In 1918 the photographer Eric Engstrom wanted an uplifting picture for a nation at war.
He found a subject in Thomas Wilden, a local food peddler, at his dinner table in solitary prayer.
I’ve kept the picture close to remind me of how, when, and where I first understood prayer.
In an earlier post, I shared the story about an event that occurred in September of 1979.
As I was wont to do back then, I was drinking at The Irish Times, a bar in Washington, D.C.
I had been kibitzing and trading shots with a singer from Donegal, Ireland. Shortly after, three drunk Marines started heckling her during her performance.
I stepped in, words were traded, and in no time a fight broke out that soon found its way into the alley, where things got decidedly — deadly.
Someone pulled a tire iron from the trunk of a car and started beating me with it.
Soon my jaw was shattered, my ribs were broken and I was on the ground, out cold.
I read later in the police report that the assailants, thinking I was dead, drove a car over my body to give the appearance of a hit and run.
I was then dumped over a bridge onto a deserted parking lot.
At some point several hours later I came to.
- I couldn’t move.
- I couldn’t speak.
For a split second I felt a piercing fear, and then nothing — like a a switch had been turned off.
It’s then I experienced myself moving away, up the embankment, onto the bridge, where I could see myself lying perfectly still.
I remember thinking, how could I be here and there at the same time?
I screamed out, “God Help Me!” — not as a prayer, but rather as a plea.
After a while, getting no response, I made my way back down the embankment to where I lay — so deathly still.
Then suddenly, as if someone turned on a switch, I came to and found myself staring into the face of a police officer.
The police report stated he had happened upon me during a routine patrol, comatose and without a pulse. He administered CPR and revived me, and I was then taken to the Washington Hospital Center where I spent the next 10 hours in surgery.
Three days later I woke up in the midst of receiving the Last Rights of the Catholic Church.
My brothers, Steve and Kevin, were standing at the foot of my bed.
I spent the next week in intensive care with two other critically injured young men who the hospital staff called heroes — a 23-year-old county lineman who’d been electrocuted while attempting to restore power to an apartment building after a storm, and a 16-year-old teenager who’d been shot in the groin trying to protect his sister from an assault.
The three of us were in the same room —
- fighting the same fight,
- praying to the same God,
- hoping for the same outcome.
The two of them died — the lineman first, and two days later the teenager.
Why did they die, not me? There is no answer to that question. Life is unfair.
It was three weeks before I left the hospital, three months before I could walk again and three more years before my body fully recovered.
As for my psyche?
The trauma from that night still remains.
When I left the hospital I knew for certain —
- booze was the cause of my nightmare,
- the party was over,
- I was an alcoholic.
I would wear this identity the rest of my life.
Mr. Smarty Pants had been forced to his knees. My cocky facade was blown to smithereens, and my days of thumbing my nose at the rules — were over.
I was about to enter a five-year era best described as the dark night of the soul.
It has been said the passage from one cycle of life to another can only take place in darkness. So it was for me.
I saw myself as Job, lying on a dung heap, exposing me in the most personal way, to the one great truth that judges all others.
So be it.
Now when I call out, “God Help Me,” it is a prayer, not a plea.
Just a thought…
Pat
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