My father had a very successful business when I was a child. We were very well off and I was able to do just about anything I wanted to do. I jumped from activity to activity, but my dad never seemed to mind. He just wanted my brother and me to have good childhood experiences, mostly because the first four years of my life my mom battled leukemia. No matter how hard it was for her to get up in the morning, she always went the extra mile to be the perfect mom.
She died the summer before I turned five. I didn’t immediately understand the fact that my mom would never make me pancakes shaped like zoo animals again, that my mom could never read me Curious George and make monkey sounds as she read it again, and that during a thunderstorm I would never again be able to climb into her bed and hear her voice telling me, “listen to the thunder Stephen, that is God and his angels having a concert. God is playing a rain stick, that’s why it’s raining so hard, and St. Michael the Archangel is playing the drums which is the thunder you hear. And do know what the lightning is? The saints and angels are at the concert and they need bright stage lights so they can see the stage.”
The day of my mom’s funeral I came down to breakfast and asked when mommy would be home. I thought she had just gone on a trip because my dad kept saying that she had gone to heaven. My dad just looked at his cereal, and my Aunt Janine, who had come to help my dad with me and my brother, came over to me and gave me a hug, but before she could say anything, my brother took my hand and lead me out of the kitchen. We walked through our fancy dining room into the family room. In the far corner of the family room there was a great big, blue armchair with a colorful afghan draped across the top, sitting next to a huge window that framed a willow tree. This was my mom’s sanctuary. She crocheted the greens and blues and yellows and pinks into that comforting blanket when she was pregnant with Benjamin, long before the leukemia attacked. Benjamin and I crawled into the chair and hid underneath the blanket. “You know how Mommy always talked about Heaven and how we each have a special place up there with Jesus and God?” Benjamin said as played with a loose thread, “Well Mommy went up to Heaven to get places ready for me and you and Daddy.” He took my hand and said, “Mommy’s not going to come back here again, she’s waiting for us with Jesus.” I was still a little confused but because my big brother, who I thought knew everything at the age of six, said so, I believed it. Then I had a thought, “What if there’s a thunderstorm before we go to see Mommy in heaven, what am I going to do?” “You can come into my bed with me, it’s big enough for the both of us,” he replied all-knowingly.
By the time I was twelve I had taken karate, guitar, and drum lessons, played basketball, baseball, football, and soccer, made a dozen model airplanes, and participated in Boy Scouts. I was never able to stick with one activity for very long, a fact that sometimes annoyed my brother, who was, in a nutshell, my opposite. While I jumped from sport to sport, Benjamin stuck with soccer and he got good enough to play for his college team. He also stuck with his chosen instrument, the trumpet, and made the school marching band. I only made it to the wolf cub level of Boy Scouts, but Benjamin eventually became an Eagle Scout.


I was a good kid in grade school, mostly because I had the perfect big brother who I wanted to be exactly like. I also didn’t want to disappoint my mom, even if she wasn’t physically present. Whenever I wanted to do something that I knew I shouldn’t and Benjamin himself couldn’t change my mind, he would tell to go talk to mom. That meant to go sit in Mom’s chair, curl up with her blanket and to tell her what was going on, because we were sure that whenever we sat in that chair she dropped all heavenly duties and came to listen to us. We never moved that chair or used it for anything but talking to her.

People often said how much Benjamin was like my mom. He had her eyes, but mostly, he had her personality. Benjamin was a tried and true Catholic, just like my mom. I heard my Aunt Janine remarking to my dad one Christmas how surprised she had been when my mom got married because she was sure that my mom was going to be a nun. On the other side of things, I was often told that I was exactly like my dad. I never knew if that was a compliment or an insult. My dad and I agreed on some things, but we usually fought. Benjamin was our peacekeeper and he was my best friend.

When Benjamin started high school, he decided to wear a “Got Jesus?” shirt the first day. It earned him some unwanted attention from a junior who obviously had not “Got Jesus.” After two weeks of being pushed around, Benjamin told the guy, “I don’t care what you do to me, I don’t care how long you do it, but it’s not going to change anything about me. This Jesus that is on my shirt has already suffered ridicule and public humiliation for me. And you know what, that is nothing compared to what the Romans did to him after the humiliation. They nailed him to cross and left him to die because they didn’t like him. So continue to bully me, I am extending to you an invitation to bully me.” The bully sulked off that day but walked up Benjamin after school the next day to find out more about Jesus. The former bully converted the next year and today is a priest.

As a seventh grader, all I got from this extraordinary story was that religious freaks got bullied in high school and I was not going to be bullied. I started hanging around with kids who were on the road to expulsion. By the time I got to high school, I was no longer the kid who looked up to his big brother for everything. I thought Benjamin was a loser, why did show his faith in public? Didn’t he know that people weren’t religious anymore?
In January of my senior year, Benjamin came home to visit and found evidence that I had been doing drugs. He confronted me about it saying, “What would Mom think Steve? Don’t you remember anything she taught you?” Before he could say anything about her chair, I snapped, “Mom is dead Benjamin, open your eyes. How can you have faith in a god that took her away before we even got to know her?! And don’t say anything about her chair, it is just a chair with a blanket on it, she is gone Benjamin, GONE!” Benjamin took a deep breath and walked out of the house. My dad wasn’t home because he was working late, and Benjamin never told him that I had been doing drugs, maybe he trusted me to make the right choice even after everything I said, maybe he wanted Dad to catch me himself, which would have been horrible for me, or maybe Benjamin just couldn’t bring himself to tell Dad the things I had said about Mom, and God, and that I was nothing like the way my mom would have wanted me to be.
I graduated the following May and Benjamin still hadn’t told Dad about the drugs. Dad’s business was starting to fail, so before I left for college in August I confronted him about my inheritance. Dad and I went out to lunch the day before I left. “I want my share of the inheritance now.” My dad looked at me with bewilderment all over his face, “I know your company is losing money and some of that money is what you were going to give me after you died, so I think I can get the maximum out of my inheritance if you just give it to me now.” The truth is that I was starting to run out money and I refused to get a job. But it was true that things weren’t going well in the business world. My dad wasn’t sure what to do. He looked down at his steak and started a cutting a bite off, but after three minutes he was still making sawing motions between his steak and the bite he was able to cut off after about ten seconds. “I don’t see why not,” he finally said. He transferred the money into my account, and the next day I was off to college and a new life on my own.
Needless to say, I didn’t do much studying when I got to college. I partied hard every night, and was even deeper into drugs then I had been in high school. I didn’t go home for Christmas that year and never returned any of my dad’s or my brother’s phone calls. By the middle of second semester, I had run out money, had to quit school, and had gotten arrested twice while drunk. I had hit rock bottom and now I had to do the unthinkable, get a job.
Nobody wanted to hire a guy who had just dropped out of college and had been arrested twice. I finally got a job, but I won’t say where because I don’t want to create a stereotype for this franchise. I’m pretty sure that it was only horrible because of the owner of the specific location that I worked. I had to continue to work there because they were the only people who would hire me.
After six months of torture, I was walking to the homeless shelter that I had been staying at, and I found myself wandering into a church. I hadn’t given my faith a thought since that night when I was in high school and I blew up at Benjamin. The church had have been at least sixty years old. The first thing I noticed was the crucifix behind the alter. Jesus hung on a crude, wooden cross, and all I could think was, and I thought I had it bad.
I walked through the church and found a little alcove with a single statue with a kneeler. It was a statue of the Virgin Mary holding Jesus as a young child. I recognized the statue because my mom had kept a small replica of it on her nightstand. I knelt down, and as I looked at Mary, I could feel tears forming in my eyes, and a wave of memories rushed over me. The one that stood out to me was of a summer day when I was three and Benjamin was five. We were sitting underneath the willow tree in our yard having a picnic lunch because it was Benjamin’s birthday. My mom was telling us a story from the bible. A young man took his inheritance, left home, and squandered it, he eventually returned home with the notion of working for his father. I couldn’t remember what happened when he got home, but it set off a thought in my brain. My father’s business was back up and running wonderfully. I knew that he treated his workers wonderfully, not at all in the way that my current boss treated me. Then I remembered my mom, the little things that she would do to show her family how much she loved them. The tears that had been forming in my eyes flooded out and could hardly breathe because of how hard I was crying. I made up mind, I was going to go home and ask my dad for a job. I returned to the church in the morning for mass, and I felt like I never had before. I suddenly had the courage and the humility to apologize to my dad and to Benjamin for everything that I had done. As I walked past the Mary statue before I left, I swear that she smiled just a little broader and just little more motherly as if to say, your mother has faith in you too.
I bought a bus ticket and rode for two hours until I got to my hometown. I prayed the rosary, the Divine Mercy Chaplet, and every other prayer I could remember. When I got to my dad’s office building, I could feel my confidence waning. I got all the way to his secretary’s desk before I decided that my dad would never forgive me and it would just be a better idea to talk to Benjamin first. But, before I could turn around and leave my dad walked out of his office and saw me. At first he there was sadness in his eyes, but it was immediately replaced by so much joy that I thought he was going to have a heart attack. “Stephen, i-is that really you?” he asked as if he was afraid I was a ghost. I took a deep breath, “Yeah, Dad, it’s really me.” That was all I was able to get out before we both burst into tears and I was engulfed in a hug that made up for all the ones I missed in the last year.
My dad called everyone and anyone he knew to say that his prodigal son had returned and invited them all to his home to celebrate that night. When we got home, almost every one of my family members was in the family room ready to welcome me home, along with assorted family friends. Everyone came up and hugged me and told me how much they had missed me. The only person who didn’t rush me when I stepped through the front door was Benjamin. As I peered through the room I saw my father approach Benjamin, and they seemed to have a disagreement, Benjamin turned away and walked outside. After everyone had greeted me, their attention turned to food because a pizza delivery guy had just shown up with twenty pizzas. I took the opening to dash outside and find Benjamin.

I found my brother sitting underneath the willow tree. “Hey,” I said as I sat beside him with my back to the tree. “You always knew how to make a splash, little bro,” he remarked with an edge to his voice that seemed out place in my brother. “What do you mean?” I asked as calmly as I could. “I have been there for Dad ever since Mom died when I was six, and I have never been given any sort of special treatment. But then you cut yourself off from the family for more than a year and the last conversation you had with Dad was give me my money before your business loses it, and you won’t even return my phone calls! Then you come home and Dad throws you a big party. The only party he ever threw me was when I graduated from high school.” He stared at the horizon and I knew that he felt guilty for feeling this way, but I couldn’t blame him. He had always been there, even if people weren’t going to hand him a medal for it (which they should, because he had been there since he was six.)

“I’m sorry for everything that I ever did to hurt you, and for yelling at you about Mom, and for expecting you to just pick up the pieces of my messes, and for taking you for granted. You are honestly the world’s greatest brother, even if that makes me sound like a five year-old instead of a high school graduate. I don’t expect you to be able to forgive me and I don’t want you to feel compelled to, but I am really sorry and I want you to know that I could never in a million years ask for a better brother.” I said it all in about one breath and when I finished Benjamin looked at me and said, “you’re right, you do sound like a five year-old, and you could never ask for a better brother.” He said smiling at me. He jostled my shoulder, “Now let’s go enjoy your party.”
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I worked off everything I owed my dad, and I eventually went back to college. I graduated at the top of my class, and my dad immediately offered me a job at his rapidly growing company. I eventually became CEO, and when he died, he left me a sum of money that he said was for his “prodigal son.” I didn’t want to accept any inheritance because I felt that I already gotten my share, but Benjamin told me to go talk to Mom because she would say that I had to do something with it. Well, I took the money and set up a foundation. I didn’t want any money and I didn’t need any money, but I knew there are people out there that do. That’s why I have set up the Open Arms Foundation to help families who have been torn apart to come back together, and to help teens and young adults who a struggling with addictions that are ruling their lives. I believe that this is why the Lord made sure that I came home all those years ago to a family who was ready to embrace me with open arms.