THE TRIQUETRA OF LIFE: Wisdom, Wealth, and Wellness

A Chapter Eighteen Excerpt

Path Perilous: My Search for God and the Miraculous

A True Story of Teenage Innocence

College in the early 1960s felt like a collision of ideals and crude impulses, a place where the air reeked of beer and cigarette haze, and a young man like me carried a tender conscience into an era of loosening morals. I had one foot in the Church, one foot in the culture, and very little guidance on navigating the rugged coming-of-age emotional and spiritual terrain. Fraternity parties were frequent, the temptations plentiful, the live music thudding through my chest. My inner life strained to be heard beneath the clatter, the heat, the turbulence of restless youth seething around me.

What happened one winter weekend in our fraternity basement wasn’t anything I was prepared for. It became one of the more bewildering moments of my youth — a scene both comic and sobering — etched in the damp smell of concrete, the low hum of the furnace, and the quickening beat of my own heartbeat. It revealed far more about my innocence than I wanted to admit.

One weekend party night, I ended up in our basement furnace room alone with a nice Catholic girl who was no doubt as tipsy as me. We hid from the partygoers for a passionate kiss, standing next to a hot furnace that breathed heat against my face each time it rumbled alive, warming us and the cold winter air. Nothing had prepared me for what happened next. As the expanding furnace metal ticked, and the room seemed to shrink all around me, I suddenly realized I had no experience with any of this.

She was eagerly expressing her predatory primordial instincts. Aroused like a praying mantis, she raised her arms; her legs angled where she stood; her facial expression glistened with rapacious hunger. The furnace hissed behind me, the air thick with the smell of metal and skin, as her shadow jittered across the concrete wall. What I felt was a hair-raising chill from sheer fright, watching this dramatic, instinctive display of our nature’s reproductive ritual. A strange, primal dread shot through me — an animal fear I had no name for, stirred by an innate knowing that in some creatures the female kills the male before mating even begins.

Ironically, it turned me off. I was not ready to lose my head. That idiom no longer felt like a figure of speech but a bodily truth, scaring me out of my wits. My throat tightened; sweat prickled along my ribs despite the cold floor under my shoes. I was terrified and aroused at the same time — a reckless surge of yearning, tangled with panic — yet I managed to control myself and left her standing there … alone.

No doubt, she would have loved to have me for dinner, so to speak, as would any properly aroused female mantis. I suspect she was miffed that I escaped. I never saw her again, leaving only the echo of my footsteps and the cold draft of that basement hallway, spared the retaliation and fury of a woman scorned.

Looking back, I realized that what startled me most that night wasn’t her arousal at all, but the glimpse it gave me of how much marriage asks of a man — that surrender and total consummation I was far too young to understand, yet felt as a tremor in my chest and a heat rising up my neck.

In time, I could smile at the awkwardness of that moment, though at the time it shook me to my core. It showed me how immature I still was — how far apart were my head and my heart.

Encounters like this became part of the education that no university catalog ever mentions: learning the boundaries of desire, fear, morals, instinct, and self-restraint, felt first in the body long before the mind.

Chapter 18 explores these tensions more fully, tracing how my spiritual aspirations and human vulnerability often collided in my early adulthood, leaving me to sort out which impulses were guiding me toward life … and which luring me toward a danger zone where instinct and fear overruled.

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From the memoir-in-progress, nearing publication:
Path Perilous: My Search for God and the Miraculous
—a spiritual epic for truth-seekers, contemplative mystics, and all who long for God.

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