Nobody Cries When We Die

God, Community, and Surviving to Adulthood

Patrick B. Reyes

• Publisher: Chalice Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780827225329
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Religion

When the screams of innocents dying engulf you, how do you hear God's voice? Will God and God's people call you to life when your breath is being strangled out of you? For people of color living each day surrounded by violence, for whom survival is not a given, vocational discernment is more than "finding your purpose" - it's a matter of life and death. Patrick Reyes shares his story of how the community around him - his grandmother, robed clergy, educators, friends, and neighbors - saved him from gang life, abuse, and the economic and racial oppression that threatened to kill him before he ever reached adulthood. A story balancing the tension between pain and healing, Nobody Cries When We Die takes you to the places that make American society flinch, redefines what you are called to do with your life, and gives you strength to save lives and lead in your own community.

Part of the FTE (Forum for Theological Exploration) Series

Chapter 1: Called to Live

[In our world, it] is not possible for a child—any child—ever to use his family’s language in school. Not to understand this is to misunderstand the public uses of schooling and to trivialize the nature of the intimate life—a family’s language.

— Richard Rodriguez, 1982

The first time I heard God call me to my life’s work and vocation was the first time God called me to live. Hold my story in care. For survivors: My story contains tragic violence. I want to care for those for whom this story may be a trigger or who are in need of healing from violence. Know that you are not alone and that I pray you receive the care you need and deserve.

God, Where Are You?

As a child, I always listened intently for the sound of God. God could have come in any form. Raised in a Latinx Catholic church, I longed to hear God calling me out of my adolescent reality and into a thriving future.

Sometimes, that is what we think vocation is: God calling us out of our present reality and into some divinely purposed and infinitely better future. Unfortunately, life does not always allow this to occur. In fact, God often just calls us to survive. That’s how it was for me.

The days were always short when I knew what was waiting for me at home. When my parents split, I was only 12. I remember feeling as though my conscience split. My sense of right and wrong, my grounding, my sense of belonging to a space—to a people—belonging to the Holy, all felt off. It’s a deep disconnect many families are experiencing today. As a mixed-race, light brown-skinned, Chicano boy in a gang-infested neighborhood, my identity was difficult for me to navigate. Language barriers in both English and Spanish, historical marginalization, and lack of opportunity in education and livelihood defined every step my father took for our family. Here I was in adolescence, already split in conscience by our society as Latinxs, neither belonging to nor excluded by our community. But now within one of Latinxs’ most coveted categories, familia, my identity was shattered. I didn’t know to whom I belonged. I didn’t know where to call home.

I was the oldest of three boys. We are fortunate now to have another younger brother and sister, whom I love dearly. But at the time with just the three boys, I had settled into my life of being the extra parent, the strong brother, the student, and the steady example. I helped raise my two younger brothers both in mind and spirit—despite my parents wishing I wouldn’t. I remember my mother telling us less than a month after my parents stopped living together that she was moving a new “man” into the house. I was 12 years old at the time. I said as forcefully as one can at that age that I didn’t feel that was right. Everything about this Stranger unsettled me.

“You are just a child. I am the adult. This is what’s right.”

I wanted so desperately to be heard, seen, and included. I wanted my truth to be recognized. My encounter with the gospel at this point was limited to Catholic Catechism on Sundays, but I knew that Jesus would have included me, a child, just as the stories about Jesus and children in both Mark 10 and Matthew 19 report. I wish Jesus had my back in that moment. Instead, my mother sent me to my room. Children often have wisdom and insight far beyond their years because their eyes are not clouded by rationalizations or passions.

The Stranger moved in the next day.

I had recently been admitted into the local Christian Brothers all-boys school. Every day I returned to the house that my parents had once shared to find the Stranger in it. A Stranger with bad habits. A Stranger whom I now can imagine must have been suffering far more than I ever realized. A Stranger who had yet to hear God’s compassionate and loving call to new life, a new way of being in the world. He was a Stranger who brought with him shadows of pain and storms of violence that clouded my future and caused the waves of my past reality to crash around me.

I acclimated to his abuse, knowing when and how to step in, when to incite it, how to redirect it, ways to focus its hateful energy toward an external object, or how to hide from it. As the oldest sibling, as the protector, the model citizen, a “good” Christian, and at the beginning of my adolescent journey into and through the expectations of cultural machismo and manhood, it was my duty to protect my brothers from the pain of this world—a duty I know, now that I am out of my youth, was one that I could never have fully realized.

I felt very fortunate to have an opportunity to go to this Christian Brothers school. Not everyone in my community did. I always enjoyed learning and still do. School provided me an outlet to succeed in what was otherwise an overwhelming and defeating life. I remember saying in a session with a counselor that I shouldn’t need help processing the world. What I needed was someone to help me survive what was happening at home. No child should have to process abuse.

One day I came home from school and prepared to do my homework. I pulled out my books, which were carefully wrapped in old brown paper grocery bags, and placed them on the white laminate desk. I heard footsteps coming up the stairs. I turned in the small chair to look through the open doorway. Competing with the sound of the Stranger’s footsteps were the shrieks and bumps of my brothers roughhousing in the room adjacent to mine. Then the Stranger’s first yell: “Knock it off, or I am coming in there.” I remember my brothers quieting down for a moment and the footsteps stopping. I froze in my chair. The whole house was in suspended animation. I sat there staring over my books, hoping that the Stranger wouldn’t say or do anything to my brothers, wishing that I could escape this reality of ours.

Seconds passed, and it was not long before my brothers were doing what young boys do—playing again. The Stranger’s steps quickened their pace. Now footsteps were at the top of the stairs, so forceful, even with the gray carpet designed to dampen such noise and impact, that they rumbled the entire second floor. As they grew louder and louder still, my brothers instinctively slammed their door. But the Stranger continued to move toward it, eyes bloodshot from his self-abuse earlier. My mother was in her room, telling the Stranger to stop. I remember his gaze and his footsteps turning toward my brothers’ bedroom.

When he’d made it near my mother’s room, just a few paces away, I scurried to my brothers’ bedroom door. Through the hollow white door, I told my brothers to go outside. As they ran down the short hall, the Stranger turned his focus back toward my brothers, who were frantically trying to make it to the stairs, nonetheless laughing as he yelled after them. I don’t know if they thought it was actually funny or if they were more aware than I ever gave them credit for, and were laughing nervously to mask their fear.

The Stranger turned toward my mother, “I am going to shut those kids up.” There was something about the look in his eye, and the image of his large clenched fists that made me certain: This time he’s coming after them too, not just me.

Where was God in this moment? Would God have protected my brothers had I not intervened? Would the Stranger really have gone after them if I had not provoked him?

There was no time for such questions all those years ago. Instead, as he turned toward the stairs, I screamed out.

“HEY, ¡PENDEJO! You dumb pile of shit! Why don’t you leave them alone!”

I screamed out words of profanity, words I will never utter in front of my son, words of lament, words of pain, words that turned the Stranger’s attention toward my small adolescent body, a body that wanted nothing more than to do homework. I stood in the door and ripped into the Stranger, naming all of his bad habits, naming all of his shame, lighting the fire in his eyes, and focusing his pain and hate on my small figure. The Stranger stood nearly 6’2” and weighed 220 lbs., and here I was, 4’11” and maybe 105 lbs., daring to challenge him. I was David in the face of Goliath, slinging my rocks. But unlike David, my rocks did not stop the Stranger.

“What did you say to me, you little brown piece of shit?” His racial and ethnic hatred for those he saw as inferior to him was now directed at me—his Latinx other.

“You heard me! Who the f— do you think you are?” I yelled. Then his body lunged at mine.

The impact of a grown man slamming a fist into a child is a pain I never want any child to know. After hitting me once, I fell backward on the floor, dazed. This was not the first time he had hit me, but it was the first time he had hit me like I imagine he would have hit a man his own size. In the past, there had been a limit to the amount of abuse that he had inflicted on me, as if he was saving himself for a better fight, a fight with a worthier opponent. This time there was no limit. The strike was meant to destroy me, to destroy my humanity.

“You think you know better than me, with your books?” The Stranger lifted the books off my desk and threw them judgmentally in my direction.

“I do know better,” I whimpered as book after book struck my small body. Those were the last words I remember saying.

The Stranger threw my desk chair against the wall. He reached down and lifted me up by the shirt. I tried to kick and punch back. Before I had an opportunity to stand up, his large frame towered over my body. His eyes were the color of hell. As he stood over my body, my body seemed to shrink. My body ached not just from the strikes that came, but from my perception that my arms, legs, body, and head were all collapsing inward. At that moment, my body was the smallest thing on the planet and the Stranger’s, standing over me, was the largest. I tried to cover my face and my body, flailing around like a fish out of water, only to be stopped dead cold by the Stranger’s right hand reaching down and wrapping its way around my neck like a giant snake preparing to suffocate its victim. The feeling of my body slowly rising against the wall, the force of the constriction, and the strain to the body as it rose are all sensations I do not remember as vividly as the strikes. I only remember rising off the ground, placed up on my cross, my body nearly lifeless.

No child desires a cross; no one wants to suffer; there is no redemption in suffering.

Suspended above the ground, I remember looking for and longing for the eyes of my father. He wasn’t there. I searched in vain. I looked all around, avoiding the violent gaze of the Stranger. My father wasn’t there. I remember hearing my mother crying, yelling for the Stranger to stop, telling me I was out of control. In a way she was right, for I had no control in that moment. I remember, or perhaps I project back onto that memory, a simple question: Where is...

Table of contents

• Praise for Nobody Cries When We Die
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• Series Foreword
• Foreword, a Letter from a Friend
• Editor’s Introduction
• Psalm 23:4
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Called to Live
• Chapter 2: Valley of Death
• Chapter 3: The Game Is Rigged
• Chapter 4: In the Wilderness
• Chapter 5: Grounded in New Life
• Chapter 6: Sources of Inspiration and New Life
• Chapter 7: Calling Others to New Life
• Chapter 8: Living into the Christian Narrative
• Acknowledgments
• Bibliography
• About the Author