Over the next couple of weeks, I will be offering a taste of my memoir, The Promise, or the Pros and Cons of Talking with God, published by TouchPoint Press, here on my blog. It is my true story of first faith and first love and how the two became almost fatally intertwined. Keep checking back for additional chapters.
JUNE 18, 1977.
Winter gave way to the spring and with the spring came joy. The whole Jesus thing was working out great for me. Not that you would necessarily know it from my behavior. Outwardly, I appeared the same. I didn’t suddenly become a street evangelist or a missionary to Africa. I didn’t start attending church more frequently or even become more outspoken in my mandatory religion classes. To quote the title of a film I later wrote, I was a true Holyman Undercover.
I wasn’t deliberately hiding my faith. I was still simply a Rosenberger at heart. To discuss such private things remained an anathema to me. If someone asked me a direct question, I would endeavor to give him a reasonably direct response, but, frankly, the subject of faith rarely, if ever, came up. Why would it? My friends and I were all Catholic!
In the Catholic Church, at least among the people I grew up with, we left the heavy theological lifting to the priests. That’s what they were getting paid for. We were trained to show up for mass and partake in the sacraments. Evangelism, for the average Catholic layperson, essentially involved getting married, practicing unprotected sex and then taking the ensuing progeny to church. We weren’t taught to share our faith. As a result, I was experiencing a mind-blowing encounter with the Supreme Being but kept it entirely to myself. A pity. Though I suppose I can’t really blame the Roman Catholic Church. My own Rosenbergian nature was more responsible. That said, I don’t remember the Lord ever pushing or prodding me to share my faith, either. I suppose He was waiting for me to finish my training period.
That would take quite a while.
Despite my lack of outward change, I definitely underwent tremendous internal transformation. With God watching my back, I no longer had any anxiety or concern about the future. I was happy. The inner sense of loneliness was gone. I was a new man, or, at least, a new teenager. And what did every teenager want in June of 1977? You guessed it: To see Star Wars.
I remember feeling utterly content as I stood in an impossibly long line outside the Towson Theater with Bob Burgess to see a Saturday afternoon screening of Star Wars. The buzz on the film was unbelievable, although no one could have guessed at the time what a monstrous cultural phenomenon it would soon become. Frankly, I was a little skeptical. I remember watching the television commercials playing on the Washington, D.C. stations before its release and thinking that the film looked kind of corny. Shows you what I knew.
Still, as I stood in line, allowing myself to be swept up in the enthusiasm of my fellow moviegoers, I found my thoughts turning toward the other thing every teenage boy wanted in June 1977: A girl.
The prospect of me getting a girlfriend at that time was remote at best. Why? Because I didn’t know any.
The girls I knew from St. Dominic had all been safely shipped off to all female high schools and I lost track of them. The neighborhood girls were all sisters of friends, or friends of my sisters. That essentially made them off limits. Despite riding the bus home every day with numerous, nubile young ladies from The Catholic High School, I didn’t have the courage to talk to any of them individually. I had no problem addressing, and, even amusing them, as a group, but those darned green uniform skirts were simply too intimidating for me. There’s no question. Pickings were slim for a shy, slightly goofy boy from Hamilton.
Bob, Jim and I were always on the lookout for girls – like any red-blooded American boys. Bob was actually pretty good at figuring out where to go to meet girls. However, despite Bob’s desire and ability to place us into proximity of members of the opposite sex, none of us were ready to make the first move. When it came to picking up girls, we were a pretty pathetic lot. And I ultimately didn’t mind.
I remember thinking, as the line to the theater slowly moved forward, that it would be great to have a girlfriend, but, if I didn’t have one, that’d be fine, too. I was happy where I was in my life just hanging with the Lord.
Perhaps out of appreciation of my well-ordered priorities, I got a strange feeling, or leading, as it were, that I would meet a girl soon. “Meet” is actually the wrong word. I’d already met her. I’d known her as long as I could remember.
Two or three weeks later, I found myself in the backyard of my paternal grandparents’ house at 3111 Westfield Avenue. It was a loud house growing increasingly quiet as my myriad of Murphy aunts and uncles married and left to start their own families. My family was only too happy to fill the void. We spent a lot of time there, especially during the summer. My grandfather, Paul James Murphy, was a wonderful host. Summer nights often found him cooking hamburgers and hot dogs on the grill. He’d also cook a terrific rockfish with stuffing. I am not, nor have I ever been, a fan of seafood, but I would always make room for that.
One of the great appeals of the Murphy house, other than the simple pleasures of family itself, was the pool in the backyard; pools, actually. There was a steady stream of above ground swimming pools built in the backyard throughout the sixties and the seventies. The first ones were extremely small, in the two-to-three-foot depth variety, but they always seemed ridiculously filled with people. Each summer seemed to bring a larger pool. By 1977, the circular, above ground pool, now wide and five-feet deep and surrounded by a concrete patio, had become a permanent fixture.
On one memorable evening, as the sky began to darken, I found myself in the pool alone with a certain Katherine Jean Gardiner, a neighbor girl from across the street. Her presence was not surprising. The Gardiners were frequent guests at the Murphy house and vice versa. The two families were very close.
Kathy’s parents, Daniel and Sally Gardiner, were a generation younger than my grandparents. Their children corresponded closely in age with my siblings and me. The oldest, the easy-going, good- natured Daniel, Jr., was about my age. Kathy was approximately the same age as my sister Laura. With all the time we spent at my grandparents’ house, it was only natural we would become friends. Whenever my grandmother Margaret wanted to get me out of her hair, which was frequent, she would say, “Why don’t you go over and see if Dan wants to play?” I was only too happy to comply.
The Gardiners were also a family that was touched heavily by the miraculous hand of God. In an automobile accident, Kathy’s father’s legs were crushed between two parked cars. The doctors felt they had no choice but to amputate them. Sally, distraught, called The 700 Club to ask for prayer and guidance. They told her not to let the doctors amputate his legs. They said he would be able to walk again. And he did.
Since then, Sally became what I would later recognize as an evangelical, born-again believer. At the time, however, I had never seen anything or anyone like her. She was totally outside of my realm of experience. My mother was undergoing a very religious phase at the time. She became active with the church and even indulged in extra-curricular activities like Bible Studies, but she remained within the Catholic norm.
My grandmother, Margaret Murphy, was also a firm believer. My Uncle Brian summed her up best in her obituary when he said, “Her major hobby was trying to get us to read the Bible.” She made sure we always prayed before every meal, and, yes, she forced some of her children to recite a psalm or two on occasion, but her faith was more staid and mainline. It was predictable. Understandable. Safe.
Sally Gardiner was different. When she talked about Jesus, you got the impression he was sitting in the next room, or maybe standing right behind you. She was quick to turn off the radio if she heard something she deemed satanic like the Fifth Dimension singing “Aquarius (Let The Sunshine In.)” She was equally quick to leave her church when they shunned a black family that dropped in for a service. Not to say she was judgmental. She displayed the fruit of the spirit. I found her kind, compassionate and no-nonsense. I really admired her. In fact, I envied her. Alone among the people I knew at the time, she seemed to share the same kind of faith that I possessed. I, however, lacked her boldness to express it in both words and deeds.
I still don’t have it.
Her husband, Daniel Gardiner, Sr., did not share her religious fervor, but I liked him, too; a lot. He had an easy smile, and I always enjoyed his stories and practical common sense. In the ensuing decades, I frequently found him hanging out at my brother Doug’s garage. His wife called him D.A., for Daniel Andrew. Dougie started calling him “Dah,” which Daniel appreciated, since it was also an affectionate Irish term for father.
The Gardiners were a good family. By 1977, Kathy’s brother Daniel and I had gone our separate way in interests, but I still held them all in affection; including Kathy. But that didn’t prepare me for what would happen next.
Kathy and I were the last two people in the pool. It was customary for the last people in the pool to create a whirlpool to gather together all the grass and whatnot into the center so that it could be easily scooped out. I remember putting my arms around her waist and started dragging her backwards along the edge of the pool. There were smiles and laughter as I pulled her faster and faster.
Then the strangest thing happened. God said, “Son, behold your wife.” Behold your wife?
Kathy?
What the...
Believe me, since that day, I have replayed that moment in my mind a thousand times. Those four unexpected words changed the course of my life irrevocably, for both good and evil. They would bring me years of bliss followed by years of sorrow and confusion when Kathy would prove not to be my wife.
Was it possible I imagined it? Part of me wishes I did. It would be easy to discount those words if this was an isolated incident, but it wasn’t. This was just a single link in a long, solid chain of words of knowledge and answered prayers. I had no reason whatsoever at the time to doubt it. Everything else the Lord said to me, both prior to this incident and subsequent to it, came true. I was in a place in my life where I expected and often received direct guidance from the Lord. He was simply doing now what He had already been doing. It was well within the realm of possibility.
Additionally, this wasn’t something I would have thought on my own. I wanted a girlfriend, but Kathy simply wasn’t on my radar screen. Not at all. The circumstances of the moment proved it. I had wrapped my arms around her waist and was dragging her around the pool. There is no way I would have been bold enough to do something like that to a girl I had romantic designs on. I was simply too shy. But I could treat Kathy like that because she wasn’t a girl to me. She was Dan’s sister. She was my sister Jeanne’s friend. Those were two major disqualifiers. If my relationship with Kathy took a wrong turn, it could ruin my relationship with Dan. He might feel compelled to beat me up. Not only that, if things went bad, she might complain to my sister and tell her what a jerk I was. I valued my privacy too highly to consider dating someone who had independent access to other people in my life. Plus, Kathy was too young for me. I was sixteen going on seventeen. She was a mere fourteen going on fifteen.
The whole idea was crazy. Behold your wife? Nobody was getting married any time soon. Still, the thought of dating, let alone marrying, Katherine Jean Gardiner was a revelation. And, after the initial shock, I found it not an unpleasant one.
Why not Kathy?
Until that moment, I never really looked at her as a girl before, but upon further examination, I discovered her to be quite a girl indeed. She was very pretty, and, as she blossomed through her late teen years into her early twenties, she would grow nothing short of beautiful. She was also great to be around. She was warm and friendly, with an inviting smile. Intelligent. Thoughtful. Funny.
What more could I want? Plus, she already liked me.
Maybe not that way, of course. I’m pretty sure she had given me as little romantic thought as I had previously given her. Probably less. But we were friends, and that seemed like a good foundation to build a relationship upon.
Perhaps most importantly, she was someone I already felt I could talk with and that was what I really wanted more than anything else. My desire for a girlfriend wasn’t inspired predominately by my raging hormones, although they were certainly a factor. I truly wanted a companion: A girl and a friend. Someone to drive a stake through the heart of my inner Rosenberger.
But the Lord was offering me more than that.
“Son, behold your wife.”
I didn’t object. I got onboard immediately. But, in retrospect, I wish I had never heard those words.
The Lord told me more than I needed to know. I’m sure I would have pursued Kathy with half the encouragement. I would have acted the same if He had said, “Son, behold your girlfriend.” That was all I needed to know. Instead, the Lord had upped the ante. In poker parlance, He pushed me all in.
I didn’t need to know He wanted me to marry her, especially since He knew I would eventually blow it. It’s one thing to break up with a woman you love. It is another thing entirely to know that that woman walking away from you was the partner God intended you to share your life with. Not only have you shattered a beautiful human relationship, you have also disrupted God’s perfect will for your life.
When I titled this book The Promise, or, The Pros and Cons of Talking with God, I wasn’t being a smart aleck. The pros of talking with God are self-evident but there are also cons. The main one is knowing. You have no excuse and no one to blame but yourself when you know, categorically and without question, God’s will, and then you deliberately choose to disobey.
How do you recover from something like that? I think it is better not to know.
The Lord disagreed.
Maybe because one day He wanted me to write this book about surviving in the gray area we create for ourselves between His sovereignty and our own free will.
5 – The Promise
JUNE 18, 1977.
Winter gave way to the spring and with the spring came joy. The whole Jesus thing was working out great for me. Not that you would necessarily know it from my behavior. Outwardly, I appeared the same. I didn’t suddenly become a street evangelist or a missionary to Africa. I didn’t start attending church more frequently or even become more outspoken in my mandatory religion classes. To quote the title of a film I later wrote, I was a true Holyman Undercover.
I wasn’t deliberately hiding my faith. I was still simply a Rosenberger at heart. To discuss such private things remained an anathema to me. If someone asked me a direct question, I would endeavor to give him a reasonably direct response, but, frankly, the subject of faith rarely, if ever, came up. Why would it? My friends and I were all Catholic!
In the Catholic Church, at least among the people I grew up with, we left the heavy theological lifting to the priests. That’s what they were getting paid for. We were trained to show up for mass and partake in the sacraments. Evangelism, for the average Catholic layperson, essentially involved getting married, practicing unprotected sex and then taking the ensuing progeny to church. We weren’t taught to share our faith. As a result, I was experiencing a mind-blowing encounter with the Supreme Being but kept it entirely to myself. A pity. Though I suppose I can’t really blame the Roman Catholic Church. My own Rosenbergian nature was more responsible. That said, I don’t remember the Lord ever pushing or prodding me to share my faith, either. I suppose He was waiting for me to finish my training period.
That would take quite a while.
Despite my lack of outward change, I definitely underwent tremendous internal transformation. With God watching my back, I no longer had any anxiety or concern about the future. I was happy. The inner sense of loneliness was gone. I was a new man, or, at least, a new teenager. And what did every teenager want in June of 1977? You guessed it: To see Star Wars.
I remember feeling utterly content as I stood in an impossibly long line outside the Towson Theater with Bob Burgess to see a Saturday afternoon screening of Star Wars. The buzz on the film was unbelievable, although no one could have guessed at the time what a monstrous cultural phenomenon it would soon become. Frankly, I was a little skeptical. I remember watching the television commercials playing on the Washington, D.C. stations before its release and thinking that the film looked kind of corny. Shows you what I knew.
Still, as I stood in line, allowing myself to be swept up in the enthusiasm of my fellow moviegoers, I found my thoughts turning toward the other thing every teenage boy wanted in June 1977: A girl.
The prospect of me getting a girlfriend at that time was remote at best. Why? Because I didn’t know any.
The girls I knew from St. Dominic had all been safely shipped off to all female high schools and I lost track of them. The neighborhood girls were all sisters of friends, or friends of my sisters. That essentially made them off limits. Despite riding the bus home every day with numerous, nubile young ladies from The Catholic High School, I didn’t have the courage to talk to any of them individually. I had no problem addressing, and, even amusing them, as a group, but those darned green uniform skirts were simply too intimidating for me. There’s no question. Pickings were slim for a shy, slightly goofy boy from Hamilton.
Bob, Jim and I were always on the lookout for girls – like any red-blooded American boys. Bob was actually pretty good at figuring out where to go to meet girls. However, despite Bob’s desire and ability to place us into proximity of members of the opposite sex, none of us were ready to make the first move. When it came to picking up girls, we were a pretty pathetic lot. And I ultimately didn’t mind.
I remember thinking, as the line to the theater slowly moved forward, that it would be great to have a girlfriend, but, if I didn’t have one, that’d be fine, too. I was happy where I was in my life just hanging with the Lord.
Perhaps out of appreciation of my well-ordered priorities, I got a strange feeling, or leading, as it were, that I would meet a girl soon. “Meet” is actually the wrong word. I’d already met her. I’d known her as long as I could remember.
Two or three weeks later, I found myself in the backyard of my paternal grandparents’ house at 3111 Westfield Avenue. It was a loud house growing increasingly quiet as my myriad of Murphy aunts and uncles married and left to start their own families. My family was only too happy to fill the void. We spent a lot of time there, especially during the summer. My grandfather, Paul James Murphy, was a wonderful host. Summer nights often found him cooking hamburgers and hot dogs on the grill. He’d also cook a terrific rockfish with stuffing. I am not, nor have I ever been, a fan of seafood, but I would always make room for that.
 |
| The Murphy Pool |
On one memorable evening, as the sky began to darken, I found myself in the pool alone with a certain Katherine Jean Gardiner, a neighbor girl from across the street. Her presence was not surprising. The Gardiners were frequent guests at the Murphy house and vice versa. The two families were very close.
Kathy’s parents, Daniel and Sally Gardiner, were a generation younger than my grandparents. Their children corresponded closely in age with my siblings and me. The oldest, the easy-going, good- natured Daniel, Jr., was about my age. Kathy was approximately the same age as my sister Laura. With all the time we spent at my grandparents’ house, it was only natural we would become friends. Whenever my grandmother Margaret wanted to get me out of her hair, which was frequent, she would say, “Why don’t you go over and see if Dan wants to play?” I was only too happy to comply.
The Gardiners were also a family that was touched heavily by the miraculous hand of God. In an automobile accident, Kathy’s father’s legs were crushed between two parked cars. The doctors felt they had no choice but to amputate them. Sally, distraught, called The 700 Club to ask for prayer and guidance. They told her not to let the doctors amputate his legs. They said he would be able to walk again. And he did.
Since then, Sally became what I would later recognize as an evangelical, born-again believer. At the time, however, I had never seen anything or anyone like her. She was totally outside of my realm of experience. My mother was undergoing a very religious phase at the time. She became active with the church and even indulged in extra-curricular activities like Bible Studies, but she remained within the Catholic norm.
My grandmother, Margaret Murphy, was also a firm believer. My Uncle Brian summed her up best in her obituary when he said, “Her major hobby was trying to get us to read the Bible.” She made sure we always prayed before every meal, and, yes, she forced some of her children to recite a psalm or two on occasion, but her faith was more staid and mainline. It was predictable. Understandable. Safe.
Sally Gardiner was different. When she talked about Jesus, you got the impression he was sitting in the next room, or maybe standing right behind you. She was quick to turn off the radio if she heard something she deemed satanic like the Fifth Dimension singing “Aquarius (Let The Sunshine In.)” She was equally quick to leave her church when they shunned a black family that dropped in for a service. Not to say she was judgmental. She displayed the fruit of the spirit. I found her kind, compassionate and no-nonsense. I really admired her. In fact, I envied her. Alone among the people I knew at the time, she seemed to share the same kind of faith that I possessed. I, however, lacked her boldness to express it in both words and deeds.
I still don’t have it.
Her husband, Daniel Gardiner, Sr., did not share her religious fervor, but I liked him, too; a lot. He had an easy smile, and I always enjoyed his stories and practical common sense. In the ensuing decades, I frequently found him hanging out at my brother Doug’s garage. His wife called him D.A., for Daniel Andrew. Dougie started calling him “Dah,” which Daniel appreciated, since it was also an affectionate Irish term for father.
The Gardiners were a good family. By 1977, Kathy’s brother Daniel and I had gone our separate way in interests, but I still held them all in affection; including Kathy. But that didn’t prepare me for what would happen next.
Kathy and I were the last two people in the pool. It was customary for the last people in the pool to create a whirlpool to gather together all the grass and whatnot into the center so that it could be easily scooped out. I remember putting my arms around her waist and started dragging her backwards along the edge of the pool. There were smiles and laughter as I pulled her faster and faster.
Then the strangest thing happened. God said, “Son, behold your wife.” Behold your wife?
Kathy?
What the...
Believe me, since that day, I have replayed that moment in my mind a thousand times. Those four unexpected words changed the course of my life irrevocably, for both good and evil. They would bring me years of bliss followed by years of sorrow and confusion when Kathy would prove not to be my wife.
Was it possible I imagined it? Part of me wishes I did. It would be easy to discount those words if this was an isolated incident, but it wasn’t. This was just a single link in a long, solid chain of words of knowledge and answered prayers. I had no reason whatsoever at the time to doubt it. Everything else the Lord said to me, both prior to this incident and subsequent to it, came true. I was in a place in my life where I expected and often received direct guidance from the Lord. He was simply doing now what He had already been doing. It was well within the realm of possibility.
Additionally, this wasn’t something I would have thought on my own. I wanted a girlfriend, but Kathy simply wasn’t on my radar screen. Not at all. The circumstances of the moment proved it. I had wrapped my arms around her waist and was dragging her around the pool. There is no way I would have been bold enough to do something like that to a girl I had romantic designs on. I was simply too shy. But I could treat Kathy like that because she wasn’t a girl to me. She was Dan’s sister. She was my sister Jeanne’s friend. Those were two major disqualifiers. If my relationship with Kathy took a wrong turn, it could ruin my relationship with Dan. He might feel compelled to beat me up. Not only that, if things went bad, she might complain to my sister and tell her what a jerk I was. I valued my privacy too highly to consider dating someone who had independent access to other people in my life. Plus, Kathy was too young for me. I was sixteen going on seventeen. She was a mere fourteen going on fifteen.
The whole idea was crazy. Behold your wife? Nobody was getting married any time soon. Still, the thought of dating, let alone marrying, Katherine Jean Gardiner was a revelation. And, after the initial shock, I found it not an unpleasant one.
Why not Kathy?
Until that moment, I never really looked at her as a girl before, but upon further examination, I discovered her to be quite a girl indeed. She was very pretty, and, as she blossomed through her late teen years into her early twenties, she would grow nothing short of beautiful. She was also great to be around. She was warm and friendly, with an inviting smile. Intelligent. Thoughtful. Funny.
What more could I want? Plus, she already liked me.
Maybe not that way, of course. I’m pretty sure she had given me as little romantic thought as I had previously given her. Probably less. But we were friends, and that seemed like a good foundation to build a relationship upon.
Perhaps most importantly, she was someone I already felt I could talk with and that was what I really wanted more than anything else. My desire for a girlfriend wasn’t inspired predominately by my raging hormones, although they were certainly a factor. I truly wanted a companion: A girl and a friend. Someone to drive a stake through the heart of my inner Rosenberger.
But the Lord was offering me more than that.
“Son, behold your wife.”
I didn’t object. I got onboard immediately. But, in retrospect, I wish I had never heard those words.
The Lord told me more than I needed to know. I’m sure I would have pursued Kathy with half the encouragement. I would have acted the same if He had said, “Son, behold your girlfriend.” That was all I needed to know. Instead, the Lord had upped the ante. In poker parlance, He pushed me all in.
I didn’t need to know He wanted me to marry her, especially since He knew I would eventually blow it. It’s one thing to break up with a woman you love. It is another thing entirely to know that that woman walking away from you was the partner God intended you to share your life with. Not only have you shattered a beautiful human relationship, you have also disrupted God’s perfect will for your life.
When I titled this book The Promise, or, The Pros and Cons of Talking with God, I wasn’t being a smart aleck. The pros of talking with God are self-evident but there are also cons. The main one is knowing. You have no excuse and no one to blame but yourself when you know, categorically and without question, God’s will, and then you deliberately choose to disobey.
How do you recover from something like that? I think it is better not to know.
The Lord disagreed.
Maybe because one day He wanted me to write this book about surviving in the gray area we create for ourselves between His sovereignty and our own free will.
Other Chapters:
Chapter 1 - A Photograph
Chapter 2 - My Death
Chapter 3 - Childhood
Chapter 4 - Saved!
Chapter 5 - The Promise
Chapter 6 - The Mission
Chapter 7 - Mission Accomplished
You can get a copy of the whole book here:
Chapter 1 - A Photograph
Chapter 2 - My Death
Chapter 3 - Childhood
Chapter 4 - Saved!
Chapter 5 - The Promise
Chapter 6 - The Mission
Chapter 7 - Mission Accomplished
You can get a copy of the whole book here:
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