One Song That Changed My Life

When you’re weary, feeling small  
When tears are in your eyes, I’ll dry them all …Paul Simon

Nothing is wasted in life if I am willing to hold onto and draw from each experience when I need it–as painful and unpleasant as they sometimes are.

Evidently I needed to revisit one particular experience from my youth–to see how a lesson learned at seventeen is still a necessary one for me today.

I grew up in small town Iowa, where I went to the same Catholic grade school and high school for eleven years. I was on the “inside” of my class. If my dozen friends and I weren’t together in class, we were riding bikes to the woods or ball park or river after school and on the weekends.

Over the years we grew close through our shared school experiences– nights spent camped out in basements or backyards, or trading dinner meals with families.

In high school, there were always four or more of us in one car cruising around town, and there was always someone’s home we gathered at for the evening.

Life was turning out just swell for this teenager, and the future looked grand. I assumed this was the norm in every school and for every kid.

Then one day the Greek gods, sitting in their thrones in the clouds looking down on me, decided to pick on me for their fun.

On that day, my parents sat us all down to break the news to us—we were moving to Reno, Nevada. The news did not go well. Of all the ages to pick up and move across the country, seventeen is the worst— though my sixteen-year-old sister might disagree.

The first day at our new catholic high school I knew this was not going to be good.

I was small for my age, and was mistakenly assigned to the freshman PE class. Thus, began a year of teasing, ridicule, and humiliation.

One morning, as I was walking down the halls of my school, three of my classmates snuck up behind me and clamped padlocks on my belt loop. This set the students in the halls screaming with laughter. I had to cut the belt loops to get the locks off.

Now, I wasn’t new to being a teen, and I knew the difference between good humored friendly teasing and mean pranks. After all, I had become proficient at teasing my sisters and brother.

With good-natured teasing there must be a close relationship and no desire to harm someone. With prankster’s, however, there is no relationship with or consideration for the other person. The bullies and prankster’s have fun and bolster their own image at another’s expense.

Being young looking and with longer hair, I could hear the guys in the back of the class whisper loud enough for me to hear “Gee, Toohey would make a good-looking girl-he’s as cute as his sister!”

This was the absolute lowest place I could go. The Greek God’s have outdone themselves. I could not wait to get home, where it was safe, and take my younger brother out to the desert hills behind our house to hike off my steam, and to roam far above the city to shoot jackrabbits and snakes–to just forget about it all.

One day each week we had a student mass. As we piled into the chapel, I could hear from the back of the chapel the sound of my name being whispered, followed by familiar chuckles. Who knew what the joke was this time.

When it came time for the homily, the priest (who was also my calculus teacher—yes, they required calculus in the junior year at this school–another story altogether.) turned on a cassette tape player and played the Simon and Garfunkel song  Bridge Over Troubled Water.

The priest gently reflected on the many ways we may experience “troubled waters” in our lives. This was 1970, and I think he had the tumultuous times in mind, but I could not think past my own immediate misery.

He drew our attention to the way the song points to how important it was to have unwavering and selfless friends who would lay down their own interests to help you pass over troubling times.

I thought to myself , ‘I have no one in my life like that’. If there had been some person or place or thing—something concrete that I could have turned to for help or comfort, I surely would have. I couldn’t tell my parents or my sisters how I was feeling–I thought that would just re-enforce my feelings of being inadequate–of being a sissy.

Then, the priest began to describe how Jesus is the ultimate friend, the one who would never fail, the one who the words of this song described perfectly. “I’m on your side—I will comfort you”. He described a person one would go to first, and not last, for help. At that moment I was introduced to the possibility of an ever-present friend who was on my side, who would not necessarily remove or still the troubled waters in life, but who by his presence provide a safe passageway through  troubling times.

Up to this time, my concept of Jesus was the ancient miracle worker who died so mankind could get to heaven. I wasn’t much interested in a worn out religious Icon. Yet, here, at a time I most needed a friend, I was presented with a different Jesus; Jesus the comforter, the counselor, the mercy-giver, the advocate, the defender, in a word, my friend.

As the priest continued to paint this picture of Jesus as a close and loyal friend—I began to lose my interest in what others thought or said about me, or even did to me. As the priest played again the song, I felt a surge of hope enter in, a feeling that I am not alone, and that I was never alone, and that I would never be alone.

I walked out of that mass seeing things differently, as if the grayness of the world had blown away.

I was not long in Reno after that. We moved only ten months later to Alabama, where my experience was completely opposite and I made some great friends and had a marvelous finish to my high school years. Yet, in that short time in Reno, I learned to get comfortable with my new friend, Jesus. As it has turned out, the more comfortable I am with him, the more comfortable I am with everything else.

And, so it has been for me all these years. This little story may appear small compared to the bullying and harm and deprivation many school children endure. Yet, it was my pain at the time, and I often wonder how I would have processed my remaining school years and beyond without the loving intervention of this priest and this song.

Yes, Jesus is my Lord, he is my God, but he is also my brother, and my friend. It is to all these aspects of Jesus I turn to regularly. But, when I am weary and feeling small, and friends can’t be found, it is to Jesus my friend that I turn, for he is on my side, and like a bridge over troubled waters, he lays himself down.

Kind Regards,

Bob