“Have you thought about asking Jesus for help?”

I had been telling my corner grocer, Jose, about my woes in finding a contractor to rehab my ruined house after the roof went during the “Ike” hurricane.

I had four estimates for my insurance company and not one of those contractors had returned my calls.  They had disappeared.

“He was a carpenter, you know, “he added.

I hadn’t thought about Jesus.  Besides, he was probably mad at me since I left the Catholic Church long ago.

Although I came from a devout family, I started having doubts at about seven years old.

Tentatively, I had already come to the following conclusions:

1.  God was not an old man with a beard who was keeping records on me.  There was some force out there but I did not know what to call it.

2.  Is Jesus more God than I was?  Maybe, he was just in a higher grade.

3.  God would not send you to hell if you ate meat on Friday or missed Mass.

4.  No loving God would doom innocent babies who were not baptized to Limbo.

5.  Nothing bad would happen to me if I went into a Protestant church.

6.  I had this funny feeling I had lived in this world before.  That there was something inside me that had nothing to do with the body I was in right now.

Remember, I was seven.  I would not dare mention these things to anyone.   That would have made me a heretic.

Catholics laugh and call people like this a “Delicatessen Catholic” in these days.  You are tolerated if you just take a little of this and a little of that and believe what you want.  Not then.

But, what I learned at seven was this.  If you really, really want something, it is not going to happen if you don’t do something to get it.  You can’t just pray to Jesus because this does not work.

For example, what my brother Henry and I really, really wanted was to go to the Rialto movie theatre on Flatbush Avenue on Saturdays.  It cost seven cents.

We spent the entire week looking through people’s garbage for bottles.  You got two cents return for each bottle.

We went to the movies every week.

Long story short.  I decided to ask Jesus.

Two days later, I found a contractor.  The crew starts tomorrow morning.

So, if it was you, Jesus, I want to thank you for your help.  You can be sure I will be giving you all my business from now on.

I’m starting to think -

Maybe Jesus isn’t even a Catholic.


If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!