“Even If It Kills Me, I’m Not Going Back!” Larry’s Pilgrimage to Freedom
Soaked in blood, seventeen-year-old Larry shivered under a viaduct for two cold Covington, Kentucky November nights. After fourteen years, he was seeing to it that the beating from the night before, would be his last. His sociopathic stepfather, Dick, would never acquiesce to manumission. The road to freedom lay on the other side of a long, exposed walkway over Spence Bridge where Brian’s family lived in Cincinnati.
Dick was unaccustomed to any of his sons or stepson’s fightingback. His three older brothers had left home. Larry had become Dick’s sole target. Capture by the police would have resulted in a reunion with a man whose capacity for violence, and revengeknew no limits, up to and including dark rumors of murder. “Even if this kills me,” Larry thought to himself, “I’m not going back!” Hypothermia was a small price to pay for freedom!
Larry’s history of living with Dick was bookended by blows to the head that left him sprawled out on the floor of a car, and the floor of a kitchen, respectively. Unlike the first time, at four-years-old, and countless other times, after this final bloody blow, fourteen years later…Larry got up! He pushed back. He got out the door. That precipitated a two night, five mile sojourn to “Brian’s house,” where he would live out the balance of his Senior year. It was at this home that Larry refuted Dick’s final words to him, “You’ll never amount to anything; you’ll never graduate high school.” After receiving his diploma, he completed a stint with the Navy, then settled down to a thirty-five year career as an electrician. Retired now, he enjoys the fruit of having raised two boys, two step-children, and their collective ten grandchildren. As we speak, he and his wife of twenty-eight years are wintering in Florida.
Unlike, a two-dimensional super-hero, violence, cruelty, and poverty tend to leave a mark on a person. Resilience is not the same thing as invulnerability. Like Jacob in the Old Testament, the resilient among us, frequently walk with a limp. Larry is no exception. The past two episodes of SMC have asked the question, “Where did Larry get hold of his resilience?” This third and final installment returns to Larry’s story to ask, “How does someone heal from such dramatic abuse?” To locate that answer, I invite you to load up your backpack, and travel back in time for an adventure with four little boys that could have come straight out of the movie, “Stand by me” (1986 film).
Shinrin – Yoku: Healing at the Quarry
As Larry described in the first episode of this trilogy, Dick “was always looking for a place to put his anger.” A wrong answer to a question, a return trip from the bar, or just looking at him the wrong way could result in four boys lined up against the wall enduring an extension cord whipping “front, back, up and down” to their bare bodies. “It felt like fire,” as skin broke, welts rose, and bruises formed. Where do boys go? What do boys do to heal from that kind of abuse? What follows, in Larry’s own words, is a description of what will be interpreted as four boys’ efforts at applying a healing salve to their broken bodies, and their wounded souls.
“It would begin sometime in March. We would take the railroad tracks down to the quarry. Sometimes there’d still be ice along the edges, but we would still jump into the water. Then you’d find a sunny place to lay out on the huge boulders, that were heated by the sun.”
Larry’s account of a scene from his boyhood
The Japanese concept of Shinrin-Yoku is literally translated, “forest bath.” Practitioners of this unthematic spirituality experience a kind of rejuvenation by plunging into nature for a hike, or in this case, an actual plunge into the water. As Larry spoke, it was not hard to imagine this little band of brothers recapturing their boyhoods, if even for a sparkling moment, in chilly waters that chased away any lingering memories of violence. Here was a kind of home where you didn’t have to watch your words or your back. You could practically hear Larry reliving those moments of stretching out on slabs of rock warmed by sweet, golden, wholesome light.
If I could go back in time and interview those swimmer/sunbathers, I‘m pretty sure that the word, “healing,” never would have crossed their boy lips or boy consciousness. Likewise, words like, “spiritual,” “transcendent,” or “God,” would not have occurred to them either. As I listened, my eyes glanced back and forth between juxtaposed scenes: Hakuna Matata and warmed rocks, versus The Passion of the Christand extension cord whips. It occurred to me that these boy’s bodies were frequently made to mediate pain and humiliation. But not at the Quarry!” At the Quarry, their bodies were given back to them as gifts that mediated warmth, relaxation, and play. The Quarry provided their bodies a kind of kinetic experience of beauty. If Thomas Aquinas was correct, that “Beauty,” is both an attribute of God, and maybe even a synonym for the Divine Presence, then it is not a stretch to imagine those boys were unconsciously experiencing an unnamed Healing Presence. It was that same unnamed Healing Presence that showed up for Larry years later during night watch in the Navy.
“There’s Something Healing in Me:” Rendezvous with Healing Presence
Sometimes Healing Presence arrives methodologically, in the course of a twenty-five year practice of contemplation, like Mara (see SMC Jan 23 ’22). Other times, it shows up, seemingly out of nowhere, as in the case of Larry. It’s more like, he bumped into Divine Presence. To put it in the words of a mystic, like Augustine of Hippo, Larry didn’t know he was looking for God when God found him. As a young man in the Navy. Late at night, he would steal away to the back of a huge vessel that guarded an aircraft carrier (i.e. a “Fast Frigate”). Here’s how he put it.
Looking up at the stars, and the bioluminescence of the fantail [the wake left by the boat], it put everything in perspective. I did feel like God was there. Especially at night. There’s a dark that’s darker than dark. The ship is in the middle of the ocean. But I always felt so comfortable. It was very calming. It was then that I felt, there’s something healing in me.
(Larry, Interview, Jan. 25, 2022)
To put in the words of a spiritual theology scholar,
“There was something in [Larry] that was deeper than [his] pain and anxiety and that when the chaos of [his] mind was quieted, the sense of anguish gave way to a sense of divine presence.”
(Laird, Martin. 2006. Into the Silent Land p.22)
What Larry was experiencing on those nights that were “darker than dark” was a “comfort” that came from a deeper place than the layers of abuse he had suffered. In fact, according to Larry, his fourteen years of cruelty were not an impediment to accessing that Presence.
As a young man, I should have been too busy to look for all that stuff. I wasn’t too busy. If I would have had a normal childhood, I wouldn’t have been looking for something more. My abusive past…created a need to go to the back of that boat, and look up.”
Larry, Interview, Jan. 25, 2022
Larry was clearly not saying that he was glad for the abuse. Like sufferers of many stripes, Larry is saying that his psychological pain caused him to search. What Larry discovered at The Quarry, and on that back of that boat was a Source of Healing that drew him, that seemed to desire healing for him.
Resilience Takeaway
Whether you had a “normal” childhood (whatever that is?), or a childhood closer to the end of the spectrum where Larry lived, perhaps the takeaway from this story is the same. “Look up!” And sometimes, “Look down!” The Source of Beauty itself has always lived within you, before, and beneath the pain. You may experience that deep down thing the way Larry did…pulling you down a railroad track to bask on sunbaked slabs of rock…pulling you to the back of a boat where it is darker than dark…where the brilliance around you…the brilliance within you…will cause you to… “Look up!”