Unbroken: Part Three
- Dr. Tom Wagner
- May 3
- 9 min read
“Even If It Kills Me, I’m Not Going Back!” Larry’s Pilgrimage to Freedom
How does someone heal after experiencing profound trauma? This article explores the deeper, resilient, and even sacred part of the human spirit that suffering cannot destroy.
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Unbroken: Part Three
“Even If It Kills Me, I’m Not Going Back!”
Larry’s Pilgrimage to Freedom
Soaked in blood from a gash to his head, seventeen-year-old Larry shivered under a viaduct for two cold Covington, Kentucky, November nights. After fourteen years, he was seeing to it that his beating from the night before would be his last. Like a cruel slave owner, his sociopathic monster of a stepfather, Dick, would never acquiesce to Larry’s manumission. The road to freedom lay on the other side of a long, exposed walkway over Spence Bridge, where his friend, Brian, and his family lived in Cincinnati.
Dick was unaccustomed to any of his sons or stepsons fighting back. Years ago, Larry’s three older brothers got away from home as fast as they could. This left the youngest sibling in the unenviable position of sole target and sole scapegoat for Dick’s rage. He knew that capture by the police would have resulted in a reunion with a man whose capacity for violence and revenge knew no limits. Dark rumors of murder clung to this man like a custom-fitted suit. Larry didn’t want to provide him an opportunity to show what he was capable of. Hiding out for two cold nights, Larry remembers thinking, “Even if this kills me, I’m not going back!” Hypothermia was a small price to pay for freedom!
Larry’s history of living with Dick was bookended by impossibly hard blows to the head. The first one, at four years of age, left him sprawled out on the floor of a car. The final one, at seventeen, left him sprawled out, momentarily, on a kitchen floor. Unlike his four-year-old initiation into abuse…unlike fourteen subsequent years of beatings, often with weapons…this time, after getting up off the floor…HE PUSHED BACK! The combination of teenage strength and his abuser’s surprise bought Larry just enough time to get out the door.
The next thing he knew, he found himself on a two-night, five-mile sojourn to his buddy Brian’s house, where he’d live out the balance of his senior year. It was during that year that Larry defiantly refuted Dick’s final words to him, “You’ll never amount to anything; you’ll never graduate high school.” After receiving his diploma, he completed a stint with the Navy, then settled down to a thirty-five-year career as an electrician. Retired now, he enjoys the fruit of having raised two boys and two stepchildren. He enjoys a great relationship with his ten grandchildren. He and his wife of thirty-four years winter together in Florida and take the occasional cruise vacation. To appreciate the magnitude of these achievements, let’s return, just for a moment, to Larry’s childhood. We return there, not for shock value, but to provide a context of understanding the story of healing that follows. Warning: the next paragraph contains graphic descriptions of brutality.
Walking with a Limp
As Larry described in the first episode of this trilogy, Dick “was always looking for a place to put his anger.” A wrong answer to a question, a return trip from the bar, or just looking at him the wrong way often resulted in boys getting lined up against the wall, enduring an extension cord “whipping…front, back, up, and down” administered to stripped, bare bodies. Larry’s voice was grim as he remembered. “It felt like fire.” Skin broke, blood flowed, welts rose up, bruises formed. Those physical effects provide some clue as to the psychological and spiritual scars that such cruelty furrows into a boy’s soul.
Unlike a two-dimensional superhero, violence, cruelty, and poverty tend to leave a mark on a person. Resilience is not the same thing as invulnerability. Like Jacob in the Old Testament, those resilient souls that live amongst us, frequently walk with a limp. Larry is no exception. The past two episodes of SMC have asked the question, “Where did Larry get hold of his resilience?” This third and final installment returns to Larry’s story to ask, “How does someone heal from such dramatic abuse?” To locate that answer, I invite you to load up your imaginative backpack and travel back in time for an adventure with four little boys that could have come straight out of the movie, Stand by Me.
Healing at the Quarry
Where do boys go? What do boys do to heal from that kind of abuse? What follows, in Larry’s own words, is a description of what will be interpreted as four boys’ efforts at applying a healing salve to their broken bodies and their wounded souls.
“It would begin sometime in March. We would take the railroad tracks down to the quarry. Sometimes there’d still be ice along the edges, but we would still jump into the water. Then you’d find a sunny place to lie out on the huge boulders, that were heated by the sun.”
Shinrin – Yoku
The Japanese concept of Shinrin-Yoku is literally translated as “forest bathing.” Practitioners of this informal spirituality experience a kind of rejuvenation by plunging into nature for a hike, or in this case, an actual plunge into the water. As Larry spoke, it was not hard to imagine this little band of brothers reclaiming their boyhoods in chilly waters that would have chased away any lingering memories of violence. Here was a kind of home where you didn’t have to watch your words or your back. You could hear the warmth in Larry’s voice as he relived those moments of stretching out on slabs of rock warmed by sweet, golden, wholesome light.
If I could go back in time and interview those swimmer/sunbathers, I‘m pretty sure that the word “healing” never would have crossed their boy lips or boy consciousness. Likewise, words like “spiritual,” “transcendent,” or “God” would not have occurred to them either. As I listened to adult Larry, I found that the eyes of my imagination glanced back and forth between two side-by-side scenes. On the one side, it was all “Hakuna Matata” on sun-warmed rocks. On the other side of the screen of my imagination, it was Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, with bloody extension cord whips. It occurred to me that these boys’ bodies were frequently forced to absorb pain and humiliation, but never at the quarry! At the quarry, their bodies experienced exhilaration, warmth, relaxation, and play. The quarry provided their bodies a kind of kinetic experience of beauty in action. Spiritual writers have long considered “Beauty” an attribute of God, as well as a synonym for the Divine Presence. From that perspective, it’s not a stretch to imagine that those boys were unconsciously experiencing an unnamed Healing Presence. It was that same unnamed Healing Presence that showed up for Larry years later during night watch in the Navy.
“There’s Something Healing in Me:” Rendezvous with Healing Presence
Sometimes Healing Presence shows up through years of diligent spiritual practices like meditation, sacred ritual, and spiritual community. Other times, it shows up, seemingly out of nowhere. It was the latter of these two experiences that showed up for Larry. It’s more like he bumped into Divine Presence. To put it in the words of a mystic, like Augustine of Hippo, Larry didn’t know he was looking for God when God found him. As a young man in the Navy, late at night, he would steal away to the back of a huge vessel, called a “Fast Frigate.” He and his crew were on that ship to guard an even larger aircraft carrier. Here’s how Larry described it for me.
Looking up at the stars and the bioluminescence of the fantail [the wake left by the boat], it put everything in perspective. I did feel like God was there. Especially at night. There’s a dark that’s darker than dark. The ship is in the middle of the ocean. But I always felt so comfortable. It was very calming. It was then that I felt there’s something healing in me.
In his book, Into the Silent Land, spiritual theologian Martin Laird describes the phenomenon that Larry bumped into on the back of a Navy frigate. According to Laird, it’s as if “there’s something inside that’s deeper than the pain, deeper than the anxiety, deeper than the trauma.” In experiences like the one Larry described, “the chaos of the mind” is quieted. “The sense of anguish gives way to a sense of divine presence” (p. 22).
What Larry was experiencing on those nights that were “darker than dark” was a “comfort” that came from a deeper place than the layers of abuse he had suffered. In fact, according to Larry, his fourteen years of cruelty were not an impediment to accessing that Presence.
As a young man, I should have been too busy to look for all that stuff. I wasn’t too busy. If I would have had a normal childhood, I wouldn’t have been looking for something more. My abusive past…created a need to go to the back of that boat, and look up.”
Larry was clearly not saying that he was glad for the abuse. Like sufferers of many stripes, Larry is saying that his psychological pain caused him to search. What Larry discovered at The quarry, and on the back of that boat, was a Source of Healing that attracted him, that seemed to desire healing for him.
A Spiritual Takeaway
In my spiritual tradition, of Catholicism, there’s an old belief in a thing that Saint Augustine called “original sin.” That belief was meant to explain how people, like Larry’s stepdad, can go so wrong. Having said that, Larry’s story reveals another story, a story more ancient and all-pervasive than Augustine’s story of original sin. We might call it “original blessing.” This original blessing pre-dates original sin. It exists further in and deeper down within each of us, kind of like an underground aquifer— below our unconscious self.
This deep-down place inside Larry was a place that his stepdad couldn’t get to, and therefore, couldn’t take from him. It’s what eventually led Larry to the back of a boat to “Look up.” And in looking up, Larry fell down into the Source of Beauty itself. That Source, come to find out, had always lived within him, before all the pain. It was original blessing that attracted him down a railroad track with a ragtag band of brothers, to bask on sunbaked slabs of rock. Likewise, years later, the Source of that original blessing attracted him to the back of a boat to initiate a healing process within him.
Whether you had a “normal” childhood or a childhood that lived closer to the end of the spectrum where Larry lived, the takeaway from this story is the same. The human spirit, miraculously and mysteriously, comes ready-made with a source of Healing Presence knit into its deepest fibers. Even more miraculously, all of creation is shot through with that same Presence.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t appear that this ever-present Source of original blessing, or Healing Presence, prevents any of us from experiencing chaos or cruelty. That’s why Larry’s story, and stories like it, are so important. They bear a kind of witness that violence and damage don’t have to get the last word.
Dialogue and Discussion Questions:
Longtime SMC readers know that “the Dialogue” section of this article is set aside for a good conversation over a cup of coffee—with a friend, with a group, or just with yourself! As always, feel free to share your reaction or reflection in the “Comments” section below.
What stood out to you in this article, and why do you think it spoke to you?
Has there been anything in your life that caused you some trauma, or has gotten in your way psychologically or spiritually?
Is there a way in which you kind of “walk with a limp” as a result of a past trauma or wound? What helps you make your way with that limp?
When I was a boy, Lake Springfield in Illinois was just a short walk away from my back door. The rhythm of its waves and the underwater silence stilled my soul in the midst of family chaos. Larry found his way to an anonymous source of Healing Presence at the quarry. Can you think of times where you kind of accidentally found your way to places like that? Recall one or two of moments by going back to those places. Just take a few minutes to savor those spots again.
Please share with the SMC community your thoughts and/or reflections in the comments below.
Comments