Grace

 

My history with blindness, madness and AIDS is worthy of Oprah.  In 1998, I came down with a slight case of the Plague.  At the time I was boarding at the house of a saintly woman named Betty Jane Narver, and it is for that reason that I am alive today.  She organized a healthcare team around me, fed me, made sure I went to medical appointments, took my temperature and generally kept me from drifting away.  I owe her and all of those people a debt I can never repay.  Betty Jane herself died about ten years ago, and I still grieve for her.

 

But my healing didn't have a straight trajectory.  I was grateful to have survived AIDS, but when the reality of blindness finally sank in, I was furious with God.  There were a number of months where I raged and boxed with him.  And in one of these sessions, occasions of great despair and rage, I vomited up the worst blasphemy I could devise.  I didn't even really believe in God at that moment, and as much as anything, I was cursing him for not existing, cursing him for my abandonment.  and what I said was this:

 

"God, when I die, I'm going to come up there, you motherfucker.  And I'm going to slash your motherfucking throat and kick your dead body into the Atlantic ocean.  Then I will sell 'God is Dead' T shirts from a stand in your left nostril."

 

I mean, I was REALLY angry, as angry as a human being can be without murdering someone.

 

And God answered.

It wasn't a voice in my head or sparkly lightsor anything like that.  I've come to understand that what I had is something which Catholics call a heart locution, in which God or Christ speaks to you directly, silently, in your heart.  I actually felt it there, like a flower blooming in my chest.  And what God simply said was:

 

YES

 

It wasn't quite "Yes, you're right!" or even "Yes, I'm so sorry!"  It was much deeper than that.  What the Divine YES unfolded into was something like:  Yes, your suffering is profound, and your rage is appropriate.  And it is holy, because it has turned your attention towards me, without cleverness or evasion.

 

And he was right, of course.  Because up until then, I had been one evasive, clever cat.  Not long after that, I was baptised in the Catholic Church. That was an adventure, and it helped me through my rage and social withdrawal.  And I met some interesting people, especially Father Michael Ryan, of Saint James Cathedral.  Father Ryan is the kind of funny, humane priest they try to pull off on  television religious dramas but always get wrong, too smarmy or something.

 

Anyway, there were several years of going to Mass and working through the truth of my blindness. It was, as I like to say, one hard damned uphill slog in the rain.  I spent some time in loony bins, I slashed my wrists, I just wanted so much not to have to carry the load I had to carry.  But gradually, very, very gradually over these years, I found hope and healing.  And a lot of the credit goes to the authorship of books, which I attribute to Divine inspiration.  I guess that sounds really self-aggrandizing or something, but I think of it as exactly the opposite.  What I mean is that the Source of all creative work is God / Goddess / Christ --however you name it-- and that doing anything creative, if it is not to bbe a vain endeavor does and must involve that Source. 

 

Besides God, I attribute my healing to two things.   The first is the stalwart friendship of Kevin haggerty,Mary Beaudin, Chris Jeffries and Ed Hawkins. The second is the authorship of the book I told you about, THE APOCALYPSE HILTON.  Through that novel,I was able to work through my bitterness about my high school experience, which had left me pretty scarred.  Now, I realize that everyone at Steilacoom High School was just trying to make it through their own personal trench war, but back then I thought of SHS as a fiendish mousetrap set up exclusively for the torture and humiliationof William L. Houts.

Since writing that book, my life has been getting better and better.  Not materially so much as spiritually.  I have great hopes for a successful literary career.  I embrace people I once loathed.  I thank God for everything which has happened to me

I used to play a certain kind of computer game addictively, in an attempt to blot out my suffering.  Now, I still enjoy games of this sort, but my energy is mainly focused upon writing the current novel.  ON most days, I get up around 6am, check Facebook, get my coffee and write for somewhere between five and eight hours.  Usually I get a page or two, but I have some extremely fertile days in which I write as many as four or five.  At the completion of each paragraph I have a little ticker tape parade at my desk and give thanks to High G, as I call my Collaborator. Then, around one or two, I knock off, walk up the hill and get a bowl of pho.  It's a good life, and I have reason to think that it's going to become a great one.