My business is memoirs<\/a>: I help people write their stories. Sometimes that story might involve a whole family or even an institution, which is why I now find myself deep into the final stages of writing the history of a large Boston institution, the Massachusetts General Hospital. (It\u2019s also incidentally why readers of this blog are reading fewer posts by yours truly in recent weeks.)<\/p>\nNow, you would think that someone who effectively had ghost-written sixty books (I have, though none on the scale of the MGH project) would have no trouble writing his own memoir. But over the past couple of years, I have come to the shocking realization that there are things in my past life\u2014major things\u2014that I cannot write about, or at least should not. This is because to write about them truthfully would create a scandal. Although this may sound confusing and abstract, and I\u2019m sorry I can\u2019t be more specific, it is actually a very real quandary. Imagine a doctor who could not use his skills to save his own life. That is me and memoirs. I cannot tell my own story. Not all of it, anyway.<\/p>\n
Let me be clear: I believe that there are some things that we should take to the grave with us. I do not side with the tell-all school of memoirs that has been such a rage in the past twenty years of mainstream publishing, from fine-lit efforts like Mary Karr\u2019s The Liar\u2019s Club <\/i>to the latest, stupid tell-all destined for ten minutes on Oprah and then, once the publisher\u2019s receipts are counted and the author\u2019s vanity sated, Oblivion.<\/p>\n
What do you do when there are things in your past that cannot or should not be told? My experience as a Catholic has taught me this: you redeem them. Redemption <\/i>is one of those big, ponderous religious words that I\u2019m not sure even most Catholics understand, though we use them freely enough. I want to propose a new reading of the word. To redeem <\/i>is to reconsider, rethink, re-deem.<\/i> As a Catholic, one redeems the past by viewing it through the lens of one\u2019s faith. Here\u2019s an example.<\/p>\n
I once knew someone whose actions toward me had mixed motives, or so I\u2019ve come to believe. This person did some very good things, and some pretty bad. But when I review (re-view) the trail of events that stretch from my first meeting with that person to this present day, I see many steps along the way that led me toward the Catholic Church, bread crumbs leading Hansel and Gretel out of danger and safely home.<\/p>\n
I am happier today than I have ever been in my life. Some of this is seeing my children safely on their own roads home. A big part is being married to Katie, and happily, after 25 years. But the greatest ingredient in my happiness is my Catholic faith, without which everything else would reflect a paler light. And without that person\u2019s mixed influence on my life, I might never have become a Catholic.<\/p>\n
When I can look at my past\u2014all of it, good, bad, indifferent\u2014and not just imagine but begin to understand that every person, every incident led me here, <\/i>I can only be grateful, and for all of it. I am, in some sense of a difficult word, redeemed.<\/p>\n
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<\/a>If Catholicism were only about getting into heaven, then it would be only about the future. I\u2019m sure there are skeptics who look at our faith this way, as a means of racking up brownie points for the afterlife. In fact, however, I chose to become a Catholic mostly for what it does for my present. It changes my life, day by day. It makes me happier, here and now. What I didn\u2019t know then, and what has taken two years to begin to understand is, being a Catholic also changes my past. ![\"\"](\"https:\/\/blogger.googleusercontent.com\/tracker\/6738513599344023043-9030400500221204144?l=yimcatholic.blogspot.com\")
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