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Jack’s Story
 Let’s call him
Jack. He is 15, the runt of the
litter in a large family, his father having deserted long ago. Jack barely
knows him. He thinks it’s normal to be fatherless.
Jack is a tiny, cute boy with a
cowlick on his forehead, a snub nose, and an endearing sense of humor, but
 he
was always in the soup
from the time he started school. “A trouble magnet,” he has
been called. He couldn’t stay out of fights, which he usually lost, and
was expelled from school countless times, when he bothered to show up at
all.
Jack was an affectionate kid, but
he got used to being humiliated. He was small for his age, and he’d
been told he was “ugly” so often that he refused to believe
otherwise.
Jack was a bit slow in school, with
a short attention span. They put him in “special education.”
Other kids were quick to call him a “retard.” One day he came
home from school and told his mother he had been diagnosed as
“hyperactive.” By then he knew how to interpret official
euphemisms. “That means bad,” Jack explained sadly. It
also meant Ritalin. Her heart ached, but there seemed no other way to
control him.
Not that it controlled him very
much. By the time Jack reached his teens, he was smoking, and not just
tobacco. To support these expensive tastes, he stole. Now he was getting
into trouble with the police, not just the school authorities. He was hanging
out with the wrong kind of kids. Neither his mother’s tearful pleas nor
Ritalin seemed to make much difference. His young life was already shaping
up like a Merle Haggard song. Mama tried. Would Jack turn 21 in prison, doing
life without parole? The trajectory seemed all too clear.
Jack was like a lot of kids —
incorrigible for sure, but not wicked. The lovable black sheep, who never
seemed to hurt anyone but himself. His grandfather tried to help by taking
him in for the summer a few times, just to help Jack’s poor mother,
and the two became attached to each other. Jack’s humor made the
old man laugh, when Jack’s behavior wasn’t driving him nuts.
They shared a love of old Marlon Brando movies, On the
Waterfront and The Godfather, both of which
furnished them with running gags.
The old man often asked Jack
what he wanted to do when he grew up. Partly he wanted to start the boy
thinking about the future, but mostly he sensed that Jack needed someone
to listen to him with respect. To most people, he was a pest or a problem.
But what was inside him?
![[Breaker quote for Jack's Story: A turning point]](2006breakers/060330.gif) Someone
else took an interest in Jack too. He was befriended by a
Brother Thomas, we’ll call him, a member of a Catholic religious order,
through Big Brothers of America. Jack saw him weekly and loved him with a
passion, but that didn’t stop him from continuing to smoke and steal
and break his mother’s heart.
Despite warnings and lectures and
probations, he wouldn’t change. Why? Why? He was ruining his life, and
it was all so needless.
Finally, inevitably, Jack was
arrested for something more serious — being accomplice to some
bigger boys in a minor robbery. He was put in a “juvenile detention
center,” a clean, well-lighted dungeon. He was helpless and homesick.
Then something happened that
wasn’t inevitable. Jack started praying. Hard. Daily. Constantly. He
said the rosary twice a day, he became devoted to the great saint Padre Pio.
He repented bitterly, not just for what he had done, but for the way he had
hurt his mother. For the first time, he was putting himself in someone
else’s shoes.
“I just want to cry when I
think of all the bad things I have ever done. She did not deserve the mean
things I have said to her,” he wrote to his grandfather. (He added a
postscript — a joke from On the Waterfront.)
His grandfather barely resisted
the urge to write back to the little boy, “You are more of a man than
your father.” Though it was the truth.
Suddenly Jack had matured
dramatically. Only weeks before it would have been hard to imagine. And
everyone who knew him marveled, understanding that the Good Shepherd had
found the black sheep: “There is more rejoicing in heaven over one
sinner who repents than over ninety-nine of the righteous.” And he
who said that was pretty righteous himself.
Joseph Sobran |
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| Copyright © 2006 by the
Griffin Internet Syndicate, a division of Griffin Communications This column may not be reprinted in print or Internet publications without express permission of Griffin Internet Syndicate 
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