The Trinity (2 page)

He was born the youngest of seven kids, five girls and two boys all about two years apart, and raised in a small town in Northern Minnesota. His sole brother was the oldest sibling and he had left for work in Minneapolis by the time Alexander was four, leaving Alexander essentially the only boy in a house full of women.

His father was the town’s high school history teacher and football coach. His father was a large and outspoken man with broad shoulders, large hands, and an even larger head with a Marine Corps style haircut. He was very masculine and a contrast to his devoutly Catholic and thin and timid wife. He was privately atheist, despite going with the family to Mass every Sunday.

Alex’s mother was a homemaker of the most obedient kind, surreptitiously devoted to her husband but more devoted to her church. Rosary beads, crucifixes, and images of Mary and Jesus could be found throughout the house, and she was constantly seen kneeling, especially after a confrontation with her husband, who had despised her by the time Alex was born. But he would never leave her, despite the malaise that crept into their marriage; he had too much comfort in his lifestyle, being a big man in a small town. His peers assumed his family life was perfect.

Alex took after his mother much more than he did his father throughout his childhood.

He was born prematurely, was tiny as an infant and child and had many grave childhood illnesses: mumps at three, measles at five, a near-fatal flu at seven, and chicken pox at eight. With each illness, his mother would pray constantly and convince the local priest to come and pray over him. After each recovery, his mother would tell Alex that God had saved him, and that He had set a special purpose for his life. Because of all the religious imagery his mother surrounded him with, young Alexander Crowley saw his childhood as some sort of an amazing divine drama. He thought of himself as a knight of God, battling disease and pestilence and evil in the world. He developed an early love for Mass and Sunday school, and would join his mother in prayer at home whenever the mood struck her. He read scripture often, especially the canonical Gospels. He was fascinated by the miracle of the loaves and fishes, the walking on the water, the temptation in the wilderness, the cross being carried to Calvary, the brutal crucifixion and the miraculous resurrection. But he was more interested in the Catholic rites than he was scripture; he had a fascination with the sacraments and the lifestyle of their parish priest.

Because of his frailty and his interest in religion, Alex had his mother’s undivided attention. She all but ignored her daughters and husband.

His father, sensing and fearing an effeminate nature in the boy, tried pushing sports and hunting and fishing and martial arts training on Alex. He wasn’t interested.  He would remain small until he reached college, and he possessed no athletic ability whatsoever. In fact, his father was embarrassed when he watched Alex try to play with other boys. Alex felt hunting was barbaric and fishing very boring. Martial arts was tolerable, as it gave him time alone with his father, time his father never normally provided. But he much preferred spending time indoors with his mother, reading the Bible or almost anything non-fiction or church related, and going to Mass and different church functions. His childhood ran the full gamut of Catholicism; he took all the catechism classes he could and was an altar boy throughout junior and senior high school. The Roman Catholic population in his town was small, and no parochial school existed. Alex would have preferred a parochial school to the public high school where he was taunted and left friendless, despite his father’s imposing and respected presence.

Early in Alex’s senior year of high school, his father died of a heart attack while coaching a football game. As his father fell on the field, Alex and his mother, who were sitting in the stands, didn’t bother to run to him. They sat peacefully and watched as paramedics ran to his side. They didn’t bother to rise until the ambulance drove him away. This cinched Alex’s future (and his desire since childhood): he would become a priest with his mother’s strong approval. The vows of celibacy would be no problem, as he had no interest in girls or sex, and felt guilty when any sinful thought crossed his mind. His heart was a bit lighter when his father passed away; he had been wishing for years to be rid of him. He felt a small amount of shame at the glee he experienced upon his father’s demise, and prayed at length to absolve himself. It was to no avail. The selfish joy he felt upon his father’s death would be his first insight into his innately cruel and selfish nature.

He completed his undergraduate degree in theology at Bemidji State and attended seminary at a small Catholic university in southern Minnesota. He was ordained in the tearful presence of his mother and in the indifferent presence of his siblings.

His first work as a clergyman was as a roving assistant priest for rural parishes in North Dakota, saying several Masses from town to town on Saturdays and Sundays, as none of the parishes had enough people to support a fulltime priest.

After three years in North Dakota, Houston became available. He welcomed the opportunity to leave the Midwest and he welcomed the challenge of serving in the inner city. He rekindled his childhood fantasy life. He pictured himself as a knight of God, as a sort of divine superhero to rid Houston’s Fifth Ward of poverty, drug abuse, rampant crime and faithlessness. He failed miserably.

Shortly after his arrival in Houston, Father Crowley’s mother developed breast cancer. It spread quickly to her lymphatic system and into her lungs. She passed away within six months, without giving Alex a chance to come home and say goodbye.

Alex was devastated. He was angry with God and angrier still with his remaining family.

He blamed his sisters and brother for their mother’s quick demise. He felt that if they had been more attentive in his absence and had taken better care of her, she would have lived, or at the very least, the cancer would have been spotted sooner. Only two sisters actually remained in their hometown, and they had husbands and children of their own. They weren’t particularly close to their mother, especially after being reared in the shadow of her beloved Alex.

  Father Crowley returned for the last time to Minnesota to deal with his mother’s funeral and all the other family business that comes with the death of a last remaining parent. Things were tense between him and his siblings, especially since Alex was named executor of the will, even though he was the youngest child. There wasn’t much in the way of finances to settle. The house was sold at a bargain just to unload it, and the monies were equally divided between Alex and his brother and sisters.

After the family business had been settled, Alex returned to Houston and remained solely in Texas for the next several years, communicating with his family only cordially on holidays and after a few years not at all. They never shared his religious zeal, and they felt he looked down upon them. He was fairly self-absorbed as a young priest, and despite the implied forgiving nature of a clergyman, he held a grudge against his family and vowed he would never return to Minnesota, not even in the event of another family member’s death.

Despite his pride, Father Crowley felt adrift and empty without a family to come home to.

His faith began to ebb as he neared the age of forty when he realized that after years of frustration, he was a lousy priest.

From his days of assistant priest to head of his own church, he had inspired no one. His Masses were listless and eventually sparse; only the devout would remain, staring hopefully from the pews.

He couldn’t speak well; he stuttered and rambled and the eyes in the pews stared everywhere but at him. He prayed and prayed in the early going, praying for the gift of an able tongue, but God didn’t intervene. Crowley blamed his parishioners for his poor preaching skills. He felt they were too dimwitted to understand him, and after a time, he blamed their ignorance on their race. If they weren’t black, he thought, then maybe his preaching would be more effective and their attention would be more rapt.

He had very little patience for confessions; the paltry sins of the pious irritated him, and the confessed debauchery of the casual believers sickened and sometimes excited him. Weddings and the required pre-counseling he considered a waste of time; he had seen more divorces than marriages, and after a time, he didn’t wish to see his parishioners procreate.

And then came the visions.

At first, he saw them as white specks of twinkling light that came only at night as he tried to pray for an able tongue and to be removed from the parish that had become so loathsome. The specks of twinkling white light appeared behind his eyelids and on the ceiling. He thought the lights shrouded small faces, but he couldn’t be sure.

He was afraid the lights were demonic, but he was sure they were angels, angels sent to guide him through this difficult period of his life. They began to appear more frequently as he became more disgruntled with his parish, and eventually he could see them throughout the ceiling of his chapel, as though they were sneering at the congregation. He took it as a sign from a god, but from which god, he couldn’t be sure. He took the visions as a signal that it was time to turn his attention somewhere else. The zeal he had once had for the Church was gone forever. He became interested in the origin of his visions, and visited New Age bookshops after exhausting his own library on the subject of angels and apparitions. He decided he was again special, just as he felt special as a child when the angels and God had saved him from all those awful illnesses.

He had been a fan of history since his boyhood days in Minnesota, partially due to his father’s role as the high school history teacher. He developed a fascination with World War II after it became apparent to him in Houston that he had missed his true calling and that he wasn’t cut from a priestly cloth. He had a special interest in the spectacular rise of Hitler and the Third Reich. Something, somehow, made sense to him. He read
Mein Kampf
in a relatively brief period, hiding the book in the rectory in case someone should stumble upon it. He began to understand Hitler’s notion of the superiority of the white race—his frustrations in his own church made that apparent. And the struggle Hitler described stirred something in his soul; he could identify with the isolation Hitler felt as a young man as a struggling artist in a hostile Vienna. Crowley felt he was a struggling priest in a hostile church, hostile because of the ethnicity of the congregation.

He felt the world would be a better place if Hitler had been successful, and as he became more infatuated with Hitler, he thought of Jesus less and less and eventually stopped personal prayer—a very large part of a clergyman’s life—altogether.

He began performing his Masses by rote, mumbling the prayers and offering communion robotically, without passion. After a time, his homilies rarely mentioned the Father, the Son, or the Holy Ghost, and they rarely referred to scripture. He had also stopped reading the Bible altogether, devoting his readings to anything germane to the separation of the races.

He even tried to find a local white supremacist group in the Houston area. He found a few, but their simplistic, amateurish meetings in far-western suburban Houston basements bored him; he wanted something more spiritual, more fulfilling. He began exploring Hitler’s interest in Norse mythology and the occult, and slowly, after the passage of years, he discovered a whole new set of gods to replace the one he had discarded. He was sure the twinkling lights were angels sent from the gods of the north, the same gods revered by Hitler and the Nazis.

With all the social ills in America, the crime and poverty in his part of Houston, problems he blamed on the inferiority of the blacks in his neighborhood, he assumed Christianity and its apparent ineffectiveness and pacifist nature had failed America. He decided covertly and solitarily to join the ranks of another side. He read the ancient
Poetic Edda,
the definitive book of Norse mythology, and he tried to become intimate with all of its deities, male and female: Thor, Njord, Frigg, Freya, Freyr, Tyr, Heimdall, Bakur, Loki, and especially Odin, the supreme Norse god and the focus of all of Crowley’s new devotion. He made the leap from Christianity, and Crowley adopted his own brand of religion and supremacist beliefs, molded to contour his feelings.

After many complaints stretching the span of two years, the Houston diocese censured Crowley. He was given two options: resign or accept service in the military, which was in dire need of priests. More than a decade of priesthood and an advanced degree in theology left him unsuitable for other employment. The world offered him no other options; he couldn’t go home again. The thought of the military excited him; he craved structure, and if he had to perform Mass, he might as well do it where he would find fewer of those minorities that irritated him so much. He chose the Navy, hoping to influence a young Caucasian sailor or two with his new theology, and the travel opportunities seemed better. He was thrilled when he was ultimately assigned to a small base in Scotland, with Europe lying at his doorstep, the ancient home of his newly beloved Norse gods a short flight away.