Jesus, My Father, The CIA, and Me: A Memoir. . . of Sorts - Softcover

Ian Morgan Cron

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0849946107 ISBN 13: 9780849946103

Publisher: Zondervan, 2011

Synopsis

A touching memoir of life with an alcoholic father who secretly works with the CIA, a dark pilgrimage through the valley of depression and addiction, and finding a faith to redeem and a strength to forgive.

"This is a record of my life as I remember it—but more importantly, as I felt it."

At the age of sixteen, Ian Morgan Cron was told by his mother that his father, a motion picture executive, worked with the CIA in Europe. This astonishing revelation, coupled with his father's dark struggle with alcoholism, upended the world of a teenager struggling to become a man.

Born into a family of privilege and power, Ian's life is populated with colorful people and stories as his father takes the family on a wild roller-coaster ride through wealth and poverty and back again.

Decades later, as he faced his own personal demons, Ian realized that the only way to find peace was to voyage back through a painful childhood marked by extremes—privilege and poverty, violence and tenderness, truth and deceit—that he’d spent years trying to escape.

• A fast-paced, unique memoir about the power of forgiveness from the bestselling author of The Road Back to You
• Details his father’s struggle with alcohol and Cron’s own journey from addiction to twenty-three years of sobriety
• Encouragement to see God’s redemptive power through life’s struggles

In this surprisingly funny and forgiving memoir, Ian reminds us that no matter how different the pieces may be, in the end we are all cut from the same cloth, stitched by faith into an exquisite quilt of grace.

About this title

About the Author

Ian Morgan Cron is an Episcopal priest, speaker, retreat leader, and songwriter. He loves yoga, reading, the Rolling Stone's album Exile on Main Street, and complaining he has no spare time. Ian and his wife have three children, and a Portuguese Water Dog named Hobbes. They divide their year between homes in Vermont and Tennessee. His new book "Jesus, My Father, the CIA, and Me: A Memoir...Of Sorts" will be released by Thomas Nelson on June 7, 2011.

For speaking Inquiries:
 
Chaffee Management Group
(615) 236-1686
booking@chaffeemanagement.com

From the Back Cover

"Simultaneously redemptive and consoling with bright moments of humor...this story is chock-full of sacredness and hope. Cron is one of only a few spirituality authors who could articulate these themes as poignantly."

Publishers Weekly


"Ian Morgan Cron writes with astonishing energy and freshness; his metaphors stick fast in the imagination. This is neither a simple memoir of hurt endured, nor a tidy story of reconciliation and resolution. It is - rather like Augustine's Confessions - a testimony to the unfinished business of grace."

- The Most Rev. Dr. Rowan Williams - The Archbishop of Canterbury


"Ian Cron has the gift of making his human journey a parable for all of our journeys. Read this profound book and be well fed, and freed."


-Fr. Richard Rohr, author of Everything Belongs: The Gift of Contemplative Prayer


"Much tongue-in-cheek humor (and pain) in a fast-paced narrative...the author's English major shines through with an interesting, well-written plot of pain and redemption. Cron's realism and lack of bitterness are a refreshing blend. A powerful story of faith and forgiveness."

Kirkus Reviews


"Ian Cron is a brilliant writer. This is the kind of book that you don't just read. It reads you."

- Mark Batterson, author of In a Pit with a Lion on a Snowy Day: How to Survive and Thrive When Opportunity Roars


"Ian Cron walks us through the drama of his life, making us laugh and cry with him every step of the way. His memoir is filled with everything from boyhood stories of celebrating communion in the woods to chipmunks and blue jays, to poignant reflections about growing up with an alcoholic father. Ian's honesty, vulnerability, and humor will bring a measure of healing to all who go on the journey with him."

-Jim Wallis, President of Sojourners, and best-selling author of God's Politics, and Rediscovering Values


"I like stories. And this is a good one. Ian Cron has a ton to teach the world. And he's gentle as he does it. Here it is: The Gospel of Ian... not in the top four gospels, but it's pretty magnificent. And it's sure evidence that God continues to tell the extraordinary story of grace through the lives of ordinary people."

-Shane Claiborne, author and activist, and co-compiler of Common Prayer


"Simply the best memoir I have read in years. It is engaging, clever, heartbreaking, and God-drenched in all the right ways."

- Phyllis Tickle, author of The Great Emergence: How Christianity Is Changing and Why


"There are books you have to read because they are important for your work and books you want to read because they humanize you and deepen your soul. This is one of those want-to-read books, a portal that transports you into the struggles of childhood, the agony of alcoholism, the joys of coming of age, the terror and hope of parenthood, and the mystery of faith. Enthusiastically recommended."

-Brian McLaren, author of Naked Spirituality: A Life with God in 12 Simple Words


"Ian is an absolutely magnificent writer, and this memoir is a stunning work. With Miles Davis and squirrels and weddings and Red Bull and fawns and cliff diving--it's like he has this bottomless bucket of images and metaphors and they're all so spot-on brilliant. I literally had to put the book down several times because I began tearing up. What a gift!"

- Rob Bell, best-selling author of Love Wins and Velvet Elvis


"Ian Cron's story is a compelling one. Every turn of the page draws you closer to God."

-Craig Groeschel, author of The Christian Atheist



"At once touching and profound, poignant and full of grace, this is compelling writing of the highest order. I can't imagine anyone not being drawn deeper into the momentum of God's healing Spirit."

Jeremy Begbie, musician and Thomas A. Langford Research Professor of Theology, Duke University Divinity School; author, Resounding Truth: Christian Wisdom in the World of Music


"Ian Morgan Cron's daring writing lays bare the human journey with grace and wit. His confessional words combat despair and illuminate the path toward forgiveness and redemption we are all searching for."

- Makoto Fujimura, artist, author, and founder of International Arts Movement

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Jesus, My Father, the CIA, and Me

a memoir ... of sortsBy IAN MORGAN CRON

Thomas Nelson

Copyright © 2011 Ian Morgan Cron
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8499-4610-3

Chapter One

Sometimes we go on a search for something and do not know what we are looking for until we come again to our beginning. —Robert Lax

I was rummaging around for a pen in my mother's apartment when I found a grainy black-and-white photo stuck to the back of a drawer in her desk. It was taken of me as a toddler at the beach near our home in Greenwich, Connecticut. Stamped on the white, decoratively scalloped border is the year, 1962. That year, riots broke out when African-American student Phillip Meredith tried to enroll at the University of Mississippi, two members of the high-wire circus act the Flying Wallendas were killed when their seven-person pyramid collapsed during a performance in Detroit, and the United States and the Soviet Union came within a cat's whisker of incinerating each other when our military discovered that the Soviets had placed nuclear missiles ninety miles off the coast of Florida in Cuba. It was also the year in which an unsuspecting black bear named Yogi was volunteered by the air force to participate in an escape capsule test. He was ejected from a supersonic aircraft flying at 870 mph at an altitude of thirty-five thousand feet, landing safely on the earth seven minutes and forty-nine seconds later.

It was a stressful year for everybody.

The photo of me at the beach suggests that young children are more conscious of what's happening in their environment than developmental psychologists once believed. I knew that civilization was teetering on the precipice of annihilation, and I was ready.

I am sitting in a lifeboat.

The picture was taken with my mother's camera, a Kodak Brownie Hawkeye, a perfect cube of black plastic with a gray knob on the side that you wound to advance the film. To take a picture, you had to hunch over the camera, looking at your subject through a small square viewfinder. The owner's manual claimed the lens could take sharp pictures from "5 feet to infinity." That's a whole lot of camera for five dollars and fifty cents. Later, when my mother bought a new camera, the Brownie ended up in my toy chest. The knob made an awful grinding noise when I turned it because of the grit and sand lodged in the gears of the film spool. For a year it went with me everywhere.

My mother told me that if I removed the back of the camera and shook it hard enough, the countless memories hiding inside might tumble out. I gave it all I had, but not even one fell out. I would pay much more than five dollars and fifty cents to hold that Brownie in my hands again today.

So here I am in the photo, a towheaded two-year-old sitting in what I remember was a salmon-orange-stained lifeboat, waving and laughing at the photographer, whose identity is a mystery to me even now. Behind me, classic wood motorboats with elegant lines bob in the waves. I imagine men sauntering by off-camera in Ray-Bans and wearing short, skintight bathing suits only a Canadian could love.

When I first discovered the picture in my mother's desk, I was overwhelmed by the feeling that the boy in the boat was not waving and laughing at the person snapping the photo as much as he was frantically trying to get the attention of the man I am today. He was beckoning me to get into the boat.

* * *

"Home is a place you grow up wanting to leave, and grow old wanting to get back to." That's what John Edward Pearce said. But what if your childhood was a train wreck? What if your memories of home are more akin to The Shining than The Waltons? It doesn't matter. Home is not just a place; it's a knowing in the soul, a vague premonition of a far-off country that we know exists but haven't seen yet. Home is where we start, and whether we like it or not, our life is a race against time to come to terms with what it was or wasn't. The boy was calling me to join him on a voyage through the harrowing straits of memory. He was gambling that if we survived the passage, we might discover an ocean where the past would become the wind at our back rather than a driving gale to the nose of our boat. This book is the record of that expedition.

By now, the attentive reader is wondering what I mean when I say this book is "a memoir of sorts." I set out to write a conventional memoir, but after weeks of writing I discovered a vexing paradox: no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't tell the whole truth about my childhood by rigidly sticking to the facts.

John Irving describes the problem in his memoir, Trying to Save Piggy Sneed. "This is a memoir," he writes, "but please understand that (to any writer with a good imagination) all memoirs are false ... we can always imagine a better detail than the one we can remember. The correct detail is rarely, exactly, what happened, or what should have."

This work dances on the hyphen between memoir and autobiographical fiction. Many of the stories in this book are more than forty years old. They are told as "through a glass, darkly." They include approximations of conversations that actually occurred or ones I believe could have reasonably taken place, given my knowledge of the people and the events at the time.

In places I have conflated stories. I have compressed timelines. I borrowed from the memories and experiences of my siblings. I changed the names of people who did not sign up to be in my book. (For example, my childhood dog's real name was Tigger, but I changed it to Waldo. He was very private.)

Some accounts are based on stories I've heard family members tell, even though none of us can agree on the details. These differences in opinion about what happened to whom nearly lead to bloodshed when family stories are recounted at holiday meals.

Memoirists work with bones. Like paleontologists, we dig up enough of them to make intelligent guesses about what a creature looked like a million years ago. But here and there a femur or rib is missing, so by faith, with imagination, we fill in those gaps with details we believe are consistent with the nature and character of our upbringing.

So what's really true in this account of my life, you ask? If while reading you become uncertain about where the line between fact and fiction lies in my history, then welcome to my childhood. I felt that same uncertainty as a kid growing up, and even now as I try to relay it to you.

If you have a low tolerance for ambiguity, and these earnest attempts at transparency make you wonder if I'm to be trusted, then know that this book is true, either in fact or in essence, and most of the time—both.

This is a record of my life as I remember it—but more importantly, as I felt it.

Chapter Two

It doesn't matter who my father was; it matters who I remember he was. —Anne Sexton

A friend of Wild Bill Donovan's recruited me to work for the Company after the war," my father whispered.

I pulled my chair closer to the side of the grand four-poster bed where my father lay. As a boy, I'd hidden a hundred times under that imposing mahogany antique during games of hide-and-seek. Six weeks of intense radiation therapy on my father's face and throat had seared his vocal cords. The voice that during my childhood could make me cringe in fear was now thin and reedy. Tabs of white, pasty spittle gathered at the corners of his mouth, and he winced when he swallowed. A cup of ice chips sat on his bedside table, surrounded by a forest of amber-colored prescription bottles in a variety of sizes.

My fiancée, Anne, sat frozen in a Queen Anne armchair at the end of the bed, listening, her eyes darting back and forth between my father and me. She knew he never spoke with his children—or even with his wife, for that matter—about his work with the CIA. I had known since I was a teenager that he'd worked on and off in the clandestine intelligence services, but we were forbidden to talk about it. The Cron clan lived by the don't ask, don't tell rule long before the government employed the phrase to describe its policy toward gays and lesbians in the military. Our version was simple: don't ask dad about his work, past or present, and whatever you do, don't tell anyone about his drinking.

"My work at a motion-picture company gave your mother and me access to all the big society events in London," my father continued. "We were invited to parties at embassies where we rubbed elbows with foreign leaders, military brass, and ambassadors. We became good friends with people close to the royal family as well. I would listen to conversations and report back to the London station."

"Did Mom know?" I asked.

"Not until much later."

"How is that possible?"

"Wives in the fifties didn't ask questions," he said, smiling faintly.

I imagined my mother sitting in the living room of our home in London, addressing invitations to a garden party while my father plotted coups in the study. Not exactly Ozzie and Harriet.

"So all you did was listen in on important people's conversations and report back?" I asked.

My father arched one eyebrow and studied me as though he were performing an X-ray on my motive for asking the question. This was his trademark facial expression. When it was soft and accompanied by an impish grin, it was his way of expressing incredulity. If it was dark and seemed to be drilling a hole in your forehead, it meant he was trying to decide if you were toying with him. I think in this case, he wanted to know if my question was sardonic or just naive. It was definitely the latter.

"It was the Cold War. We were fighting to keep our country safe," he said.

"What does that mean exactly?"

He shrugged. "In the fifties and sixties, the Agency wasn't the monolithic bureaucracy it is today. We didn't have the kinds of constraints people in the field have now. In the early days we were more ..." He paused and smiled. "More independent."

As crazy as the story sounded, I knew my father was telling the truth, or at least his version of it. My father was describing our family's Camelot years. My two older brothers and older sister remembered those halcyon days much better than I did. They spoke with wistful reverence of the days when my father was managing director of Screen Gems, the television subsidiary of Columbia Pictures in the 1950s, in the United Kingdom and Europe, when they attended the finest private schools in London, when our home was filled with cooks, maids, and nannies, when the sky was blue and cloudless as far as the eye could see.

My boyhood was filled with the retelling of legendary stories from that era—like the night Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner spontaneously performed their famous sketch "The Two-Thousand-Year-Old Man" at a party in the living room of our home on Eaton Place, or the time Art Buchwald entertained a Thanksgiving party by standing on a chair and taking off his clothes to the song "The Stripper." There were tales of our next-door neighbor, the author James Jones, meandering over to our house in his dressing gown to sit in our kitchen and have coffee with my mother after he had finished writing for the day. On the title page of his masterpiece From Here to Eternity, he scrawled a personal note to my father beginning with the words, "To Jack, last of the great big spenders."

If you delved headfirst into the fifty-five-gallon cardboard moving barrel that stood next to the half-round eyebrow window vent in our attic, or if you were strong enough to heave open the big hidden drawer in the bottom of the lift-top blanket chest in the downstairs hall, you would find a treasure trove of pictures of my parents posing with celebrities—as well as glossy black-and-whites of my father with men my mother swears she never met. But it was the big green steamer trunk with brass rivets along its seams that contained the really cool stuff. It bore a Cunard Lines first-class sticker on its side, a reminder of a journey made between New York and London on the Queen Mary. Many of the photos were yellow, their corners crimped, leaving craggy, white fault lines that couldn't be repaired. The photos were filled with dashing men in black tie and women in shimmering satin evening gowns, sitting at round tables at Sardi's or 21 in New York or Maxim's in Paris. The tables were covered with white tablecloths with sharp pleats, strewn with champagne flutes and Scotch tumblers, packs of Chesterfields, and small, beaded cocktail purses with gold chains.

There were shots of my parents mugging gaily for the camera with stars like William Holden, Judy Garland, Donna Reed, Roger Moore, and Terry-Thomas. They all looked so sophisticated and elegant, but they were still willing to scrunch up like giddy kids on prom night so no one would be left out of the picture. There were photos of our home on Cadogan Square in Knightsbridge, snapshots taken of my parents on business trips to out-of-the-way European cities—business trips that my mother said she knew at the time had nothing to do with my father's job at Screen Gems—or of my sister being pushed by a uniformed nanny in a fancy pram with a blue canvas sun canopy and oversized white rubber wheels with wire spokes.

None of these photographs ever made it into well-organized photo albums, the tobacco-colored leather ones with the year the pictures were taken embossed on the bindings. Nor were they placed into sterling-silver frames and displayed on coffee tables or mantels, as happy reminiscences to be shared with guests. Shortly after I was born, our boom years went bust. My father's descent into the madness of alcoholism made riding a yo-yo look easy. One minute we were wealthy, the next we were broke, and years later we were reasonably comfortable again. When people ask about my childhood, I say it's shaped like a J. There were the really high years, the really low years, and finally, in the words of the prophet Joel, the years when God restored to us what the locusts had eaten—or at least some of what they'd eaten.

But for all of my years growing up, I was haunted by this vague feeling that we must have committed some terrible offense against the gods to have such a charmed life taken away from us. The pictures from those glamour years were orphaned souvenirs from a previous life, proof that once upon a time the Fates really did smile on us.

* * *

My father was handsome and always impeccably dressed. I still have a picture of him taken by the famous Bruno of Hollywood, the photo grapher who took the headshots of A-list actors in those days. My father looked like a movie star himself. He was a man's man, hard as Errol Flynn and charming as Cary Grant. Today, we'd say he was a cross between Daniel Craig and George Clooney. He wasn't tall, maybe 5'7", but he was barrel-chested, with jet-black hair, curly at the edges, and swarthy skin. My father was a force of nature. When he made an entrance into a crowded room, the balance of power shifted. Men would feel it first and look fleetingly in his direction, then feign disinterest before returning to conversation with women who couldn't take their eyes off him. My father couldn't walk through a door without colonizing the space.

The sad thing about the Bruno of Hollywood picture is that my father looks so happy, so hopeful, unaware that he was speeding into an ice storm with no chains on his tires. Every time I see that photo I'm reminded that we're all one decision away from disaster.

"I was trained to drink milk and then swish whiskey around my mouth before we went out for the night," my father continued. "They said the milk would make the smell of the Scotch stick to my breath."

"What was the point?" I asked.

"The Agency wanted people to think of me as the harmless, shallow American who drank too much. That way people wouldn't be as careful about what they said around me." He looked away. "One day I became the person I was pretending to be."

My heart was pounding. There was something I'd waited my entire life to hear him say, words that I was convinced could change everything, past, present, and future.

I could tell he knew what I was hoping for when his faced darkened. He fixed me with a gelid gaze. "That's what happened," he said, folding his arms across his chest.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Jesus, My Father, the CIA, and Meby IAN MORGAN CRON Copyright © 2011 by Ian Morgan Cron. Excerpted by permission of Thomas Nelson. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Edition details

• Publisher: Zondervan
• Publication date: 2011
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0849946107
• ISBN 13: 9780849946103
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 257