Episode Two: The Interview-Father Richard Murphy

Do you believe in ghosts? Father Richard Murphy does! In this longer interview, Richard tells of growing up in an Irish Catholic family surrounded by stories of ghosts, banshees and things that go bump in the night! His story is one of mystery, magic and how people can cross the veil to visit us from the other side.

Transcript

When she died,

We saw the angels come and take her,

As real as you and I are talking right now.

So there was always that sense that this is pretty normal.

Richard Murphy,

A semi-retired Episcopal priest.

I've been ordained now.

I just celebrated June 23rd.

I celebrated 30 years of ordination,

And which is pretty extraordinary.

And come from New England,

Born in 1945.

Actually,

Grew up Irish Catholic,

Which is a culture unto itself.

It's got its own mores,

Let me tell you.

I've had a number of jobs and opportunities in my life.

Probably one of the best,

One of the things I always highlight is that I got involved in the civil rights movement back in 65.

And so that makes it about 55 years that I've been involved in some sort of human rights or social justice work.

Inner city in New Haven,

Out here.

I've done work in Northern Ireland and the Balkans.

And then I came in the Episcopal Church back in 78,

And have been loving it ever since.

Grew up in a single parent family,

My mother and my sister and myself.

And it was kind of a poor upbringing,

Although at the time we didn't realize it was poor because everybody in the area was pretty much still was living the same thing.

I jokingly say,

Or half jokingly say,

That my mother's milk was made out of God,

The church,

Irish Republicanism,

And the Democratic Party.

But yeah,

The church is the center of our lives.

I grew up in an era when the priest and the nuns,

They were the most educated in the neighborhood.

And you got guidance and counsel from them from everything from almost daily living up to religious stuff.

The thing that I remember the most is I'm not one of those kids who went to Catholic schools that has bitter memories.

We had some wonderful sisters that taught us.

And given the neighborhood we lived in,

They were pretty sensitive to our whole socioeconomic and all that stuff,

As well as the priest.

So I was always very grateful.

Matter of fact,

When my mother had asked,

Had my father out of the house because of his drinking,

She never went to a lawyer.

She went to Father Flanagan.

And she said,

You won't go to the meetings,

You won't go to counseling,

What should I do?

And he said,

Throw them out.

She came home and said,

Father Flanagan says to leave.

He packed his bags and moved around the corner with his mother.

They call that the Irish divorce.

That was the end of that.

I always tell people that when I talk about the sisters and the area we grew up in,

It was during the 50s and McCarthy and communism and all that.

And these were the ladies that told us in grammar school,

Listen,

If you want to argue against the communists,

Make sure you read Marx first.

They were preaching social justice to us from the time we walked into the first grade.

These were just,

You know,

So we kind of grew up in that atmosphere.

The story I recently told you was just,

Oh,

I think my wife and I were in the other room,

I forget the exact dates.

She was visiting with our grandchildren in North Carolina and our granddaughter who was,

I think she just turned five.

They were playing some sort of a card game where you needed to guess what the cards were because they were face down.

And Walden,

Our granddaughter,

Kept winning.

And Carol asked her,

She said,

How is it that you're beating me all the time?

And just nonchalantly said,

Well,

I see through the cards,

Don't you?

Well,

You know,

Kids are born so unfiltered.

They don't have the stuff we adults have learned or whatever and had gotten the filters.

So the world around them is a much broader and wider world,

I think.

Again,

Going back to my first grade experience,

When I was six,

St.

Peter's Grammar School in New Haven,

Connecticut,

We had a principal,

Father Plude,

Who was just the neatest,

Kindest priest you could meet.

But he would drive sister Dominic Nutz,

Who was our first grade teacher,

Because,

Oh,

Every couple weeks or something,

He'd walk in with boxes of candy and good unannounced.

And she would just get a paw and he just started passing them out.

We'd have these parties.

And he loved us and we loved him.

Well,

One morning I was,

It was the second floor walk up apartment.

So I was sleeping in the same room as my mother and father.

And that's when they were together.

So I was five.

And it was one morning and I still remember around five o'clock,

I woke up and walked over to the window and on the lawn,

Saw a woman dressed as a nurse,

Lying as if she was sleeping,

Holding a bouquet of flowers.

So I tried to wake my mother up.

My father was out and I woke my mother up and she said,

Go back to bed,

Go back to bed.

You're dreaming,

You're dreaming.

And I'd say,

No,

Ma.

I said,

There's a lady out there in the lawn.

She's holding flowers.

She's asleep.

She's dressed like a nurse.

No,

No,

No.

You're imagining things go back to bed.

So finally,

Mother's right.

So I went back to bed.

I went to school that morning and found out that that's the moment Father Plue died that morning.

I,

And I saw,

I'm talking to you as if that happened five minutes ago.

I can,

I can see everything out that window.

My mother died at a young age.

She was 57.

I have seen her twice since then and convinced.

The first time was when I was a priest in Quincy,

Massachusetts.

We were in a rectory and my son and I were doing the dishes.

My wife,

Carol was out.

I think she was working on it.

Anyway,

We're doing the dishes and I felt somebody go by and I turned around and I saw the back of my mother and I knew the dress,

The hairstyle.

It was just like she ran through the room.

And the next time was right here in Santa Fe.

We had Jeremiah and Carrie and Walden before our grandson Desmond was born.

They were living with us for a year and they took over the guest room in the bathroom with the other end of the second floor.

And it was one day I was in our bathroom,

In our bedroom with my back to the door,

But I saw a reflection of somebody go by.

And I said to Carol,

I said,

I think my mother just ran by.

And she was a disbeliever.

I said,

No,

I said,

I think that was,

She said,

No,

No,

It was the wind or something.

Well,

Jeremiah came down the hall and he said,

Walden just ran out of the room looking to see who ran by.

Do you think she's checking up on you or do you think she just wants you to know she's around?

I think she's keeping an eye on us.

Carol's brother passed away two years ago,

I think,

And she feels that he fixed the refrigerator here because after,

He was in a rehab after hip surgery up in Springfield,

Vermont.

And he said they had a sub pump in the basement that was broken.

And he kept saying in the rehab center,

He said,

If I could only get back to the house for a half hour,

I can fix the sub pump.

And of course there was no way he could even get out of bed at that point.

Well,

He died suddenly without going into the whole story.

Well,

There was a tenant on the property who called one of Carol's sisters afterwards.

And she said,

You know,

It was the darndest thing.

She said,

I was walking around the property,

Just checking on stuff just last night.

And it was right after Eddie had died.

And he said,

All of a sudden I heard some noise in the basement in the cellar.

So I went downstairs and the sub pump was working.

So there's times like that.

So.

I can't remember,

It was more after the lady in white.

We had a number of people who would move in and out of the house growing up there,

Kind of like the latest immigrants.

And I had a nanny Kate upstairs who had been a nurse in World War II,

Who was bedridden.

And just the kind of sweetest lady you could imagine.

She was just a wonderful lady.

One morning,

My mother woke me up.

It was about seven o'clock and she said,

This is middle of the week.

She said,

We're going to church.

I said,

What do you mean we're going to church?

We're going to mass.

So I said,

What do you mean we're going to mass?

And you know,

Typical,

Typical mother that she was,

You're going to mass because I said,

You're going to mass.

So got dressed and we're walking church was just around the corner.

And I said,

Why are we going?

And she said,

Well,

You got to know.

She said,

Nanny Kate died about two o'clock this morning.

And I got sad and all that.

And she said,

Well,

I got to tell you.

She said,

Now,

I don't know if you're familiar with Irish folklore.

There's the Banshee.

And she said,

I heard the Banshee.

And she said,

We knew someone was going to die in a house last night because I heard the Banshee.

And so I said,

Okay,

Accepted it.

And she said,

When she said,

She said,

Your Aunt May,

Who lived in a house with us downstairs,

She and our nanny lived upstairs,

And third floor said that when she died,

We saw the angels come and take her.

As real as you and I are talking right now.

So there was always that sense that this is pretty normal.

I've been in Ireland where I've got a cousin who's very well educated,

Had a professional career before she was married,

And went around at the family farm one day.

And this was just a few years ago,

My sister and myself.

And my cousin said,

Well,

Before you leave,

There's a hill on the other side that you can see as you drive down the road.

She said,

Be sure you go over there and then go buy it when you leave.

And I said,

What's so important about this?

She said,

Well,

That's where the fairies live.

As real,

I mean,

As normal as you and I would talk about having a glass of water.

Yeah,

That's where they are.

And you got to make sure you drive by.

Did you drive by?

Did you visit?

Yeah,

I guess that's part of the way we're brought up.

I think those Irish monks in the seventh,

Sixth,

And seventh and eighth centuries believed in that thin veil,

That liminal space.

And that's my view of heaven,

Is that it's around us,

That it's,

We just,

We don't see it.

So we have these scenes like the whisper,

Seeing my mother or so.

I think they just stepped through the veil,

Or that we're looking through the veil.

I think that the idea of a heaven up there and a help,

I don't believe in my heresy as a priest.

I don't think that exists.

It never made sense to me.

But I think quite strongly that the kingdom is here and now,

And we just don't realize it most of the time.

I love Discover Magazine,

And I've gotten it since I was like 13 years old.

And every year at the end in December,

Their December issue is the top science stories of the year.

And I remember a few years ago,

This little blurb that said,

Scientists believe that there is another universe,

But it's just millimeters away from ours,

And we just can't sense it.

And so maybe that's where those wisps and our loved ones are.

Yeah,

Carol had an uncle who died several years ago,

Lived by himself up in Vermont,

And had a nurse taking care of him in his last few weeks.

And she said periodically,

She checked in that if he rolled over on his face when he was asleep,

She'd make sure that he was set up right.

And she said the last time he did it,

She did it was she walked in there and sure enough,

He was on his face.

She turned him over,

He breathed his last,

And the door to the bedroom closed.

And there was no draft,

There were no open windows,

There was nothing downstairs.

And I think he just stepped through.

And all those scientists that are talking about millimeters away,

Absolutely.

Did any of these experiences or did they change how you viewed the world or how you viewed what's around us?

Or have you just always felt surrounded by that kind of mystical world?

That's a great question.

I think when I look back on it now,

That it was always there.

I mean,

There was always an awareness,

A consciousness,

However you want to say it,

Especially my mother's part.

Ireland was for us just being,

And we never went back to visit Ireland,

We went home.

This here,

The states are transitory,

So that consciousness of that culture was always there.

But I'll say this,

That I wasn't aware of it because it was so much a part of us growing up.

I never thought of it and I would think now that you asked that question,

It kind of triggered,

I got away from that kind of belief in the 60s with a lot of,

Religion until I went,

Well,

That's a whole other story.

But I was in the Roman Catholic seminary for five years.

And in 1970,

I made the decision to leave.

The Pope and I just disagreed on a few things and he wouldn't see it my way and I wouldn't see it his way.

So,

Celibacy,

Divorce,

Birth control,

The little things.

So when I left,

I got a job as a probation officer.

And I did that for 14 years on the North Shore of Boston.

And if anything,

Those years jaded me into a cynicism where I wouldn't even conceive of some of the conversation that you and I were talking.

I remember there was a case once where the chief of detectives came to me and he said it the night before they'd had a psychic walk into the station regarding a kidnapping that had happened of a five-year-old in Boston.

And he came in and we were talking about it and he says how much he disbelieved it.

And he said,

The first thing you think of is that this guy's a kidnapper and he's trying to cover his own tracks.

And he said,

Sure enough to just to placate him,

We put him in a cruiser and drove him around.

He said,

He found parts of the city I never knew were here.

And they found the house,

But the baby,

He says the baby's gone by about an hour.

And they got the baby,

I think,

A few weeks later.

But anyway,

It was more cynical.

And it's since reentering my priesthood and reentering my spirituality that I have probably,

I would say the best way to look at it is I grew back into it if it was ever there.

I didn't,

Just on a personal note,

Realize how hard noticed I was when I went to seminary when a couple of things happened.

And one was when we had to take a special tutorial course and had to have a paper done on a theological perspective every week for the first semester.

And the head of the program came to me one day and said,

Right early in the program,

And said,

There's two classmates that you have that are former English teachers.

And I've talked to them,

You're going to need to sit with them and learn some writing skills.

And I said,

What do you mean writing skills?

I've been writing reports and stuff for 14 years.

He said,

You've got to see them.

First one I sat down with,

I said,

Well,

What's the problem?

She said,

The problem is your reports are like incident reports.

You don't report Augustine as the subject.

And she said,

I thought I was in a traffic accident when I read your last paper.

So I quickly learned.

And I mean,

And then the other thing was,

Which was really a turning point for me,

And definitely a turning point in my spirituality,

Was I went into alcohol rehab my first year in seminary.

And that was 1984 and I've been sober ever since,

Thank God.

But anyway,

I was pretty much for redneck when I walked into the seminary,

Without really thinking,

Because I came from a world that was cops are conservative,

Parole officers are probation officers are all conservative.

Anyway,

We had a gay group on campus.

And I was what you would consider homophobic when I first started.

And when I got back on the campus,

I was never greeted so lovingly as I was by the gay caucus,

By members of the gay caucus.

My counselor was a Franciscan monk on the campus who turned out to be gay.

He's an alcohol counselor.

And they just surrounded me with support.

I did run down the CLO,

The campus with me,

Towards me sometimes,

Just literature,

Making sure I was getting the meetings and all this kind of stuff.

So finally,

Carol and I were walking on the campus one day and somebody had just come up and was saying,

Hi,

How you doing?

How's it going?

And all that.

And I said to Carol,

I said,

I'm the last person on this campus they should be talking to.

They have no idea.

And she says,

Oh no.

She said,

You're the one who has no idea.

And I said,

What are you talking about?

And she said,

They've suffered like you have.

And then she said,

They know you're suffering a lot more than most people in this community.

And the community was wonderful.

It was great support when I got back.

But that was a turning point to me in terms of personal relationships.

And I would say it was one of those pivotal moments.

And so there's a lot of the consciousness that probably was always there that came back.

So those moments,

You get kind of in the pants when you need it.

It just reminds me of those times when you very unexpectedly and very like a bolt from the blue,

You get grace.

Grace has shown you.

Exactly.

That was that grace-filled moment.

But it opened up new friendships.

It opened up a deepening of friendships that I've treasured ever since.

But that was also an awakening of God moving in my life.

And then when I talk about these moments I've had,

The woman in white and so on and so forth,

To me,

They're perfectly normal.

And so that attitude was always around.

That's so interesting.

Have you ever felt,

Being a witness to that grace,

How the grace moves in your life,

I think you can either stand back and look at it with awe and just appreciation.

Or you can think or internalize,

Wow,

I kind of resent this.

I don't really have any control over my life.

Am I really the agent?

Do I have any agency in my life?

Did you ever experience that?

Oh,

Absolutely.

The greatest example I always talked to was the day I was ordained a priest and was at the parish I was working at.

I was an assistant curate on Cape Cod.

And so it was on a Saturday and Sunday I was going to celebrate my first Eucharist.

And by the grace of God,

The priest that showed up to just be with me,

We had an 80-year-old retired priest in the parish who came in to this sacristy and said,

I just want to be with you for your first Eucharist.

And I looked,

He was just one of these real pastoral Pete types I talk about.

And I said to him,

Oh,

Rob,

I said,

Thank God you're here.

I said,

I haven't even talked to my wife about this or my son.

I haven't talked to Ray who's the director,

But I need to talk to somebody and I can talk to you.

And he looked at me and I was really shook up.

And he said,

What's the problem?

And I said,

Yesterday,

When the hands were laid on my head,

I wanted to run out of the church.

He says,

Oh,

It worked.

I said,

I wanted to get as far away from there as possible.

He said,

That's what's supposed to happen.

And I mean it,

I was terrified.

So yeah,

I've had those wake up calls.

I think what helps with that now that we're talking about it in early stages of recovery,

Like especially if you've been in rehab and rehab for me was just a transforming experience,

Obviously you're on what they call a pink cloud.

When you come out,

You are just,

It's like,

It's almost like LSD without the tabs.

You know,

You're just feeling euphoric.

You're not hallucinating,

Although you have a couple of those moments because of the chemical changes,

But you're very euphoric.

And what I remember was when I first got back,

One of the cravings I had was for chocolate soda.

And we had a bodega across the street,

Seven of us in New York city.

I'd go over there two,

Three times a day for a bottle.

I just had to have a chocolate soda.

So one day there was a guy that stopped me in the lobby when I was coming back with my chocolate soda,

Was guzzling it down and he was laughing.

And I said,

What's so funny?

He said,

You're in recovery,

Aren't you?

And I said,

Yeah.

He says,

Brand new in recovery,

Right?

And I said,

Yeah.

And he said,

You're going to drink chocolate soda for the next six months.

And then you're going to stop drinking chocolate soda because your blood cells are craving for sugar.

Do you know it was six months to the day,

I haven't had a chocolate soda since then.

It's been 36 years.

And so I think that's when all of a sudden the pink cloud it's at that point and you've kind of drifted into the routine,

The one day at a time that I like to tell people.

And so I've never had any resentment about it.

I've always been thankful,

At least in my case.

But I think,

Well,

I know I said that God's been with me sometime and especially in that pink cloud time,

Because it does.

And as a friend of mine said,

Who's ordained a year ahead of me,

She said,

The challenge for vocation is going to come in when your job becomes routine.

And it's when your recovery becomes routine when everything else.

And if you allow it to work and are guided with a spiritual focus,

It's okay.

Those resentments don't happen.

As a panentheist,

Of course,

I see that God is in the chocolate soda.

I'm a panentheist too.

If I told that to my bishop,

He'd probably run me out of town.

But I believe in the cosmic Christ that we're surrounded by a transcendence that's not physical,

Yet loving,

And is both,

As Paul said,

Already not yet.

But I very much believe that God may not be in the chocolate soda,

But that chocolate soda somehow is an expression.

Everything around us is an expression of God's creation.

This has been episode two of Bite Size Blessings,

The podcast all about the magic and spirit that surrounds us,

If only we open our eyes to it.

And whether you choose to listen to our Bite Size Offerings for that five minutes of freedom in your day,

Or the longer interviews,

We're grateful you're here.

I need to thank the Reverend Dr.

Richard Murphy for sharing his story today,

As well as the creators of the music used,

Sasha End,

Winnie the Moog,

And Raphael Crux.

Thank you for listening,

And here's my one request.

Be like Richard,

And live into the questions,

And believe in the magic in the world.

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