Shortly before our college graduation, my friend Tim Hull offered me his image of my future: I am on a dirt road in some third world country, kicking a can as I walk, wrapped up in my thinking. At the time, I received this as accurate, appreciative, and affectionate. I was flattered. I have always cherished the image. I take it to be prophetic of my life.
In sophomore year of college seminary, I received my annual "evaluation" (the judgment of our priest faculty about our progress towards the priesthood) from a marvelous Maryknoll priest, John Halbert: "You are a nothing! What are you? A nothing! Not a leader, not an athlete, not a trouble-maker, not the popular guy, not the class clown, not the smart one! You are nothing!" He paused in silence. I let it sank in. "That is about right" I said to myself. Through high school I was the same thing: quiet, nothing exceptional, invisible. But I didn't feel bad. Strangely, I felt quietly within a peaceful self-esteem, unrelated to the social perception. I think I was flattered by the attention: he was obviously speaking so passionately because he expected better of me. Than he asked: "What about your father? Is he a nothing like you." At that I felt a surge of joy and pride within: "No. My father is not a nothing. He is a union organizer. A leader of men." I felt such happiness and affection at the thought of my father, Ray Laracy. And I quietly thought: "I am his son. I will not be a nothing." I have always cherished this memory. Most (for example my wife and children) are horrified to hear of it.
Upon graduating college in 1969 at the age of 22 I left the seminary. Despite a continuing attraction to the missionary priesthood, I had to overcome my pathological shyness with women and work/live as a man before I could consider returning to the seminary. On my very first date I fell madly in love. My destiny was clear: husband to Mary Lynn and hopefully father of our children.
I had zero career direction. What I had was an urgency to study/share my faith and a desire to befriend the poor. While I courted my Beloved, I pursued these two passions, in an entirely fluid, spontaneous and random manner. I took courses as an nonmatriculated student with the best professors at Union
Theological and Woodstock Jesuit Theology School; I taught theology part time at Xavier HS. and ESL in the South Bronx. At the time, another college friend described me as an itinerant, mendicant theological student.
You can imagine that my new wife's mother and father were not thrilled with the career-free, happy-go-lucky, live-simply attitude of their new son-in-law. And the subsequent almost 54 years of marriage have been a dance...not always serene, never boring...between a Groom who is frugal, sparse, minimalist, abstract, detached...and the Bride who is an Earth Mother: free-spirited, fiercely devout, compassionate, mega-generous, artistic, aesthetic, visual, concrete, garden-food-wine-beauty loving. Rarely is the asymmetry, along with the more dominant mutuality and complementarity, of the male/female so pronounced (and sometimes excruciating, especially for the more sensitive one of us.)
The 18 months in Manhattan between my graduation and marriage, I realize in retrospect, nicely sum up my entire adult life: the love I share with Mary Lynn, study and sharing of our Catholic faith, and our friendship with the poor.
Other than 25 years working as a supervisor in United Parcel Service to support our family, my adult life has been bereft of career purpose, certification, achievements, and a professional curriculum vita. In the meritocracy I am close to a nothing. The initiation, with family and friends, of Magnificat Home, now over 15 years old, is another exception. In general, I am amateur, entirely lay and unprofessional, in all things. This in two ways.
Most importantly, I have done what I have done out of love (Latin: Amo), not out of utility or for an exterior goal like money, status, security.
Secondly, I have done everything at a low level of quality: almost no real excellence. But I have done very many very excellent things...however poorly...and that is my salvation. Somewhere I heard: "lower your expectations, and your performance will rise." I have a low bar of expectation. So I am easily pleased...with myself and with others. "Jack of all trades; master of none."
I have taught elementary school, high school, college, CCD, confirmation, summer bible camps, charismatic prayer meetings. I am expert at none.
I have prayed in city projects, jails, hospitals, psychiatric wards...I am not a certified chaplain.
I have engaged in Cursillo, Marriage Encounter, Charismatic Renewal, Our Lady's Missionaries of the Eucharist, Neocatechumenal Way, Communion and Liberation events, Communio conferences, 12-step groups, sensitivity groups, retreats of all sorts, men's conferences and support groups. But I wander in and out of these ambiances of grace, staying with none.
Perhaps my favorite spiritual classis is The Way of the Pilgrim, the strange, mysterious story of a Russian man who loses family and property to fire and embarks as a wandering pilgrim across Russia. He moves from one holy site or monastery to another; owning nothing; seeking wisdom; encountering all kinds of events, good and bad; always praying the Jesus Prayer: "Lord Jesus Christ, only Son of the living God, have mercy on me, a sinner." I find this story exhilarating in the pilgrim's life of freedom, simplicity, purity, humility, drama, and unlimited serendipity. I want to be that pilgrim!
A similar liberty of spirit is manifest in the classic of Myles Connelly: Mr. Blue. Blue is an eccentric, urban, joyous mystic, living in NYC, friends with the poor, lavishly sharing riches with the hopeless, exploding with praise and exuberance.
A specific highpoint in my life was 20 years ago when I did the Camino of Santiago of Compostela across northern Spain. I had been delivered by surgery of colon cancer; my children were moving through school and into adulthood; I was happily teaching high school religion. I walked, in solitude, in late summer, in marvelous weather, across the glorious, historic northern Spain. I stopped at every chapel and church to pray. I cherished my solitude. I had a long itinerary of prayers to do each day: 20 decades of the rosary, intentions, litany of Divine Mercy, prayer of the sinner, scripture reading. I had died and gone to heaven! The only time I was lonely was a dinner: inexpensive, delicious, with a cheap but decent carafe of wine. I missed my wife Mary Lynn who would have LOVED the meal and the wine and the price! Sometimes I would walk with someone and talk or eat dinner with people. But mostly I was alone and enjoying it. I never planned ahead. Even walking I only looked for the "pilgrim shells" that marked the way. About 3 or 4 times I wandered off path, but always found my way back.
So my life, at its best, has been like the Camino: not programmed ahead of time, spontaneous, light, free. I would like to think much of it in synch with the Holy Spirit...of joy, of mercy, of hope, of abundance. My hidden ambition has always been to emulate the Russian Pilgrim and Mr. Blue.
From my conception I have been surrounded by love...of family, within the Church, in a prosperous USA. This intensified my temperamental tendency to introversion, solitude, happiness, reflection. Along with this: an aversion to a culture of activism, conspicuous consumerism, extroversion, competition, status obsession and crude machismo. Perhaps that is why I am prone to reject the bourgeois. Perhaps that is partly why I will, in about two hours, pull the lever for Trump/Vance! Still a "never-Trumper" and a "double-hater," my statement is defensive of my Catholic way of life and of the lower class against the pretentious, Catholic-despising, sexually liberated, science-adoring progressive hegemony of the professional, managerial, educated elites.
I was conceived just 78 years ago this month. I wonder: what will be my legacy? I hope I will be remembered as a pilgrim, of the Camino, like the little Russian guy; as a happy friend of poor, like Blue; as a "man of the Church," a "catechist," an "echoer" who lived and listened within the womb of Mother Church; as one whose life of love, faith, and joy, shared with his wife, continues and flourishes in his family and friends.
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