The times they were a changin’. It had been two years since my parents’ divorce had been made official, two years since Doctor Engel transformed my life at Johns Hopkins Hospital by closing my ileostomy and creating a stoma for urine to flow, thus freeing me from having to wear diapers. I was ten years old then, now, my mother’s newfound faith transformed hers. She became drenched to the bone in everything Jesus. She joined Kairos Prison Ministry and Cursillo, an apostolic movement of the Roman Catholic Church whose focus was teaching lay people how to be effective Christian leaders in their communities. This, along with her singing in Sam Mancuso’s choir, our attending Mass in the evenings, and my serving as an altar boy, found us at Mass up to seven times per week, thus setting our lives on a beguiling trajectory.
My mother’s Cursillo experience began with a three-night retreat. This meant we needed to find someone who was not only willing to take me in, feed me, and make sure I got to school, but also willing to change my ostomy bags.
Sam and Joanne Mancuso were those people. For me, it was a moment of profound surrender and trust. I’d have to reveal my body with all its deformities and scars. It was awkward and not without its moments of stress, and at times comical. At the age of ten, I’d not spent more than a night away from my mother, to say that it was awkward; that it was stressful would be an understatement, but it also had moments of comedy. The first night at the Mancuso’s house, I lay in the darkness and quietly cried myself to sleep. But by the second evening, I was having fun playing with their youngest daughter, Ellyn. I will always love the Mancusos for the generosity and boundless kindness they showed me, and for giving my mother the opportunity to do something for herself, without having to worry about me.
Four days later, when my mother’s retreat ended, she picked me up from school.
“I never felt love like that before,” my mother said. “It was as if I was on fire, but at the same time at peace with everything.” Though I couldn’t understand what she meant, I could tell by the look in her eyes and the tone of her voice that something had changed. It was as if she’d broken free of some weight she’d been carrying.
As with everything she did, my mother embraced this new version of faith with genuine passion. Suddenly, we were thrust into a world populated by an odd assortment of characters—would-be spiritualists and born-agains, people who spoke in tongues, people who writhed as if possessed and claimed to have visited Hell, as well as people who broke into spontaneous song. “My mother called it rapture, or ecstasy: a heightened spiritual awareness, like what her favorite saint’s Francis and Teresa of Avila experienced.
As part of Kairos Prison Ministry my mother traveled to Collins Correctional Facility with the Mancusos and Jim and Sheila Sobkowski once a month to talk with and listen to inmates, hoping to impart on them some of that love and sense of peace she felt. One such person was a tall blonde-haired man who called himself Tex and claimed to have been part of the Manson family.
Around this time, my esophagus started constricting more and more. I missed big chunks of school and was forced to eat baby food, the only thing I could keep down. I was in and out of Children’s Hospital, where Dr. Jewett dilated my esophagus more times than I could remember. This coincided with my Rambo phase. I became obsessed with the idea of going off to war and dying. Jake Sobkowski, Jim and Sheila’s son, became my new best friend. He also dreamed of joining the Army and going off to war.
A year older than me, Jake suffered from a debilitating disease that caused his hips to deteriorate. When he was in fourth grade, he had to have both his hips replaced. He was in a half-body cast for almost an entire year. Mrs. Wilkins, my third-grade teacher, whom I fell in love with after she taught me how to tie my shoelaces, used to carry Jake up and down Saint Elizabeth’s four flights of stairs each day.
When Jake wasn’t confined to a cast and I wasn’t in the hospital, we ran through our neighborhoods at night dressed like ninjas, spying in windows and tying tripwire in strangers’ backyards. We also put letters in my next-door neighbor Melvin Tilly’s mailbox—after he called me a crippled bastard—letting him know he was under surveillance by the Junior Green Berets.
We visited Sergeant Turmain at the local army recruiting office and took home brochures. He answered our endless questions and shook his head in amusement as we narrated our naive fantasies. All this was a vast contradiction from my John Lennon and “Give Peace a Chance” ethos as well as anything Cursillo or Kairos stood for. Of course, my mother indulged me, as she always had. She let me believe I could do anything I set my mind to, even joining the Army. I couldn’t even handle gym class; how did I ever expect to survive in the Army? Jake, on the other hand, despite his double hip replacement, would not only go on to join the Army, but serve three tours in Iraq over the course of both Gulf Wars.
Sometimes, we traveled with our mothers to Collins Correctional Facility, where his father and Sam Mancuso led a spiritual retreat for inmates. Before we arrived at the prison, however, we gathered in a church a few miles away, along with fifty or sixty others to pray and listen to former inmates testify about how they’d been saved. On one of these nights, a man named Paul took to the podium on the altar and spoke.
Paul was a member of the Seneca nation. He was a tall, pock-marked man who wore his long blue-black hair tied in a ponytail. In a soft-spoken voice, he told the congregation about the grocery store clerk he’d shot and killed during a robbery twenty years earlier.
“I used to be pretty angry and confused,” he said. If it wasn’t for Kairos, or Jesus’ love and forgiveness, he didn’t know what would have become of his life. I sat in stunned silence. I’d never been in the same room as a murderer before. As Paul continued, his voice cracked. He wiped his brow with the back of his hand and loosened his tie. “I was desperate,” he admitted. “Desperate for something I couldn’t put words to.” I sat up straight to hear him better. “Many years would go by,” he continued. “Many dark nights of the soul before I would be able to admit that what I was desperate for was love.”
After his testimony, my mother and I drove to the prison. There, we found Jake and his mom, amid the crowd, next to a giant razor-wire fence. We stood side-by-side as rain poured down and our shoes sank in the wet grass. Every few minutes, a spotlight from a nearby guard tower swept across the perimeter. We were given candles, and after they were lit, someone started to sing “On Eagle’s Wing”—a song whose words I knew from hearing my mother sing along to the record at home. Soon a line of prisoners came into view on the opposite side of the fence, with Jake’s father and Sam, who strummed an acoustic guitar, in the lead. After the songs a prayer followed, then a loud, collective amen rang out from both sides of the fence and everyone clapped and shouted. We watched the line of prisoners disappear into the night, returning from where they’d come from, then walked back to our cars and went home.
Jake and I were always forced to attend Kairos’ monthly potluck dinners, which were held at different members’ houses. Decked out in our thrift-store army fatigues and green berets, we hunkered down in a far corner of the room with our plates of pasta salad, Jell-O, and potato chips, and thumbed through the pages of coffee-table-sized books that chronicled World War II and Vietnam—pictures of bombs and blood and death. We pretended we couldn’t hear the adults, with their out-of-tune voices, and their raucous proclamations of faith.
“Tell me, do you love Jesus?” a choir of women asked (my mother and Jake’s mother among them).
“Yes, I love Jesus,” Jake’s father responded.
“Do you really love Jesus?”
“Yes, I really love Jesus!”
“Can you tell me how much you love Jesus?”
“This much,” Jake’s father proclaimed, and stretched out his arms crucifixion style.
I admit I was embarrassed by these public displays of faith—sing-alongs, holding hands, praying in public. It all seemed corny, and a bit false, especially when my mother tried to get me to join in. Yet, there was something about those nights that made me feel good, and I admired the way my mother was trying to reinvent herself.
Reprinted with permission from These Fragments I Have Shored by Jason Irwin, published in © 2026 by Apprentice House Press. All rights reserved.
