This is the first part of the story of my conversion to Catholic Christianity together with my wife Judith and our three sons.
I am from San Francisco. It is usually cool there and the air is clean, because the wind comes into the city from the Pacific Ocean, where the water is cold. Our house was near the western edge of the city, where the streets end at the ocean. The sky there is often gray. After I got married, we moved away. It is strange to me that my sons are not from San Francisco. They are from a small place high in the mountains, where it snows in winter and where the days are warm and sunny all summer long.
I do not know my mother tongue. I speak English of course, because my mother spoke it to me, but she learned it in school. Her mother tongue was Czech (her family calls it Bohemian) and she did not speak it to me. Because she died when I was little, I have a child's memories of her. I also have a big box of letters she wrote to her sister, my aunt, in English.
When my mother died, my father did not want me and my little brother Eddie to live with her relatives, because he was afraid they would go to court and say he was not a good father. Everyone knew he was not a Christian. He had opinions that were very liberal in the 1930's and 1940's, and he fell in love with my mother because she was very liberal too. Among other things, they believed that discipline was bad for children, and they were careful to step around my toys, because I did not have to put them away. They wanted me to grow up naturally. As the years went by, I discovered that my father thought I would grow up naturally to agree with him, and he thought there was something wrong with me when I did not. To keep us away from my mother's relatives, Father put my brother and me in an orphanage.
This was a desperate step, because by 1948 children who needed a home were placed with foster parents, unless they were hard to manage. But my father did not want us to have Christian foster parents. The hardest thing about the orphanage was not the tough kids, but the institution's rule that I could not visit my brother, who was housed with younger children.
In a few years Father married again and brought us home. It was hard for his new wife, and for us, because we were glad to have a home, but we knew she was not our mother. Father thought that when he remarried, we would think that his new wife was our mother. My poor mother comforted herself before she died, with the thought that we would grieve for a short time, and then forget.[1] That would happen with a very young child, but I was six when my mother died, and my brother was three. My father asked adults for advice about children, and he did not ask us what we thought or felt.
Father was born in San Francisco in 1910. His father was from England, and ran away to sea when he was fourteen, but he died before he could tell me his stories. In 1910 English people had their children baptized in the Church of England, regardless of what church they attended, or whether they went to church at all. Baptism is the ceremony of becoming a Christian. Following the custom, my father was baptized in an Episcopal church, which is the Anglican Church in America. The priest put water on him, and spoke the names of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. These are the Trinity, the three Persons of God in the Christian religion. But when I was born in 1941, my father and mother were Unitarians. The name "Unitarian" means they do not believe in the Trinity.
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Making a Creed
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A Brief Guide to Eternity
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Dwite
1. My mother had cancer. She had a tumor for many years that must have turned malignant. In 1945 her doctors offered her an abortion, because of her serious medical condition. She chose to carry my brother regardless of the consequences to her own health. He was born prematurely.