Excerpt From Carl's Soon To Be Published Book

My father was a man of faith – I think. I will never know for sure because he died when he was forty-three years old and I was fifteen. I never got the chance to ask him questions about his faith. As a child, I watched him say his morning and evening prayers, go to Mass on Sunday, and bless himself with the Sign of the Cross when he drove past a church. As best I could tell, he followed the teachings of the Catholic Church. Even as a child I recognized that he had a devotion to his faith that other male members of our family didn’t have. Somehow he seemed different.

A few years ago I went to see my mother, Dolly, in the nursing home where she lived, day after day, not knowing where she was or why she was in this strange place. The home gave meaning to the expression, “God’s Waiting Room.” I dreaded these visits and hoped this wouldn’t be the one when she failed to recognize me at all. She began, as usual, asking if I had come to take her home to her house on Floyd Street, in Brooklyn, New York – the place of her birth, torn down fifty years before to make way for housing projects. Before she drifted into silence she asked why her mother and my father hadn’t come to visit her, completely unaware that they had passed away years before.

Trying to make conversation, I asked her, “What made dad a religious person? He seemed to have great faith. What drove that faith?”

My mother’s reply astounded me. She said, “I don’t know.”

I kept questioning her, hoping to extract a little more family history before dementia locked it away in her mind forever.

“How could you not know?” I asked. “You were married to him for seventeen years before he died. Didn’t he ever share his faith with you?”
She said, “No, he didn’t, he just prayed every morning and every night and went to Mass on Sundays.”

I believe her answer had nothing to do with dementia. My mother either didn’t know or wasn’t willing to share what she knew of my father’s beliefs with anyone – not even her oldest son.
It occurred to me after that visit that a person’s faith can be as personal as their sex life and shared just as sparingly. I realized that while some people wouldn’t hesitate to proclaim that they didn’t believe in God, or that Jesus was their Lord and Savior, or to make some other defining declaration of their faith, the full depth of their beliefs stayed locked inside them. My experience has been that even priests, rabbis and ministers, while telling us what we should believe, rarely share the strengths and weaknesses of their own faith with us. What a shame. Why would we not want to share this part of our lives with those we love? Is it because we are equally afraid of coming off the sinner or the saint?

I was determined not to leave my children and grandchildren with the same questions I had about my father. I was sixty years old and I didn’t want them to remember me this way. I was also concerned that, like so many young people today, my children were distancing themselves from their Church because they disagreed with some of its teachings. I wondered if they knew that I have disagreed with some Catholic Church’s teachings for many years but I still consider myself a Catholic and would never think of leaving the Church. Did they understand that it’s okay to disagree? Did they realize that you don’t have to give up just because you have a different opinion? So many people don’t.

With that in mind, I began a project to document to my children and grandchildren the things I believe regarding God, Jesus, my Church, prayer, etc. The result is “How To Keep Your Faith when all around you are losing theirs.”

While writing I realized that it wasn’t enough to tell them what I believed. I needed to tell them why I believed and how my faith was formed. I needed to share with them the people and events that helped shape that faith. I had to also be brutally honest or else the whole project would be a sham. This new direction took me all the way back to my childhood growing up as an Italian kid in a tough neighborhood in Brooklyn New York I recalled for them the hilarious and tragic events that made me believe in God one minute and doubt His existence the next. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I did writing it.