Why Did I Write Nazar's Journey?

NOTE to Reader: This essay is a more detailed version of the piece that appeared in the St. Austin Review (July, 2024) which you will find posted on the Media/ Articles page of this website.

The day is coming soon.  Interviewers will be asking me the pivotal question about what motivated me to write Nazar’s Journey.  Of course, they will expect a quick answer – just a few bullet points.  I will have those ready.  Then they will abruptly move to another question.  They will hide their frowns and ask why I would put myself through the labyrinth of getting a book published at age 70 – for a potential charitable endeavor, no less, when I could just have written out a check to the charity and been done with it. I’d be able to take a walk along the ocean and enjoy the sunset, rather than having my fingers glued to my laptop.  The final dreaded question posed by a pessimist might be: What if your book is a dud?  What if there are no prizes, no recognition?  The interviewer reminds me that I might not make a dollar in profit, then counsels me to calculate all my hours of lost time and all the energy expended to make this project a reality.

Ignoring these frowns and pessimistic concerns for the time being, I will answer the pivotal question in a more detailed manner by firstly telling you a little more about myself, for Nazar’s Journey is a reflection of my life, of who I am. 

My story begins at The Cranwell School in Lenox, Massachusetts, which, once upon a time, was a Jesuit prep school for boys.  It has been closed for many years. It was situated on the top of a hill, a magnificent property in the Berkshire Mountains, one of the most beautiful places in New England.  In the same location today, you will find an overly priced resort for New Yorkers and Bostoners trying to escape the stresses of urban life. I boarded there during my four years of high school.  It was perhaps my parents’ way of thinning out the six boys they were raising at home.  As you might have guessed, my classmates of The Cranwell School were no angels.  Thanks to my fellow students, my vocabulary in prohibited four letter words greatly expanded during those years.

The Jesuits were highly talented educators in literature, poetry, and drama.  The school had a literary magazine available to students and faculty to which I often contributed. I loved being in plays, so I was Ivan in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Pozzo in Waiting for Godot, the fellow who fired Willie Loman in Death of a Salesman, and the prudish social worker in A Thousand Clowns. My love for drama shows up in the many dialogues of Nazar’s Journey. 

But those activities weren’t enough to satisfy my young ambitions.  I was involved in student government, took piano lessons, and did a few sports like track and cross country.  Academically, I was at the top of my game, and became the class valedictorian.    

My plan was to become a famous actor and director, to one day drive along the coastal roads of California in a red convertible, with my curly Italian locks tossing in the ocean breezes.  I had wanted to go to Stanford University but didn’t get in, so I decided on Yale, located in urban and, at the time, a worn-down, dingy New Haven, CT.  Yet I felt it wasn’t a bad place to wind up with my acting goals.  After all, Paul Newman had gone there, and Meryl Streep.

I had avoided applying to Catholic colleges, as I wanted to distance myself from what I perceived was the stale and stifling Church, with all its suffocating rules and restrictions. It is a strange sentiment, now that I look back, since I had admired and benefited greatly from so many of my Jesuit teachers.  So many were gifted with preaching and the liturgy. 

I landed at Yale, intending to get away from God and religion and the Church.  But the bon Dieu had other plans for me.  It was a divine set-up. 

Within days of arriving at Yale, I found myself disoriented and insecure.  I was no longer at the top of my game.  I graduated from a class of 75, and was now in a class of about 1200, all of whom I incorrectly assumed were brainiacs. I didn’t know at the time how many of them would just turn out to be gifted and ambitious, no question, but so many were normal and kind people, without pretensions.   Still, I was now just one among many, a tiny fish in a very large and competitive pond, or so I thought.

Providentially, I had only been at Yale for perhaps six weeks or so, when I was invited by the chaplain of St Thomas More Chapel at Yale, the Newman Center, to attend on a one-day retreat along the rocky CT shore, and I said yes. The retreat was called “Confessions of a True Believer” and was given primarily by a young woman who had become a Roman Catholic as an adult while a student at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.  She had transferred from Michigan to Yale as one of the first group of women to be accepted to Yale College.

Her personal witness was beautiful and compelling.  She spoke about having a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, of knowing Him as a close friend, about surrendering our lives to Him.  She talked about Christ being the “Lord of our lives,” and invited us to allow Him to be the driver of our destiny, and to freely choose to put ourselves in the passenger seat.  After twelve years of Catholic education, all of this sounded mysteriously new and refreshing to me.  So, during the period of reflection, I walked outside along the rocks, watched the autumn waves crashing, and surrendered my life to the Lord.  It was a decision that stuck.  The date was October 9, which decades later became the feast day for St. John Henry Newman, the day he became a Roman Catholic and left the Anglican Church.

My life was suddenly transformed with a deep love for prayer and the scriptures, which has developed and grown over the years.   I discovered the extraordinary beauty of the mystics and the lives of the saints as if I was stepping into an unexplored garden.  I also had wonderful friendships with the Catholics at the Newman Center and many other Christians with the Inter-varsity Christian Fellowship.  We all seemed to enjoy being countercultural in intensely secular Yale.  Eventually I changed my major to Religious Studies, abandoning my acting dreams, as I felt I should take advantage of my college experience to deepen my knowledge of the faith.  It was a solid decision. The rest of my life was built on that foundation.

As a result, at Yale my activities as an actor were short-lived.  I was in a drama ensemble my freshman year, taking the part of young Bougrelas in the play by Alfred Jarry, Ubu Roi, a spoof on Hamlet.  That was it.  Cleverly, one of the priests at St. Thomas More observed that my career goals had changed. He asked me to direct several plays to be performed by Yale students at the Newman Center.  His concept was to use these productions as a prelude to his penance services, after which the students could individually receive the sacrament of reconciliation.  So, I directed The Selfish Giant, Jonah, and The Prodigal Son, with improvised background music provided by a highly talented oboe player from the school of music.  These were memorable and very emotive productions. 

The Religious Studies Department at Yale had some fabulous professors at the time.  George Lindbeck, the main Lutheran observer at the Second Vatican Council, lectured on the Documents of Vatican II.  Jaroslav Pelikan taught the development of doctrine, and Judah Goldin, a Jewish scholar, gave an engaging course on the historical books of the Hebrew scriptures.  I decided to do my senior thesis on St. Catherine of Siena, as she encompassed my interest in the mystics, in Italy and the Medieval era. Louis Dupre, a wonderful Belgian gentleman, who taught a class on the “love mystics,” was my senior advisor.

Now back to Nazar’s Journey.  During my senior year at Yale, which was in 1975, I had taken a psychology class on child development.  The professor gave us the option of writing a routine class paper or writing a children’s story.  I chose to write a children’s story.  I had remembered CS Lewis’ comments that it is ok to include bad things in a child’s tale if you provide a resolution to the evil at the end.  So, I experimented by creating a story about an injured boy who had lost his father during the Vietnam war and was searching for him. The narrative had a bird, but the bird was not the Skylark of Nazar’s Journey.  The boy was much younger than Nazar.  A friend volunteered to do some illustrations for me.  I rushed to complete the story as graduation was rapidly approaching, so my research was very limited, plus the internet did not exist then so I couldn’t quickly retrieve cultural details.  Still, my professor liked the story, and she suggested I get it published.

The important detail that pertains to Nazar’s Journey is that the Vietnam story had theological content, as I was really writing about redemption, reflecting in story form my personal experience of the intimate love of God the Father.  The wounded boy was symbolic of the brokenness of the human condition without God.  The search of the boy for his father represented the search within each soul for the love and mercy of God the Father, and the emptiness of life without His love.  The bird symbolized, in this early story, the reality that God knows every detail of our lives, that even if we do not feel His presence, even when suffering is overwhelming, that He accompanies us on our journey.  Those elements from a story created fifty years ago, in an entirely different historical and cultural setting, found their way into my current novella.

With the business of life after graduation, the story faded from my attention and was never published.

As I have mentioned, the conversion I experienced took root and flourished, thanks to the grace of God. I had discovered the beauty of being a Christian, the richness of Catholicism, and had fallen in love with the Pearl of Great Price.  This is my first expanded bullet point:  the major motivation of my life, the principal motivation in my writing Nazar’s Journey, is that I wanted to share the treasure of the Christian faith.

After college, I continued to study and deepen my appreciation of Catholicism. I took a graduate course at Fordham on Eastern Catholic Spirituality with George Maloney, SJ. At the time I was working at an inner-city parish in Newark, NJ as a pastoral associate. I wrote a rather scholarly paper for the course with this title:  Isaac of Nineveh and the Gift of Tears.  Father Maloney liked the paper so much that he decided to publish it in Diakonia magazine.  This was in 1979.  It is the only piece I wrote that was published in my lifetime prior to Nazar’s Journey.  Looking back, the Nineveh connection seems quite a coincidence.

I ultimately decided to go into the business world rather than academia, becoming an insurance expert in the fields of disability and long-term care. The bon Dieu brought into my life a wonderful woman who shares my love for prayer, the scriptures, and the saints. We were married almost 40 years ago. Together, we raised five children, and now have seven grandchildren.  My career dovetailed well with my faith, as it has given me many opportunities to help people deal with the difficult decisions and crises related to sickness and aging.  Also, during this phase of my life, I was able to channel my creative energies for liturgical purposes, composing songs based on the psalms using the guitar.  I was also a cantor.  

Here’s the second key point related to why I wrote Nazar’s Journey.  When Benedict XVI became pope, my wife and I both used to enjoy reading his homilies, essays and his extensive interviews, such as Salt of the Earth and Light of the World.  There is one essay which particularly made an impact on me.  He wrote about how people are most often converted by two factors--the witness of the lives and the saints. . . and by beauty.  I reflected seriously on these words.  I wasn’t sure how much of a saint I would turn out to be, although no harm trying.  But I was convinced I could contribute to the second goal.  I felt I could create beauty which would draw others to Christ, not as a painter, but as a writer, and that the opportunity was wide open before me as I was transitioning to semi-retirement.  I felt that if my work was executed well, I might be able to encourage other artists to be part of this “beauty movement”— by means of beauty, to foster the “new evangelization.”  Nazar’s Journey became for me a mustard seed in this movement.

Here's my third motivating factor:  calling attention to the reality of the persecution and displacement of our fellow Christians in other countries.  During most of my adult life, I had so much exposure in the news to the two Iraq wars and the ISIS catastrophe.  In more recent years, there was extensive discussion about Religious Liberty in the National Catholic Register and the Columbia magazine.  Then I remember a TV interview with Father Ben Kiely talking about how ISIS would paint the letter N (for Nazarene) on the doors of houses in Iraq so that Christians could be singled out and targeted, either by killing them, or harming them personally or financially.   The Holy Spirit was speaking to me of the urgency of making known, to those of us in the west, the sufferings of our brothers and sisters in Christ, who may be thousands of miles away--to personalize their sufferings and make them more real. We are, in fact, all members of the Body of Christ, but in our parish prayer, and in our western consciousness, their ordeals are far away and forgotten.  So Nazar’s Journey became, for me, a way to personalize these sufferings and to encourage the reader towards specific responses of prayer, compassion and charity.

My fourth and final motivating factor, at this stage of my life, is that I desired to give something back to the Lord in thanksgiving for the many blessings he has given me, particularly the discovery of His personal love for me, for the gifts of my wife and family, for our children and grandchildren and the wonderful friendships we have shared over the years.  Psalm 116 asks the question, “What return shall I make to the Lord, for all the good He has done for me?”  Nazar’s Journey is my special way of answering this question.

As a final reflection, I would like to comment on one detail in the scene when Nazar enters the church of Mar Addai in Karemlesh.  He observes in horror the extensive desecration, and notices that the two words “beloved Son” on the sanctuary wall (from “This is my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased” in the gospel of Matthew)– had been beaten by a hammer and spray painted with black ink by the ISIS warriors.  Although the other details of the church desecration in my book are accurate, this is a fictional detail.  What I am suggesting here is that there are many powerful and evil forces at work in our world which seek to distract us, to pull us away from the magnificent discovery that we are sons and daughters of God.  The Father loves each one of us profoundly and inexplicably.  His Son has paid the price with His suffering, death and resurrection to impart to us this great treasure of the Father’s love, the very heart of the good news.  If Nazar’s Journey awakens one reader even to begin to be curious that such wondrous love could ever be a possibility in his or her own life, then the mustard seed has been planted, and, for me, the book is a success.