new world
witness

Out of the tunnel, Toward Destiny
From a loving middle-class family to New York’s drug-infested streets, Frank Simmonds’ is a story of persistent pain, until a friendship broke through, bringing him into the arms of a Presence that gives life a meaning–and a certainty that makes him “grateful for all the suffering.”

by Christopher Bacich

“In every vocational companionship there are always people or moments in the lives of people to watch. ...Our friendship is defined by its purpose: helping us walk towards our destiny.” Fr. Giussani’s quote on the 1992 Easter Poster always comes to mind when I think of my friend of ten years, Frank Simmonds. An African American in his mid-50s, he is currently undergoing treatment for advanced-stage neuroendocrine cancer. His story and the way he lives his new circumstances are an awe-inspiring witness: “If one person learns the Truth by knowing me or my story, it is all worth it.”
His mother–a nurse happily married to a scientist and raising her family in the suburbs of New York–was diagnosed with cancer when Frank was 15 years old. When she passed away after much suffering, Frank turned against the God who did not save his devoted Catholic mother: “You failed! You’re not real! You’re a statue!” He explains, “When you lose the awareness of the relationship with God, you lose hope. It’s like walking in a dark tunnel with no light at the end–there’s no direction; nothing. I stopped caring about anything.” So he began to use marijuana but the THC high did not erase the sadness. He then had a serious accident, after which he was given morphine–and loved the feeling of escape it gave him. A friend told him that heroin was more or less the same thing as morphine, and thus began his downward spiral into drug addiction and crime. Drug abuse, robbery, drug dealing, and periodic stints in jail became his everyday routine for 15 years.
And the pain found new ways to reach him. In the beginning of his decline, the girlfriend with whom he had lived took their son and left him–“she said she needed someone more stable”–but one day, years later, he bumped into his now ten-year-old son on the street: “Daddy, I miss you! Come home!” In tattered and stinking clothes, humiliated, Frank apologized, trying to detach himself from the boy clinging to him. Insistent, his son responded, “No, Daddy, you’re important! I saw a picture of you in a store with the words, ‘WANTED,’ underneath.” Frank had robbed that store a few weeks earlier.

The poet. A decade later, Frank was arrested for selling narcotics to an undercover agent. The officer–whom Frank now says was sent from God–told him, “Frank, we’re not arresting you; we’re rescuing you.” After his conviction, but before his sentencing, he awoke one night in his jail cell, bursting with inspiration and desire. He wrote this poem: “I pray for a good future. God, please overlook my past./ Forgive my sins so I can find happiness at last./I am a lost sheep. Please lead me back to the herd./ Help me change my life, Lord; just bless me with Your Word./ I’m paying for my mistakes. Please, help me ease the pains./ Release me from the anxiety of my spirit being in chains./ I love you so much, God. Your Son dealt with pain and strife./ I’m thankful that Jesus, for our sins, had given up His life./ You’re so understanding, so willing to forgive./ Please cleanse my mind and body, so my spirit can live./ Reality has set in; I know I’ve done wrong./ My heart is filled with sorrow; it’s for Your forgiveness that I long./ I feel I’m unworthy to ask You for this blessing./ You know it took me very long to have to learn my lesson./ But I will not give up to Satan the life You’ve given me. /Please send the Holy Spirit as my guide, until I come to Thee.”
   The Catholic priest running Frank’s Bible study group shared his poem with other inmates. The fame of this poem gained Frank protectors in the jail, who called him “The Poet.” As Frank recalls, “This is how God began to show me He would not abandon me.” Everyone knew that the judge for Frank’s upcoming sentencing was famous for imposing maximum terms on drug dealers–in fact, the judge’s own son had died of a drug overdose. Frank felt his knees go weak when his lawyer told him that the maximum sentence for his crime was 15 years in the state prison. But at the sentencing,  the judge pulled out a small piece of paper and read Frank’s poem aloud to the court. He asked, “Mr. Simmonds, did you write this poem?” “Yes, Your Honor,” he answered. “Did you mean it?” “Yes, Your Honor.” “Then you will serve six months in jail and then I will place you into a drug rehabilitation center for no less than two years.”
                 
Old diatribe. After his successful rehab, Frank returned to his father, looking forward to a mutually longed-for reconciliation with the man he had abandoned 20 years earlier. Yet, after a short while, his father fell ill with cancer and died. After seven “straight” years, Frank returned to the streets. He speaks of it with images: “You think you can’t go any deeper; you think you’ve ‘hit rock bottom,’ and then a trap door opens and you fall further.”
Three terrible years later, in and out of rehab, he sat in the doorway of an abandoned building, plotting: “The next person I see, I’m going to rob!” But the next person was wearing black clothes and a collar. “Damn it! A priest,” he said to himself, as the man passed, silently. But then he turned, looked Frank square in the eye, and said, “God will not come and lie with you in the gutter, because He is holy. But if you ask Him to, He can pull you out of it!” This shocked him, and resurrected the old diatribe: “You don’t exist! There is no God! You’re a statue! And even if You do exist, why did You give me this terrible life! I don’t want it! I’m going to give it back to You!” In the   subway station just around the block, Frank decided to jump in front of the next train. Just then, for the second time in his life, something sprang forth from deep inside him: “But if You keep me from what I’m about to do, I’ll serve You for the rest of my life!” An inexplicable newness was granted to him. He says, “When my mother died, love died. But the moment after I uttered those words, I had an overwhelming experience of it. I called a drug-addict hotline I remembered, and within 15 minutes they sent me in a taxi to the hospital.” This happened during a time when he was trying to remain in another rehab program, working and living at a shelter. Hearing he was struggling, a friend he had met through a volunteer program, Rita, sent him a letter (with a bronze medal of Mary). He recalls sitting in a room with two drug dealers, as they were waiting together to be “graduated” from the rehab program. So while the others opened their letters from those in the drug world anxious for “business” to resume, Frank struggled to control the tears that were welling up while reading Rita’s kind words of faith and friendship. “This letter came right after my subway episode. I was astonished that, while I was still ‘pulling myself together’ and had nothing to offer, someone cared for me.” From then on, says Frank, “I put Rita above all other women, alongside my mom. Even though I knew I did not deserve it, I was so proud to know her! Before, I could not trust anyone. Mind you, more than once my street ‘friends’ had thrown me into a dumpster, thinking I had died due to some seizures I was having at the time. I was garbage to them, and to myself.”

Another direction.  Rita, recognizing his profound need, introduced him to her friends and her life in Communion and Liberation. “At first, I was really resistant,” Frank says. “I kept asking, ‘Who is this Giussani guy, anyway?” But he began to notice that these people and the books they read “described true things I had seen in my life.” He continues, “Truth speaks for itself; you don’t have to sell it. It touches places of desire in your heart and it is up to you to respond or not.” Then, “slowly, I began to look at myself differently, and this took me in another direction.” Meanwhile, Rita is quick to explain that she is no savior: “I myself was going through a personal crisis during part of that time. I knew that Frank was an exceptional person and since he never judges others, I was able to entrust myself to a friendship with him as he had done with me and my friends.” Their relationship and eventual marriage after five years unfolded over time, without expectation, as a gift from the Mystery.
And as “the new friends helped me to see humanity again,” Frank allowed the work of School of Community to inform all of his life, including in taking responsibility as leader of New York’s CL community for a while. He began to carry the cross during the annual Good Friday CL Way of the Cross over the Brooklyn Bridge years ago, considering this a tremendous honor: “I don’t carry the cross; He carries me and my life with It.”
Three months ago, Frank received the diagnosis of his own cancer. “All my life, I’ve been terrified of cancer. But when I heard the news, the very first thing I thought of was Fr. Giussani suffering from Parkinson’s and his affirmation from the Psalms: ‘The Lord is my strength and my song!’ The Lord is my song!” Speaking about how he faces his illness as a husband and father of two small boys, he says, “When you’re aware of who you are, that you belong to God, that you’re His, everything changes. God is the Lord of my life, not cancer. I belong to Him, not to this disease.” And he adds, “I understand now that my life is a gift and that it is a road. I used to hate my life; all I wanted to do was escape it. Now I understand it’s given to walk through because it leads to the Infinite. The only option for me is this walk. I am grateful for all the suffering, as it has a reason.”
I associate Frank with that Easter Poster of 1992 not only for Fr. Giussani’s quote but for the image of Marcellino, his child’s eyes. When Frank speaks, when he looks at you, it is with those same eyes of a child. And in front of them, I become a shepherd, gazing in wonder that such a child should be, stunned to silence that God has taken human flesh and called me to witness it.