The first time I came to terms with the meaning of this statement I was experiencing my first real time of
- Unbelief
- Doubt
- Agnosticism
I was 14 years old and it was the weekend after the Kennedy assassination. I was the paper boy at King County Hospital.
I was in a state of shock at the news that our beloved president, John Kennedy, had been assassinated. This Irish Catholic president was a hero to my family; Grandma Maggie had kept herself alive long enough to see him elected.
With his assassination, something was radically altered in many of my generation.
- A sense of disbelief was introduced
- The belief in the up there became a little less vivid
- The picture of a benevolent God became a little less believable
I was a 14-year-old boy who found himself disbelieving all that he’d been taught about a good and merciful God. Earlier that year I had discovered liquor. I had begun losing trust in the essential goodness of life and threw in with others who adopted a failsafe mechanism for handling the insanity of life. My motto became:
But someone living in the County Hospital intervened on a three-day binge I’d planned with my friends.
That Friday afternoon after JFK’s death was confirmed I arrived at the hospital to deliver papers. My first stop was at the room of my friend John, a patient who virtually lived at the hospital. His spine had been severed during a swimming accident, leaving him a quadriplegic.
John had become a friend of mine. He paid me a handsome tip for placing bets for him with a bookie twice a week. I would hang around his room when I delivered his paper to listen to his latest take on life. He was someone with whom I could share anything. Somehow, John had come to make sense out of his tragedy. How this was accomplished I cannot say; he had in every way an incomparable spirit.
- John did not preach to me
- John did not lecture me
- John did not rationalize the irrational
John was what you might call an ACCEPTOR. He had the capacity of spirit to accept the unacceptable and move on to his next life experience. I saw this time and again as he endured bedsores, a family who had deserted him, and a life confined to a hospital bed.
When I entered his room that day he was studying the Longacres Racing Forum planning his next bet. I knew he was aware of the news; the hospital had screamed it across the intercom. But John was about living in the now and had already moved on.
I remember his look of bewilderment when I shared with him how my buddies and I intended to drown our misery in a case of beer on Saturday night, as if to say, why would you misuse a perfect good Saturday night, to destroy a perfectly good Sunday?
John was planning to watch the news coverage of the assassination and study the Racing Forum at a time that I planned to escape to another universe. He invited me to interrupt my escape long enough to watch the Kennedy funeral with him.
Well, I did what I’d planned to do on Saturday night. I drank my fill and paid a horrible price on Sunday.
Then I joined John at the hospital for the Kennedy funeral. He asked me about my Saturday night and whether I had gotten the relief I’d been looking for. I said no — and to boot, I felt like death warmed over.
I then asked John about any conclusions he might have reached about why anybody would kill Kennedy. He said he’d not the foggiest idea of why Kennedy was assassinated, no more than why there had been a rock precisely in the place of his river dive. Nor did he have any clue as to whether his horses would win in Tuesday’s races. He said his one job was to live his life as best he could and let the rest of the world work out its business of its own accord.
He then looked over to me and asked, “What about you?” I said nothing; my mind was a vacuous blank.
It was then at the foot of the bed of John Loomis, a quadrapalegic, residing at King County Hospital on the day of the funeral of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, that I first heard the Serenity Prayer.
Just a thought…
Pat
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