Finding Faith

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Alan Vaughn and his wife, Janet, got into a car accident. Janet dies in the crash, and Alan is in a coma. When he awakens, he believes God wishes for him to carve a work of art. Alan starts the project with unfamiliar tools and skills, enduring pain from his crash injuries. Alan finishes his artwork, which inspires deep devotion in others, and he loses his faith. Those who want more of his work, and reporters who are looking to tell his story, pursue Alan. Alan distances himself from his art and begins a personal journey to find God again.

Finding Faith

This past Easter, I was talking with acquaintances at my son’s lacrosse game. When asked if I was going to church, I fumbled as did not know what to say. The answer was no, and the moment of awkwardness did not pass quickly. They could not know that my struggle with faith was more germane in my life at that moment than ever before.

When my father was alive, I could refer to him and say that he had enough devotion for his entire family. We attended mass when we visited him, or when he came to our home for the weekend, I took him to our church. When he died, those opportunities vanished, and so did my connection to the church.

Dad was the spiritual leader of our family. My parents would bring their six children to Our Lady of the Assumption each Sunday, as it was their duty to do so. I modeled my belief in God after theirs: stoic, unquestioned, and rooted in the rites and traditions of holy days and holidays. In my teenage years, I rebelled and questioned my belief in God as only an insolent seventeen-year-old could. It was natural to me that if I were to challenge my parents, I too would turn from the Lord as the ultimate affront to my mother and father and their beliefs.

As a parent, I made sure that my kids each received their sacraments, and that made my father happy, as he was glad that we at least gave our children a chance to find their own faith. After my mother died, I would take my father to the five o’clock mass each Saturday when he came to stay with us. During this period, I learned that my father’s belief in God was not some habit drilled into him as a boy while attending catholic school. His conviction struck him during WWII on a battlefield in Italy when he had been shot and left for dead. In a magical coincidence, he awoke as he was being administered last rites by an army chaplain. He thought he had died, and when he looked at the face of the man praying over him, clad in olive drab and holding a prayer book, he recognized him to be a priest from back home. From then on, he knew deep within his heart that he was alive, and that God willed it so.

There was no such calling for me. When I pray, it is as though I am poking my head into a large, empty, darkened room and calling out to no one. The only light is a sliver sneaking in from behind me. From time to time, I check in to see if someone answered or if he left a note on the door for me. But, right now there is nothing beyond that entrance except empty space.

Maybe soon, during the next holiday season, as Christmas music fills the shopping malls and the radio airwaves, I’ll rap on the door again. Perhaps no one will answer, but I will keep returning. There will be an answer one day when I call out. I have faith.

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Alan Vaughn and his wife, Janet, got into a car accident. Janet dies in the crash, and Alan is in a coma. When he awakens, he believes God wishes for him to carve a work of art. Alan starts the project with unfamiliar tools and skills, enduring pain from his crash injuries. Alan finishes his artwork, which inspires deep devotion in others, and he loses his faith. Those who want more of his work, and reporters who are looking to tell his story, pursue Alan. Alan distances himself from his art and begins a personal journey to find God again. #god #catholic #religion #religiousfiction #crucifix #Alan Vaughn and his wife, Janet, got into a car accident. Janet dies in the crash, and Alan is in a coma. When he awakens, he believes God wishes for him to carve a work of art. Alan starts the project with unfamiliar tools and skills, enduring pain from his crash injuries. Alan finishes his artwork, which inspires deep devotion in others, and he loses his faith. Those who want more of his work, and reporters who are looking to tell his story, pursue Alan. Alan distances himself from his art and begins a personal journey to find God again. 

Finding Faith (A Work in Progress)

I originally wrote this when I was still clinging to God. Only recently I decided that my prayers were ascending into a void where no deity was present and that I was wasting time attempting to contact a supernatural being. My life has not changed for better or worse since making this very difficult decision to eschew God and Jesus; the only exception being that I am free to think for myself and be rid of Bronze Age rules and dictums. 

Finding Faith (A Work in Progress)

Some people are equipped with faith. I see a strong belief in God not as something that can be taught, but as a trait or an asset. For me, I simply lack the fundamental ingredients necessary to form any sort of bond with the All Mighty. When I was a kid, my parents took my siblings and me to church each Sunday. There was Catechism as well, but all I learned was to be fearful of God. Jesus was the nice son of the Father; but I learned that to not believe that he is the son of God, and that he died and was resurrected for our sins meant that I was going to roast in Hell for an eternity – just for that. For the simple doubt that enters anyone’s mind that maybe, just maybe this book of ancient text written by people who believed that the Earth was flat and that the sun revolved around our planet (and they’d burn you at the stake for saying otherwise) were absolutely correct when it came to my soul and the word of the Lord.

In my youth, I had a cartoonish view of Heaven. You died, hopefully went straight up through the clouds, encountered St. Peter who scrolled through some sort of giant tome for your name as you hoped a trap door wouldn’t open beneath your feet and send you falling into the flaming pit of Hell. With luck, he’d nod in approval and wave you through like a bouncer at an exclusive, Manhattan night club. You’d turn around and wave goodbye to any unfortunate friends or relatives who didn’t have enough check marks next to their names to make it through the Pearly Gates.

That may not be close to what I was taught during my religious education, but that is what I took away from it all. I was trained to be scared, feel guilty, and to repent, repent, repent. One could never do enough good to earn a free pass in Paradise, and the slightest misstep could damn you forever. In my teens, I rebelled against authority – and that meant against God and Jesus, too. I couldn’t stop thinking impure thoughts with the raging libido of a seventeen-year-old with access to Playboy Magazines. The only reason I started watching Monty Python was because it was on PBS and they (gasp) occasionally showed nudity. But there was God, looking down upon me and shaking his head in disapproval. I was sure Jesus didn’t condone my leering at centerfolds either, and the Holy Ghost, whoever he was, probably put his foot down as well. Wait a minute, I’d think to myself. I was made in His image, and he made women – beautiful women – and it was sinful for me to look at them? Talk about a crisis. It wasn’t just sneaking a peek at naked women that vexed me; it was the idea that just about anything could be a sin. Not listening to your mother and father, lying to others (yes Aunt Beckie, dinner was delicious—ugh), skipping church, talking about classmates, anything that one could do on a daily basis was a sin, and that was just plain frustrating to me.

How could anyone have the fortitude not to sin? What irked me even more was that the other members of the parish whom I sat next to were not better than little, old, hell-bound me, I thought. God, Jesus, Heaven, Mary, Peter, Paul, and all the angels and saints, were way too demanding of my time and efforts; and the world we lived in seemed ill-suited to meet their lofty demands. So, I teetered on the brink of agnosticism; a safety measure with one foot firmly in the God camp, just in case. Why? Because I held strongly to the idea that I could be faithful.

Finally, in my twenties, I became an atheist. And not one of those obnoxious, eye-rolling, “I don’t believe in those fairy tales” kind of atheists. I simply did not believe in God – or Jesus for that matter. This bothered me because I really wanted to believe. I know so many family and friends with a strong faith in God. They have immense knowledge of all that is holy and historical when it comes to religion and Christianity in particular. They seem so certain, assured, and ultimately content. I am sure they did not arrive at their faith easily. The people I am referring to in my life are intelligent and educated. They don’t wave the Bible in the air and quote scripture as if no other fact or idea can impugn such powerful words. They are reasoned, soft-spoken souls who have had some sort of epiphany; or maybe they simply have the propensity for deep, unwavering conviction.

When I had children, I wanted them to have religion in their lives. I figured that as a parent, God would come in handy as a supernatural authority figure who would sit on the sidelines and help me round out the kids’ upbringing as the ultimate disciplinarian. When my children were preparing for their first Holy Communion, they were forced to go to confession – which nowadays the Catholic Church calls Reconciliation (to make it sound like more inviting to the sinning masses). What are little kids confessing to? Not much, really. So, they sit in the confessional and tell the priest that they disobeyed their parents and fought with their brothers or sisters.

Cue the dramatic music: they disobeyed their parents. They sinned little boy and girl sins. I committed those by the truck-load in my early years, and I agonized over the consequences. I only hoped my son and daughter didn’t experience the same internal torment that I did when I was their age preparing for the sacraments. It made me feel guilty that I put them through this at all. Ultimately, it was my latent fear of God and His perpetual punishments, in spite of my stated atheism, and the fact that I did not want to disappoint my father, that I sent my kids to church and saddled them with the same guilt and fright that I carried with me for as long as I could remember.

In church, I’ve sat and watched these children emerge from their visit with the priest after their first confession while waiting for my own kid’s turn. They appear with a sullen expressions on their faces, walking with their heads bowed and their hands clasped, as they rattled off Hail Marys and Our Fathers in their heads. Seated in the pews near their friends, they are buoyed by a sense of relief that accompanies the knowledge that they are young and that death is a long way off. The time to worry about real sins and an actual accounting of all the wrongs they committed in their lives will happen when they are very, very old. That’s what I thought at that age.

After each of my children were confirmed, I stopped taking them to Sunday mass. There was a brief, overlapping, period of time when my father – a deeply religious man – was alive and my oldest was preparing for Confirmation when I still had to pretend that I was a man of God. It was right after my mother died that I would take my dad to the five o’clock mass every Saturday night. During those visits to the Parish of the Holy Cross with dad that I became both envious and resentful again.

In the rows of pews were hundreds of others from my community who gathered together to praise God. I was present, but not one of them. My father’s faith was unshakable and built on the solid foundation of a lifetime’s worth of hardship and surviving the battlefields of Italy in World War II. I admired my dad’s capacity to understand and worship God. His daily prayers and visits to church had a healing effect on him. No doubt he prayed for his family, and I felt a tinge of shame for not praying for him as well – at least not in the way the faithful do. I wished for him  to stay healthy and for good things for everyone else in my life, however, wishes do not constitute prayers.

My parents are both gone. It’s tough to see photos of them since I feel in my heart that as much as time that they spent praying to an angry, vengeful, anthropomorphic, Old Testament God and his progressive, more accepting son, they are by every definition no longer with us. For me to believe that there is a magical realm where one goes after death where we are reunited with our families and friends and all of our pets because we had conviction and performed charitable works takes a leap of faith I do not have the strength to jump. If I had a running start and I ran at full speed while in the best shape of my life, I could not cross the chasm of doubt that is within my heart that prevents me from believing in God. For this I am damned; but that is only if I believe the tenets which outline the circumstances for one to be banished to Hell to begin with. I do not, and I certainly wish I did.

I miss my parents very much and I’d like to see them again. There are some close friends of mine who died young and I often wonder what they'd be like if they were still alive. While I will never forget them, they sit as framed portraits in my memory, and what hurts more than anything is the notion that when I die, and when everyone else dies who knew and loved them, they they have died a second time. The same will happen to the rest of us; after our friends and family die, we die once more with them. There will be no one else to carry memories of us. That is the cold, hard reality of death that frightens me more that a Dante's Inferno. Your name will never be uttered by another's lips, your pictures will have no identity, your character is lost. Your soul becomes anonymous and evaporates forever. Your grave is deep, your body decomposed, or your ashes scattered and mixed with the soil. But you are no longer alive, in person, or in the pages of history. All that you have done is futile and insignificant. Life is meaningless, and there is no point to it all except to support yourself and your family and fulfill any selfish wishes you may be able to afford.

What if after we pass away we actually could reunite with friends and family? We do have something that could be a considered a soul. Our bodies contain energy. All of the science books I have read suggest that energy cannot be destroyed, so there is hope that when we pass away that our minds do go somewhere, even for a brief period of time, and we could perhaps mingle with the others we knew on Earth before our energy is absorbed into a star or a black hole. Maybe God isn’t who we say he is, and that everything written about Him is wrong; that what we must do is love one another and fight off the entropic forces that kill our bodies and prevent civilization from advancing. I’d like to meet a merciful God; one who shows us where we went wrong and sends us back to try again instead of flinging us into an unholy pit of torture for an eternity or rewarding us with a trip to Fantasy Land. If I pray, I’d like a solid answer, and not an eventual turn of events that someone can point to and assert that it was God’s will. I’d like to go to Church and believe that the institution I am loyal to be actually inspired by a creator and not the greed and wickedness of man. As of now, none of these things I ask for seem possible.

Tonight I’ll lay awake in bed for a short time before sleep overcomes me. I’ll think about everyone in my life, what I plan to do, and what I may have done wrong or what I could do differently. If there is a God, and He is listening, I hope my thoughts count as prayer.

My Father, My Teacher

All which I thought I knew about my father was altered in the final days of his life. I believed, correctly so, that he was a strong, powerful man, both physically and in stature; but; I was also exposed to his profound spirituality. 

In my contemptuous, youthful days, I succumbed to the teen aged notion that I was going to live forever and that God did not exist. It was easy and convenient for me to shed the faith I had instilled in me from the time I was born. I called myself an atheist. There's a haughtiness to that belief system which is attached to the inherent and natural anger experienced by those who are pushing eighteen. Perhaps this is sparked by a fear of being nudged out of the nest into the real world, and by the anxiety which accompanies making a life for oneself which creates inner turmoil. My dismissal of God from my life also came at the same time I rebelled against my father.

He raised six of us, three boys and three girls, and he tended to our sick mother. Often he would take on another job to provide for us, making sure we had the bare essentials to get through life and to keep a roof over our heads, and regretfully, I could not appreciate his efforts.

Advice came in the form of bromides and life lessons, often learned from his own mistakes, which I fended off will the skill of a fencing champ. His instruction also came in the form of actions. He led by example, and often I lagged behind not paying much attention. Only now as a middle aged man raising my own family can I understand and appreciate his philosophies of dealing with difficult bosses, unreasonable deadlines, and the vagaries of keeping pace with and eventually surpassing ones peers. I only wish I had been a better student. 

With that said, I've gleaned much from his final hours, ones in which he suffered greatly. He faced his death with dignity. His bravery came from his strong belief in God and his unwavering conviction. His only regret was leaving his family behind, of not being a father and a grandfather anymore. 

It's not easy to become a role model. Folks often claim to be one and are not up to the task. Yet, my dad was a teacher, provider, husband, caretaker, father, grandfather, friend, and a servant of the Lord for his entire life. He enlightened his family until his last breath. Dad taught me that faith is not foolish, that love exits beyond life, and that death is not the end. 

My father has left us, he's given his last bit of counsel, but I remain his son. Hopefully, with the same grace and dignity he possessed, I can guide my own children through their lives while drawing from the deep well of sensibility and insight my father imparted to me.  God willing, I may also rediscover my faith which I retain a faint memory of from when I was a boy. Dad has shown me the way.

-Michael J. Kannengieser

A Halo Among The Branches

There was a story I heard when I was a young boy about the statue of the Virgin Mary in the courtyard of our church. Our Lady of the Assumption Roman Catholic Church had a long, concrete pathway leading up to a raised, brick and mortar platform where one could walk up and kneel before the statue of the Blessed Mother. Her arms were outstretched towards those her beseeched her in prayer.

I remember her image distinctly, as well as the story which became a soft-spoken legend among the parishioners of the parish. Behind the raised area which the figure sat upon is a row of large pine trees. There was no fence there at the time, and their limbs were allowed to grow much closer to the sculpture than the the fence now permits. So it was said by the faithful, when kneeling before the sculpture of The Virgin Mary, if they looked up, the boughs of the trees would form a halo around her head.

There is another local fable which pertained to the same statue. It had to do with a crown on Mary's head, again caused by the trees behind her. This time, it was said that when the figure was first erected (I believe it was in the 1930's and when I am not too lazy, I'll look it up) a young boy looked over his shoulder while walking away from the altar with his family one Sunday morning and said "Look Mommy, look Daddy! Mary has a crown! From a child's vantage point, looking up the walkway, one could envision the tops of the pine trees forming the points of a crown above her head, floating ever so high above towards the heavens.

Why am I writing about this? In recent years, the weather-worn statue of the Virgin Mary has been replaced with a statue of Jesus Christ. The trees have been pruned back, and there is a wrought iron fence between the pines, the altar, and the new statue keeping the sturdy tree limbs at bay. The myths of the crown and the halo offered me comfort during some difficult years of my childhood. Many a Sunday, I'd peek over my shoulder at the Blessed Mother as I walked with my family towards our station wagon in the parking lot, and squint in the sunlight at the crown on her head as I was too far away to kneel before her and marvel at her aura. Now, this story has all but disappeared from neighborhood folklore.

I'm two generations removed from the current congregation. The parish in the town where I currently live is only a few years old; and, there are no such folk stories relating to its sparkling, glass windows, and the statue paused at the entrance to our tiny, church building. So, I remain rooted, spiritually, to the concrete and brick altar on the lawn of the house of worship where I spent my formative years learning about God.

Back in August of 2006, I went to Our Lady of the Assumption to rescue my brother and his fiancé because his car wouldn't start after mass. In a torrential downpour, I went to jump start his car in my giant, extended, Chevy Trailblazer. I glanced toward the yard with the outdoor altar in hopes of catching something marvelous out of the corner of my eye. There was merely the recently erected, yet still beautiful statue of Jesus on the spot where my faith was formed, decades earlier.

Once his car was started, I wanted to go inside the church to say a prayer and light a candle for our mother who was home, dying of cancer. Our family had been assembled there for a week or so, keeping vigil at her bedside as she was nearing the end. My brother asked where I was going and I told him. He said, "No, we need a priest." And so he marched toward the Rectory in search of the pastor to come offer our mother absolution. No sooner than when my brother asked, a young priest, Father Paul who hailed from Poland, said he would come with us to see our mother. There was no hesitation except he needed to enter the church to bring communion wafers for those in our family who would want to recive Holy Communion.

The scene at my parents house was solemn, dignified, and ultimately the saddest event in my life. I drove Father Paul back to the church afterward and he tried hard to cheer me up.

"I like your car." he said.
"Thanks." I didn't feel like talking, but I'm not one to be rude, especially to a priest.
"A lot of people get a new car and they want me to bless it." he said. I just looked at him and smiled in acknowledgement, thinking that it was a dumb idea to get one's car blessed as God should have better things to do than to make sure your brand new Corvette doesn't get dinged by a shopping cart at Stop-N-Shop.
"I tell them that I'll bless the car, but it only works if you don't break traffic laws."

He made me laugh, and he genuinely cared and wanted to make sure that I was okay. I asked him if he'd heard the story of the statue of Mary in the courtyard with the trees forming a halo around her head, or the crown of tree tops one saw from down the walkway looking up. He said no, and that he'd ask some of the "older" parishioners if they had heard of the story. He agreed it was a wonderful tale, but with the statue of Mary replaced, it would be difficult to relate to. I dropped off the good Father Paul, and sat in my car and watched him jog through the rain to the door of the rectory. Once he was inside, I decided to take a slow drive back to my parent's house.

I drove around the corner on the street behind the courtyard and looked through the pine trees at the likeness of Jesus from the rear. As a boy, whenever we were ready to leave after Sunday morning service, I’d wander through the arm-like branches, drooping as they were, long and un-cropped. The mystery of the space between the monument and the trees made the story of the halo even more intriguing, causing me to pause long enough for my Dad to call out my name one more time.

I sat in my car, gazing through my rain streaked window, and between the wavering pines at a somewhat different churchyard from those long ago days when God, Jesus, and Mary had me enthralled. This was no longer my town, or my church. The folks who prayed at that tiny, outdoor altar weren’t my friends or neighbors, and they didn’t live there when my parents moved in. There was a new statue, and a fence which kept me away as I searched in vain for a halo among the branches.

church Mary Jesus God Catholic altar statue legend priest trees Holy Communion prayer