I am sitting at my desk in the afterglow of our Christmas Compline/Liturgy which we celebrated at Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin Mary. I went to church tonight a little depressed for some reason unknown to me, but after all was said and done, I was in a most joyful spirit. As I told Father Alexander after the Liturgy, being in church is my favorite place to be. And serving at the altar with him, which I got to do tonight because our regular cantor was in town and I didn’t have to take his place, is my favorite thing to do. There is simply nothing more happy for me in this world right now.

This wasn’t always so. After graduating from high school, I decided to investigate a new phenomenon which had taken strong root in the United States (and elsewhere) – The Hippie Movement of the 1960’s. It began innocently enough, I suppose. A former roommate from my private high school called me one day to inquire about my possible interest in some marijuana he had purchased. I found the experience much to my liking – a nice mellow buzz without the nastiness of the morning after hangover that Boone’s Farm Strawberry Wine had a habit of dropping on me.

Within a year I was sticking a needle in my arm. From there I investigated LSD – and the nightmare began in earnest.  After several “bad trips,” I turned away from psychedelics, but the damage was done. I was in a dark place, both physically and spiritually. I began to be tormented by flashbacks and odd visuals that stretched my mind into a place that scared me as I lost touch with reality. Knowing what I know now, I have no doubt that my drug use opened the door to evil spirits who both possessed my body and lusted after my death in their hatred of mankind. With the beginning of suicidal thoughts, some of them quite intense in their demand for me to open the window of my ninth-floor apartment and jump, I realized I was in some deep kimchee and needed to find a way out of this fool’s paradise I had so happily run into a few years prior.

I self-admitted to Saint Elizabeth’s Hospital, a public psychiatric facility in Washington D.C. for individuals with serious and persistent mental illness. Two months in there did nothing for me other than give me free room and board. I went to religious meetings, but found little in the Eastern religions that offered me incense to burn and a sonorous chant that was supposed to connect me to God. One night I sat in my apartment on Connecticut Avenue and shook with fear, yet what little rationality I had left kept asking me, “What are you afraid of?” I didn’t know. I was terribly lonely, desperately afraid, and slowly losing my mind. Finally, I moved back in with my parents, who were less than glad to see me. The drug use and depression continued. My naval commander father looked at my long, hippie-style hair and I could see the disgust in his eyes. My mother fretted and worried over me, but had nothing to offer me.

After finding work at a drive-in theater that showed soft-porn movies (Good grief, the stories I could tell you about that place!) I moved out again. My life was moments of relative calm interposed into the hours of sadness, drug use, and  darkness that filled my life.

But a change was coming, and from a most unusual set of circumstances.

After a night of sexual immorality with a married woman, I offered to drive her and her friend back to Virginia Beach. My thinking was that there was nothing in Washington that was doing me any good. Perhaps a change of scenery would help me get my life together.

I don’t remember how it came to pass, but I wound up staying in a small motel for free. On my second or third night there, I was hanging out in the lobby when the people there informed me they were going to a Bible study and would I be interested in going? Having nothing better to do, I thought it might be a way to stave off the boredom of being alone and broke.

Reverend Danny Marrow was a Pentecostal preacher who went down to the streets of Virginia Beach where the heroin addicts hung out. He preached Jesus to them, listened to them threaten him, and loved them. I walked into a small, flat house filled with a variety of people my age. Ex-addicts and curiosity seekers filled the living room and spilled out into the petite kitchen in the rear. After listening to several minutes of loudly sung Jesus songs,  I realized I didn’t belong, but I was stuck in the center of the room, perched on the arm of an oversized chair and surrounded by bodies that I would have to navigate through in order to escape. And where exactly was I on this cold, December night in 1972 in Virginia Beach? Escape being impossible, I hunkered down on the chair,  tuned out the preacher who was now in the middle of an impassioned sermon, and waited for the end.  This was not what I wanted at all.

Suddenly, without warning, I began to feel nervous. I was breathing heavy, my heart beating rapidly, my whole body in a sense of distinct discomfort. I raised my head and found myself eye to eye with the preacher, his face not a foot from mine.

“Isn’t that right, devil?” he screamed at me.

I don’t remember responding. I do remember Reverend Marrow asking me if I wanted to “get saved.” I found out much later that in the Catholic faith, we call this “returning to the vows of my baptism” rather than “getting saved.” Whatever it was he was offering, for some reason I managed to nod my head. Reverend Marrow clamped his hands on my head, prayed over me for deliverance, and set me free. I don’t remember a whole lot about the rest of the night, but I do remember one thing distinctly. I found myself lying on the floor and sensing a real warmth over my heart, along with a distinct sense of peace such as I had never experienced before. When I got back to the motel with the people who had taken me,  I was asked what had happened.

“I don’t know,” I responded, “but I want to know more. Give me the address of this place so I can go back.”

A week later I stood on the shoreline of the Atlantic Ocean, surveying a beach covered with snow.  The cold air invigorated me as I realized with gratitude and joy that the LSD issues had cleared up, the desire for drugs was gone, and my thinking was clear.  A bright blue sky filled with puffy white clouds was cheerful to me as I thought about what had happened to me in the last seven days. I knew I had experienced something from God, something good and wonderful and life-changing. Something that I wanted to know more deeply and intimately. Fifty years later the peace remains, the joy has increased, the desire to know more about Jesus continues.

That was Christmas, 1972.

It was the greatest Christmas gift I have ever received – my life, given back to me by the God who loved me and did not give up on nor turn against me despite the despicable manner in which I treated Him.  The God who came to mankind in the form of a small, helpless infant child in a manger in Bethlehem so that He could give Himself as gift to all of us in love.

Merry Christmas to all.  And may God’s peace be yours, now and forever.