ! Who will deliver me….? Thanks be to God…[it is ] Jesus Christ our Lord. "
We eventually lost track of Doris and the children , but learned that Matthew became a travel agent; Charles a violinist for weddings and funerals; and Gloria an owner-manager of a tanning parlor. Thanks to the freedom won by their father, I believe each one was eventually led by God into a life with a pulsating yen for the best kind of freedom, the kind of freedom that enables a human to say “no” to all that is ungodly and “yes” always to God.
The End
Next Week: The Case for
Defining the Strength of
"Weak People"
comments are welcome at
rrschwarz777@gmail.com
© 2020, 2022, 2023 Robert R. Schwarz
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