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His Mother was a Stranger
by Bernard Stack
Format: Paperback
Publication date: 5th June 2010
ISBN: 978-1-907179-66-2
Price: €16.00
Synopsis
Ben Cooper, a young boy in priest-ridden rural Ireland, was abused by the local ‘family priest’ and then cowered into eternal silence.
His mother, recently widowed and a product of the prevailing culture, fanatically addicted and heavily blinkered Catholic, designated him to God and at the age of twelve she handed him over to a congregation of preachers to “make a priest out of him”. Locked away in a seminary for two years he resisted their brainwashing and when they couldn’t break him they sent him home in disgrace. His mother murderously assaulted him for ‘daring not to become a priest’ and from then on and through his developing years he suffered constant denigration, humiliation and ridicule. Finally he could not take it any more and he broke out from this twilight life of sadness and shame and emigrated to war at seventeen.
This emotionally damaged young boy, without an identity of his own, faced into adolescence with scars no one could see. He didn’t see them himself as he had no sense of his own worth and it took time before he realised that he was bleeding in his mind. By then he had broken the rules, debunked the ethos, cast aside his mother’s sorrowful brand of religion, raised himself above his troubled origins and steered himself on the road to achievement.
Finding himself in the Holy Land, his irreverent impressions of where Jesus lived, worked and preached only helped to reinforce the emptiness and the meaninglessness of his religious upbringing and as he saw it, The Holy Land was anything but holy.
In a wild ride through the back streets of Eastern Europe and later in the carefree life of the Colonies, he enjoyed a liberated lifestyle with the native ladies and ‘sin’ retained its power to charm.
He witnessed atrocities, killings, official executions and wholesale savagery and while tracking Communist guerrillas in the jungles of Malaysia he was betrayed, ambushed, stripped of his possessions and left for dead. A timely rescue was followed by long months in recovery.
He met Julie, a radiantly attractive Anglo-Chinese nurse whose unconditional love and trust helped him through the slow process of internal healing and only when he was able to unlock his riddles, establish his true identity and deliver himself of his hang-ups, did he emerge a winner. Then he was able to accept her love when at last he found the emotional security that evaded him throughout his young life.
