Called Out of Darkness Page 0,62

before the anniversary of Our Lord's birth.

My diary doesn't give me much help as to what happened on that day. My notes are factual and simple: This is a happy day for me - my reconciliation to the Church. . . . I read a lot of St. Augustine last night. What poetry. I'm also reading on purgatory. Jacques Le Goff . . .

I feel peace and quiet in my soul. I feel happiness. I think - I know - Stan is happy for me. He told me.

The note for December 7 reads:

Went to Mass and Holy Communion. Received Our Lord into my body and heart for the first time in thirty-eight years. . . . I went to the side altar of the Giant Crucifix and said my special prayers of thanks to God for giving me the Gift of Faith and the strength to do this. . . . I was so nervous. When the priest put the host in my hand, I didn't know whether he had finished speaking or not. Then to put it in my mouth was easy. Only in the pew did I find a private moment to feel Christ inside me and to cry a little, spontaneously. I didn't want to make a scene.

Several paragraphs later:

My mind was on Mass and Communion. I love the story of the Incarnation so much - the idea of a God who becomes a man for love.

The entry for Saturday, December 12, 1998, includes this: I am married in the church. We married at the altar of St. Mary's Assumption Church on Constance and Josephine.

Scribbled in the back of the diary, only a few pages later, are these words that I must have written some time before: My heart is good but I am a monster. . . .

I'm not without a soul.

- Le Bete. Beauty and the Beast.

Cocteau

The diary ends there.

The second small miracle - which occurred on December 14, 1998, is not described in the diary at all.

That day was a Monday on which I slipped into a diabetic coma and was rushed to the hospital, with a blood sugar level of over eight hundred, and a heart that was ceasing to beat. I was unconscious as a team of doctors tried to save my life.

And save my life they somehow did. That miracle is simple to explain. Without knowing it, I had become a type diabetic.

At some point - probably around September of that year my pancreas had all but shut down its production of insulin.

For months I'd been sick with diabetes. Without knowing it, I'd almost died.

The first of the small miracles - how I managed to approach the Lord through the doors of the Roman Catholic Church - is a great deal more complex and will take a good many more words to describe.
Chapter Nine
What happens when faith returns ? What happens when one goes back to the church of one's childhood?

I've described part of the first miracle of December 6, 1998, before - in print, and many a time in interviews, and sometimes to those who have casually asked: How did you come to believe in God again? What caused you to do this?

It's important to try now to describe this "conversion" or "return" once again, perhaps in a fresh way.

When I go back to the very moment - that Sunday afternoon - what I recall most vividly is surrender - a determination to give in to something deeply believed and deeply felt. I loved God. I loved Him with my whole heart. I loved Him in the Person of Jesus Christ, and I wanted to go back to Him.

I remember vaguely that I was sitting at my desk in a dreadfully cluttered office, hemmed in on all sides by rows and stacks of books, and that I had little sense of anything but the desire to surrender to that overwhelming love.

I knew that the German church of my childhood, St.

Mary's Assumption, was perhaps six blocks away from where I was sitting. And perhaps I remembered my mother's words of decades ago. "He is on that altar. Get up and go." I know now when I think of those moments in 1998, I hear her voice.

I see her dimly, rousing us, telling us to get up and get dressed and "go to Mass."

What confounded me and silenced me in 1998 was that I believed that what she'd said so many years ago was precisely the truth. He was in that church.