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%u00a9Jack Fritscher, Ph.D., All Rights ReservedHOW TO LEGALLY QUOTE FROM THIS BOOK210 Jack Fritscherhad looked at me, at the real me, in years. My parents looked and saw a priest, but I had never looked at me. I had never ever even seen myself. In my small room, high up under the eaves, I threw myself down on the bed covers and fumbled to turn off the lamp. The window shade, drawn up, revealed the black city night bright with light and with the moon. Sirens shrieked down streets, avenues, boulevards. Sirens shrieked down me. Years of prayer and examinations of conscience and soul and intellect had plowed me back into myself. I at least stood on hope%u2019s margin. I might have a self worth finding.Heat lightning flashed across the sky.I bolted up and stood in front of the one luxury in the room that had, in the better days of the parish, been the second housekeeper%u2019s quarters, a three-quarter-length mirror. I took off my shoes and socks and shirt and slacks and underwear. I dared stand naked. White and naked and more naked than white. Blind parents raise invisible child. Another invisible boy turning into another invisible man. In the summer suddenly, I could die like Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman, virgin-martyr-saints of civil rights. The shell of my outside was new, forbidden. I looked at every part of it.Except for the unseen soul inside, corpus meum, my body could have been any young white man%u2019s body, naked, downed downy with Irish down, passably athletic. Inside me is me. Outside is me too. Ridiculously obvious. But meaning much more. My body a metaphor of the veil between me and all the world. Pushing tongue against the permanent gold bridge backing my perfect white teeth. For years when I was a child, men spoke to me as a child. Paralleling Saint Paul, I put away the childish things and men spoke to me as a seminarian. The second state little different from the first. Child and seminarian. Seminarian and child. Childseminarian. The darkling umbra penumbra of labels. I had always handled myself well without ever touching myself. Without interfering with myself. I stared into the mirror.For years, no one had seen me. I only that night stopped to look at the white dummy from the front row. %u201cChild of God,%u201d I said. %u201cI am that they see, but they%u2019ve never seen me.%u201d Never seen me: Ryan O%u2019Hara, Person. A young person. Trust in Jesus. Trussed in Jesus and Rector Karg and Father Gunn, because they went lickety-lickety, the way James Earl Jones could in his %u201cOld Man River%u201d basso profundo intone lickety-lickety, wagging their pious fingers, saying I could have no crisis, no growth, nothing but the innocence of my childhood from which I was to come to them perfect, remain untroubled, and survive without blemish.