For me, it was a long journey from addiction into the Heart of God. A combination of hard physical work and the direct intervention of God brought me to the place where I was finally strong enough to choose obedience over rebellion.
Initially, after two years of drug rehabilitation, I felt confident that my addiction problem was resolved. I sensed that leaving southern California and going to live with the other side of the family in the Boston area was the right choice. So, I hitchhiked across the United States from San Fernando Valley, California to Boston, Massachusetts. I moved in with my brother and his family in the country.
I found work nearby, warehousing and delivering furniture. The pay was above minimum wage, the work physically demanding, and mentally relaxing. I was grateful that I was able to work; my body didn’t quit on me the way it had when I used drugs. I needed the hard-physical labor to sweat out my demons, so to speak.
Bad Habits
Hoping to be rid of my bad habits, I soon realized that I had brought my baggage along with me. Once I left California, I stopped taking drugs and stopped looking to make a “connection.” However, after I moved from my brother’s house and was settled in Norwood, I started drinking every day. I had an emptiness within me which seemed to be the source of my addiction. I didn’t want to return to drugs, because they had destroyed me physically and mentally in the past.
I consoled myself with the rationalization that at least I was drug-free and that a little alcohol wouldn’t hurt me. At the time, I sometimes wondered why living in the country with my brother and his family freed me from both drugs and alcohol but while I lived in Norwood that question remained unanswered.
Dreaming About Pyro
I drank myself to sleep every night and had the same dream almost every night for months: a huge forest fire with the words “PYRO” illuminated by hotter flames within that fire. The dream greatly disturbed me, and I couldn’t interpret its meaning, at least not then.
I continued with my warehouse job. The pay with over-time was good and the physical labor helped me to stop thinking about so many things all at once.
As often as possible on weekends, I would visit my brother in Plymouth or my cousins in Billerica. From time to time I would accompany my aunt Billy to her church in Billerica. the Pastor, an older and likable person, was also intelligent and sincere. I was interested in what he had to say about life through Sacred Scripture, and partly because of him I acquired a renewed respect for the Holy Bible. Yet, I remained distant from prayer; it was as though I had forgotten God and He had forgotten me.
God Did Not Forget Me
However, God had not forgotten me, and circumstances were about to change.
In the middle of the Fall season, my younger brother and my cousin invited me to go to northern Maine for a couple of weeks. It seems that they had a financial interest in a ski lodge in a small town in north-western Maine and they wanted it open for business that winter. I gladly accepted the invitation, took some time off from work, and packed to stay. Thus, began my journey for understanding “PYRO” in the wilderness and for my deeper connection with our Lord, and our God.
John, my younger brother, and Mike, my cousin, were there to decide whether or not to sell the ski lodge–which they eventually did–the lodge was too remote and the harsh winds caused too many closed days. However, on the days it was open, the lodge was packed. People came from all over the Northeast and stayed two-three days.
The Fire of God
Spiritually, I had begun to grow in that I now understood part of the recurring dream I had in Norwood: I realized that “PYRO” was the fire of God. Also being in the country again calmed my spirit and eased the demands of my addiction and by the grace of God, I was neither drinking nor taking drugs while at the ski lodge. I was not going to any church, yet I could feel God pulling me towards Himself…the dream was clear; I would encounter the Spirit of God (PYRO) in the remote country, and as I lived and worked at the ski lodge I could feel His closeness, along with a sense of profound peace and consolation which I knew came from outside myself, and thanks to the Pastor in Billerica, I spent some time reading the Bible, a pocket-size New Testament.
Other factors also became clear to me; such as, without a doubt I had to choose between following sin or following our Lord Jesus according to His definitions, not my definitions—which often fell short of their true meaning. There was no compromise, nothing in between…and it was completely up to me. I learned very early during my journey that I could not ” have my cake and eat it too.”
In the very early stages of my journey, I held on to some of my sins, especially the sin of fornication, the natural sin, so widely accepted in our society, and often not interpreted as sin. I did not then consider myself a Christian, though I believed in God’s existence, and I was most certainly not in obedience to Him.
Turning Point
The Enchanted Mountain was a turning point in my life, my spiritual journey began to have more clarity. I was about to enter a contract or personal covenant with our Lord if I chose to do things His way. During this stage of my spiritual journey, I began to develop “communication” with our Lord and our God.
His manner of speaking to me became clear through “thought impressions” in the context of prayer. They were gently given, easy to dismiss, hard to retain, and only present either during or as an immediate consequence of prayer.
Often these “thought impressions” would shed some light on a specific problem or help me focus on what was important at that time; in any case, these impressions became the mode of communication between me and my Maker.
Perhaps another way of saying the same thing is that I was experiencing a revitalization and cleansing of conscience, the voice of God, within. I learned to test these “prayer impressions” against Sacred Scripture and later, when I converted to Roman Catholicism, against the teachings of the Church and Sacred Tradition. If any impression should contradict or conflict with any of these pillars of truth it was immediately dismissed. To date, approximately fifty years later, all of my “thought impressions” have been consistent with Holy Scripture, Tradition, and the Church.
While reading the New Testament at the ski lodge, I remembered, from my Sunday school classes in 6th grade, St. Paul’s exhortation against sins of the flesh, and I looked it up in 1 Cor.6:9-10. St. Paul states clearly that: “no fornicators, idolaters, or adulterers, no sodomites, thieves, misers or drunkards, no slanderers or robbers will inherit God’s Kingdom”.
Obey or Disobey God
When “opportunity” came knocking on my door, I had the choice to obey or disobey the sixth commandment, “Thou shalt not commit adultery.” I knew, after reading 1 Corinthians, that this commandment was not limited to meaning that married couples had to be faithful to each other. I also knew that if I chose to disobey, I would be on my own again, without the “mystical” communication and peace from Jesus. So, even though the college coed was charming and willing, I chose to not sleep with her and stayed in the same room with my brother instead. I looked upon the events of that night as sort of a test of my loyalty, a test that I could not afford to fail because I needed to continue my journey with Jesus, at all costs.
My time at the ski lodge was like a retreat for me; I became aware that I was nothing apart from God; that any peace, strength or guidance were gifts from Him to me:
The Kingdom of Heaven is like treasure hidden in a field which someone has found; he hides it again, goes off happy, sells everything he owns, and buys the field (Matthew 13:44).
The preceding parable expresses my dependency on God and my willingness to give up sin, transgression, pride, and whatever else I owned to keep that Kingdom of Heaven within myself. I needed guidelines to help me protect and keep that Kingdom of Heaven. Prayer helped, and now I prayed often; I remembered the Ten Commandments from my Protestant Sunday school classes, and I reviewed them often, though I had only a superficial understanding of their meaning (later when I became a Roman Catholic, I was delighted when I received a small catechism which explained each commandment in detail).
My brother and cousin decided to sell the ski lodge; so they closed it down and moved on. My cousin returned to Massachusetts right away but my brother stayed a few more weeks at the closed ski lodge to complete the sale. I wanted to stay in the small town, but I needed an income to keep a roof over my head. I heard from the locales that “they were hiring at the mill.” So I said goodbye to my brother, packed my things into my old Volvo, and headed for that logging mill about 15 miles northwest of the town, deep in the wilderness, accessible only by an old dirt road.
As a new employee, I did not have the best shift. The logging mill was in full operation 24 hours a day, 4.5 days a week. My shift was from 6 pm to 6 am, with three breaks. It was a difficult shift, mostly because of the winter storms and not uncommon below freezing temperatures at night. My job was to make sure that the logs coming into the mill were cleaned of all branches and bark before they reached the table saw section.
The logs came to me on a slow conveyor belt; my job was to clean the log of any residual bark and small branches with an ax before they reached the faster conveyor belt which delivered them to the “sawing section.” If for any reason I failed to clean a log on the “slower” conveyor belt, then I was obligated to climb onto the “faster” conveyor belt and finish the job–which frequently occurred
Walking slippery logs on a conveyor belt while swinging an ax most certainly taught me how to focus on the here and now. It was hard and dangerous work, but by the grace of God I could do it, and do it well, but I had to become ambidextrous using the ax in order to keep up with the conveyor belts.
During those long, cold nights I spent every minute of my break time reading the New Testament from the small pocket version given to me by my brother. This reading was a constant key which opened the doors to the Kingdom of Heaven within. I remember that while I read Sacred Scripture, I didn’t feel cold or tired; I felt at peace with myself and everything around me; I felt strong and warm and knew that God was with me, that He was near and watching over me, and that everything would be OK.
