Joe McClane

The Inheritance

St Luke 15:1: And he said, “There was a man who had two sons; 12: and the younger of them said to his father, `Father, give me the share of property that falls to me.’ And he divided his living between them.

I too took my inheritance from my Father in an untimely fashion. It was 1980 and my Father, who was serving in the Army, had just been stationed at Fort Sam Houston, in San Antonio.  I was six years old, and I began to recognize the very peculiar, and confusing behavior of my Father towards my mother.  At the time I didn’t understand what he was doing, but I knew that the way he was treating her was just not right.  What I didn’t know was my Father was addicted to pornography, and sexual promiscuity, and he imposed this world-view upon my mother, treating her like an object of use instead of a person.  Needless to say, this kind of abuse led to a divorce leaving my sister and I hurt, confused, and bewildered.  All we wanted was our parents together under the same roof, even if they were always fighting, and my Father was always complaining that my mother didn’t “meet his needs”, it was far better than the alternative, divorce.  I recall the pain & loss of my Father’s constant presence in my life, and when I did see him I recall the further pain of witnessing his “new” found relationships. “Who were all these women?” I thought. “Why are you so familiar with them?” I wondered. “They are NOT my mother!” I raged.  Then there was all the sexual paraphernalia I found around my Father, including that classic resource “The Joy of Sex” with all its detailed, illustrations, that I so often perused at 7, 8, and 9 years old.  It was by this time that I had my own “stash” of porn to draw upon.  I will never forget when, as a student at Stahl Elementary, just down the road from Madison High School, that a friend and I were caught hoarding a “Hustler” magazine. My mother busted her butt to provide for my sister and I.  Not necessarily the proudest day in her life. Although she told me it was wrong, I never heard why it was wrong. Sure it felt dirty, but dirty felt so good! Why is it wrong? I even remember sitting in Sunday School, at MacArthur Park Church of Christ, and hearing them say that “pre-marital” sex was wrong; really, I thought… why? “Well, it’s in the bible” they would say,  ”it’s the bible that says its wrong”.  Ok… why? Even if they tried to answer the question, and I have no doubt that they did, it surely didn’t take.

It was at this time that my mother’s third Husband, Wes, entered our lives.  Wes was a hard working man but, had some real struggles with cocaine, marijuana, alcohol, and oh yes… porn.  By ten years old I had found his stash of VHS tapes and began watching them almost daily.  Masturbation had taken root and I was not seeking “our daily bread” rather, I was after “my daily indulgence”.  My entire sexual formation was based on my Father’s, and stepfather’s, lifestyle with a steady stream of pornography.  All I ever knew about sexuality, love, romance, the value of women and relationships, was based on what I was watching on the TV and magazines.  I absolutely thought this is what “making love” was all about, and what women were “good” for.  This was the inheritance I took from my Father at so young an age.

The Squander
13: Not many days later, the younger son gathered all he had and took his journey into a far country, and there he squandered his property in loose living. 14: And when he had spent everything, a great famine arose in that country, and he began to be in want.

By the time I was a teenager it was my mission in life to have as many sexual relationships as possible before graduating.  You see I was trying to impress my Father,  he had countless girlfriends so I would have countless more.  I wanted to show my Father that I was becoming the man who is “made in HIS image & likeness” and  I desperately wanted him to be proud of me.  So I too didn’t see women as human persons; no, to me they were like commodities to be consumed.  They existed to please me, to meet “my needs”, not unlike a coke, when after I have consumed it I crush the can and toss it in the garbage.  As a senior in high school I took full advantage of the young, innocent, girls, who really wanted to impress me, to show me they could “meet my needs”. They wanted love, affirmation, acceptance, and security, and all I wanted was their flesh. I convinced one girl to give to me what should have been saved for the man whom God had destined for her in covenant marriage, her virginity!  But,  not many days later, I was no longer interested in her. Like the images on the porn tapes, it served its purpose and I was already bored with her and looking to my next conquest.

In 1991 the first Gulf war broke out and I was “gung-ho”;  because the “Uncle-Sam” won’t take a seventeen-year-old kid with out a parents consent, I had to do some convincing to get my Mother’s permission.  My Father served in the Army, so I would serve in the Marine Corps. I’ll never forget the day that SSgt. Simmons came and picked me up from my mother’s apartment and shipped me off to boot camp in San Diego, CA. My Father didn’t think I had what it took to finish boot camp, so he refused to put the “My Son is a US Marine” sticker on his truck until I’ve “earned the title”.  Don’t get me wrong, my Father loved me, and my sister, very much, but I think deep down he longed for his son to do better, to be better, than he was. My Father went out of his way to show his love for us, it’s just that his world-view, his concupiscence, kept getting in the way. After three months of blood, sweat, and tears, literally, my parents looked on in amazement as their, vastly skinnier, son stood tall in his dress blues, when he received Marine Corps boot-camp’s highest award, the recognition as Company Honor-man.  I graduated number one out of four hundred and fifty US Marines; I had earned “the title”!

Even though the Marines gave me discipline and some honor, my world-view hadn’t changed in the slightest. In fact, it only grew more intense in the Corps.  From California, to Tennessee, with a brief excursion to Mardi Gras of in 93, I was free to do as I pleased, the Corps was not going to be my “mommy & daddy”. So long as I did my job, they were not going to tell what “not” to do. Sure there was a price to pray if I got caught but, drinking, bar fights, strip clubs, porn, and chasing women was a pass-time for the vast majority of the “Devil-Dogs” in my unit. Perverse sexual conquest was all but encouraged by training instructors, and senior enlisted folks at every stop along the way.   Better than winning the lottery, I received my permanent duty-station orders that sent me to Kaneohe Bay, Hawaii.  Like  dropping the wolf in a pen full of helpless sheep, I was let loose in a paradise full of scantly clad women.

Back in the summer of 89 I lived my with Father, in Stuttgart, Germany, for 3 months where I saw his second wife leave, and his latest mistress trying to hide her affair from her husband.  This was par for the course but, what was new, was my Father and I sharing porn for a brief time. I think it bothered him internally, although we never spoke openly about it, somehow knowing that this is just not what a “Father” is supposed to do.  This kind of sharing developed into a mentoring relationship while I was serving in Hawaii. I was eager to impress my Father with all of my tales of womanizing and wanted him to know that his son was a “chip off the ol’ block”.  I recall the long phone calls and his advice on how too keep one girlfriend from finding out about the other, and prevent venereal diseases.   Without getting into detail I earnestly desired to live up to my Father’s expectations of my “sex-life”, and did so to the fullest extent possible.

There was one young girl that stands out however. She was eighteen and living with her sister, and her sister’s husband who was a Staff-Sergeant attached to my unit. He and I worked second and third shift, and we got to know one another pretty good. He began inviting me over to his house for dinner, and to hang out on the weekends. Taking full advantage of the situation I began sleeping with his sister-law, and even his wife once, and as usual grew board pretty quickly.  As “luck” would have it, my room-mate got to know this girl as well, so I dumped her giving him a chance to step in, an easy out, allowing me to move on to “bigger and better” prey.  It was a about a month later that I  received the phone call; it was  her on the other end.  ”Hey, I’m pregnant” she said, her voice trembling, “and am not sure if it’s yours or Mike’s… I’m scared and Im not sure what to do. I think I want to get an abortion!” I listened to how nervous she was. “Wow, you have got to be kidding me” I thought, “there is no way I want to be tied down with this chick”. I quickly responded “yes… an abortion, that sounds like a good idea; do you need money for that? Tell you what, I will drive you there”!  I checked her into the clinic and waited with her until the nurse called her name.  I watched her go around the corner then I immediately got up, left the clinic, and walked across the street to the Honolulu mall where I started scoping out the girls in the food court.  As I was trying to work my magic, getting the “digits” from one girl, there was another girl lying naked on her back, feet propped up, crying, while the baby in her womb, was sucked out, torn limb from limb. Because I was too cowardly to be the man God created me to be, this girl was all alone in this world feeling desperate, and with no “choice”! I murdered that child all the while setting my “hooks” into my next victim.  Needless to say, I no longer wanted to serve my country in honor and integrity as much as I wanted to serve my self in indulgence.

Upon my discarge from the Marines I returned home to San Antonio, and quickly fell into a deep depression. I spent all my time and money on alcohol, strip clubs, and pornography, gaining lots of weight and searching for new purpose in life.  Besides a stop over in Dallas, I ended up at my sister’s house in Oklahoma City.  She was trying to help me find a “new-way”and found a radio broadcasting school nearby, and thought that I would be perfect for it.  It sounded great, and I was thinking “yeah, chicks dig the cool DJ… I will hit it big, a great job, lots of pay, and lots of women”! But, Ten months, seven thousand dollars, and a hundred and fifty “no-thank-yous” from radio stations across the USA, and I was selling my car so I could buy a train ticket to Boston.  My Father was living in New Hampshire, with his latest girlfriend, and I felt like this would give me a fresh, clean, start to a new life.   It didn’t take long after moving in to find my Father’s porn stash, and I started using & abusing as often as possible.  I was fortunate though, after offering to work for free, to land a couple of radio gigs in southern New Hampshire. One of them was the news director, at WHOB 106.3 in Nashua. It was a good first  radio job, and I was having lots of fun as the “side-kick” in the morning drive slot.

In the summer of 97 I was at my very first live, remote, broadcast, from a pizza joint in Nashua, when “she” showed up to introduce herself.  She had been calling into the show and we were beginning to talk off the air as well.  I know she sounded so cute over the phone but, I was caught off guard when I first laid eyes on her. She was stunning, and I knew… right then and there… that I wanted to marry her.   I tried my best to seal the deal as fast as I could.  I wish I could say that my radio career worked out with great success but it didn’t.  By the end of that year I was working for a local telecommunications company trying to survive on only eight bucks an hour. When I finally did get on my knee, and present the ring, I was able to work my way up to project manager, which included a decent pay raise.  Like music to my ears Michelle said “yes”, and I was a very happy man.

“If were going to get married” she said with some hesitancy, anticipating a negative response, “your going to have to become a Catholic”.  ”Catholic?” I thought, “really”?  I grew up in the Church of Christ, and they think all Catholics are going to hell, so this should have been a big deal to me however, it wasn’t.  I had fallen away as a teenager, and didn’t really care what religion I was.  I felt all religions were the same,  so… “sure, I’ll become Catholic! I signed up for RCIA classes at the Cathedral downtown.  They were very nice people who tolerated me, my crazy world view, foul mouth, and twisted since of humor, without making me feel like the biggest sinner on the planet. But, it was one night that stands out the most. I was sitting there listening to the facilitator read the “beatitudes”, in St Matthew’s Gospel chapter five, thinking to myself just how “true” this rings! “Jesus is talking about seeking holiness here” I said to myself, “and I am everything opposite of these beatitudes. I mean I’m not free to live, or seek, holiness”! I knew what I would do that very night as soon as I  got back to the apartment.  I had high-speed-internet-access, all the porn I wanted just a mouse click away.  That was my reality, not seeking holiness.  It was a moment of clarity for me. My next thought was, “it’s a good thing I have a long life to live, maybe someday I will be able to seek holiness”. I still thank God that I was not run over by the proverbial truck after that night.

The Low Point
15: So he went and joined himself to one of the citizens of that country, who sent him into his fields to feed swine.  16: And he would gladly have fed on the pods that the swine ate; and no one gave him anything.

The Preist who married us, tired very hard to set us straight but, I had convienced Michelle that we should live together first, and we were surly living as man and wife,  just without all that complete commitment of the will, heart, and self, stuff that gets in the way of my desire to  have my “needs” met.  It was a busy couple of years completing RCIA, receiving the Sacraments, planning the wedding, getting married, buying our first house, then having Michelle’s mother, sister, and both brothers move in just months after signing on the dotted line.  Yeah… good times!  Needless to say, I was overwhelmed, and feeling very crowded.  My work environment lent itself to my perverse lifestyle, and I was living like a drunken sailor, gone out-of-control, on shore leave at Mardi Gras, and no one was very happy about it.  I railed against my in-laws, yelling at them constantly, disrespecting them, and making them feel so unwelcome in my home.  Then, one spring day, in 2002, I was laid off from work. Not only was I not bringing home love, charity, and integrity, but now, I was not brining home a paycheck either. Couple this with the many instances my wife had caught my using the porn, and she had enough. She wrote it out on a piece of paper, “you take this, I will take that; were done, I want a divorce”!

The Turn
17: But when he came to himself he said, `How many of my father’s hired servants have bread enough and to spare, but I perish here with hunger!  18: I will arise and go to my father, and I will say to him, “Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you;  19: I am no longer worthy to be called your son; treat me as one of your hired servants.”‘

My whole world was crashing down around me.  I had lost my job, was loosing my house, and my marriage too. I had nothing left, nowhere to turn, and nothing to hope for.  Feeling totally lost, and desperate,  I turned to the one person who I was sure would not be there for me. I mean I was never there for him so why would he give me the time of day?  I opened the bible I was given in RCIA class to St. Matthew chapter five and began reading those beatitudes.  I had no idea what to expect, nor what to do, so I just read them over and over again.  My heart began to fill up with so much emotion, and I was overcome with a great urge to get on my knees.

The Confession
20: And he arose and came to his father. But while he was yet at a distance, his father saw him and had compassion, and ran and embraced him and kissed him.  21: And the son said to him, `Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you; I am no longer worthy to be called your son.’

So in April of 2002, I got down on my knees and I said “God, I can not do this… your going to have to do this”.  I can not explain how but, in that instant God allowed me to mystically understand things that I didn’t understand the very instant before. It was like the “scales” fell from my eyes. The moment before, I would have rationalized with you, “we were all born sexual beings, pre-marital sex, masturbation, fornication, porn, ‘free-love’… its all natural, everyone does it! Yes of course we practice contraception, its irresponsible not to! I mean, after all, its her body, and who are you, God, to tell her what to do with it”!  But, in that miraculous instant of time, God allowed me another wonderful moment of great clarity, and I no longer wanted to make excuses for my selfish ways.  I understood, for the first time in my life, that I had to maintain sexual integrity, and practice chastity. For the first day, since I was about ten years old, I would not masturbate.  Women, were not objects to be consumed but, made in the image and likeness of God himself.  My marriage was permanent, and worth saving, worth working for, yes, even worth suffering for, and I would need to beg my wife to stay and work it out. The last, but certainly not the least, gift I was given that day was an insatiable thirst and hunger to know God.  In the moment before, I turned to my bible out of desperation but, now, in this moment, I could not get enough of God’s word and I had to have more!

The Restoration

22: But the father said to his servants, `Bring quickly the best robe, and put it on him; and put a ring on his hand, and shoes on his feet;  23: and bring the fatted calf and kill it, and let us eat and make merry;  24: for this my son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found.’ And they began to make merry.

That Spring I entered the confessional, begging God for mercy for decades of debauchery, abortion, and licentious behavior, not expecting to really receive it but, as I kneeled there, I heard the voice of Christ, through the person of the Priest, come through the screen, say the most beautiful words I had ever heard… “I absolve you of all your sins”!  How many times have I prayed for forgiveness, on my knees even, on my own, but have never heard God’s voice?  Every time I watched porn, masturbated, or slept with a woman, I was seeking satisfaction but, only and every time found shame. No matter how many times I “confessed” it privately, I never found God’s mercy, never receiving the assurance I so desperately desired.  But, here, in this confessional, I came as a slave wallowing in the mud with the pigs, and my Father restored my dignity as a son of the Most High God!  I was lost, but was found! I was dead, but am alive again!  God clothed me in His mercy, and I was a slave no longer.  Now, I am free to pursue holiness, to live the beatitudes; now I realize that I was not born to lust, but to truly love; for Christ came to set us free from sin and death.

Over the course of the next several years our Lord would lead me to his cross, teaching me the vital tools of virtue, chastity, continence, and objectivity, so that I may combat my temptations, with a healthy Christian response.  I learned to overt my eyes, cut off the avenues of lust, and avoid the near occasions of sin, praying to Our Lady for help, and reminding myself of the dignity, value, and gift, of women.   I had inherited porn addiction from my Father, but I have drawn the “line in the sand” and have declared “this far and no further”! My son’s will not inherit this from me… they will not find porn in my home! My daughter will know that she is precious, and a daughter of the Most High.  Temptations will come, and I may fall again, but God, in His infinite wisdom, has given us the remedy to the wounds we  receive in spiritual combat…. the sacraments.  What a gift we have in reconciliation, to experience our Father running to meet us on the road, falling upon our neck, and lifting us up, from feeding the swine, to feasting in His kingdom as his Son’s!  Don’t waste another moment of your life living in your sins, cut off from the life of God, repent and confess, for “Just so, I tell you, there is joy before the angels of God over one sinner who repents” (St. Luke 15:10)!

Notes: Verses taken from Revised Standard Translations. Emphasis added.

I hope to have the conference talks available for sale, on CD & MP3, in a few days.

“One of the best-loved books of Christianity after the Bible, The Imitation of Christ is a passionate celebration of God and His love, mercy and holiness.  It has inspired conversion and stimulated religious devotion for over five hundred years. With great personal conviction, Thomas à Kempis (1380 – 1471) demonstrates the individual’s reliance on God and on the words of Christ, and the futility of life without faith.  In this astonishing work he demonstrates an encompassing understanding of classical phiolosophy and human nature, and his writing speaks to readers of every age and every nation.  Countless saints, including Thomas More, Ignatius of Loyola and St. Therese of Lisieux have loved it and known it by heart…”