“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.

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.

THE group of first-graders receiv-ing the eucharist for the first time gathered in the narthex of the church.

“Remember,” Dickie Carter whis­pered as we were being lined up: “don’t let the Eucharist fall off your tongue or we’re all dead.” He drag­ged his index finger across his throat. This aide-memoire did not help to soothe an already quaking queue of eight-year-olds.

The procession commenced when the organ music began, and the soloist started singing “Ave Maria” with a vibrato that could have been picked up on police radar. First down the nave came the thurifers carrying brass thuribles on chains. They swung them forward and back, smoke from smouldering myrrh incense pouring from their vents. After them came ministers with lighted candles, between them an acolyte bearing a cross with the broken body of Jesus still on it.

Behind them was the lector, who carried the book of the gospels high above his head. Fr Durcan and the other parish priests and deacons came next, and we followed in our school uniforms and white dresses. Then came Bishop Dalrymple in his blue and silver-embroidered cope and mitre, carrying his crosier, turning side to side, repeatedly making the sign of the cross over the congregation. As he passed, men and women — young and old, rich and poor — bowed as they received the blessing.

I remember nothing of the mass itself — neither the prayers nor the homily. I remember only the picture of the Virgin Mary draped in her blue robe, emblazoned with gold stars. As we processed, her beatific smile and warm, brown eyes made my throat tighten, and I began to cry — I wasn’t sure why. 1 tried to wipe away my tears.

Dickie looked around us as if afraid my crying could somehow get him into trouble. “Why are you bawling?” he whispered.

“Shut up,” I said, wiping my runny nose with my sleeve.

The closer we came to the altar and Bishop, the more difficult it be­came for me not to lose it com­pletely. I looked at the aisle where my family was sitting, and saw that my father was missing. I wasn’t sur­prised. The magician David Copper­field couldn’t compete with my dad when it came to putting on dis­appearing acts.

“I’m just going to pop in here to buy a pack of cigarettes. I won’t be a minute,” he would say to us, and then disappear into a restaurant that, lo and behold, had a bar.

It wasn’t until I was within four or five kids of the Bishop that I could really see his face. He was cor­pulent, his cheeks and jowls glazed with perspiration, and he was lightly wheezing, like Kip Merri­­weather, a kid in our class who had asthma.

The Bishop looked like he would have paid a hundred bucks to get out of his clericals, go home, put his tired feet up, pop open a Pabst Blue Ribbon, and watch a Notre Dame basketball game. As I stepped for­ward and stood before him, he saw the tears running down my face. For an instant, his pasty white face softened, his eyes sparkled just like the Virgin Mary’s, and the corners of his mouth turned upward in a smile of deep knowing.

I suspect that he knew that I was one of those strange kids who “got it” — who was hungry and thirsty for God, who longed to be full. Maybe he’d been one of those weird kids, too. He placed the Host on my tongue, and put his hand on the side of my face, his fat thumb briefly massaging my temple, a gesture of blessing I did not see him offer to any of my other classmates. And I fell into God.

I have spent 40 years living the result of that moment.

I am told that, in years past, when a blizzard hit the Great Plains, farmers would sometimes tie one end of a rope to the back door of their farmhouses and the other around their waists as a precaution before going out to the barn to tend to the animals. They knew the stories of farmers who, on the way back to the house from the barn in a whiteout, had become disoriented and couldn’t find their way back home. They would wander off, and their half-frozen bodies wouldn’t be found until spring, when the snow melted.

That day, Bishop Dalrymple, sweat dripping from the end of his bulbous nose, tied a rope around my waist that was long and endur­ing. How did he know the number of times that I would stretch that rope to its breaking point, or how often I would drift on to the plains in a whiteout and need a way to find my way back home?

THIS is the first time I will be at the altar as a celebrant. I pull the chasuble over my head, and adjust it so that it sits evenly on my shoulders. It is Pentecost; so the chasuble is red, and the gold satin lining makes it heavy. On the front there is an intricately embroidered dove fashioned from silver thread soaring like a rocket out of orange and red tongues of fire. It’s no wonder the vestment makes me feel so warm.

I look in the mirror and pick a piece of lint off my shoulder. I don’t recognise myself. I am someone else, but altogether me at the same time. “It’s all come down to this, hasn’t it?” I say to my reflection. I nod. This is the life to which God has asked me to say yes.

The eucharist has followed me through life like my own shadow. It is the string on which the pearls of my life’s experiences, burnished white and dirty grey, have been strung. I still feel out of true. Is there any other way for us to be in the world?

Yet when I kneel with palms upturned to receive the bread and then drink deep from the chalice, I feel the crooked made straight, the uneven made smooth, and the torn, patched. “Man is born broken. He lives by mending. The grace of God is glue,” Eugene O’Neill wrote. This is my glue.

God is present in that bread, but he is not alone. Beside him is the unrelenting grief of the parents seated in the last pew whose son was killed in Iraq last year. Five rows in front of them is the young couple with hollow eyes who learned on Friday that their in vitro procedure failed again. Present in that Host is the scripture-reader’s struggle to accept his gay son.

We stretch forth our hands and take not only God, but a portion of each other’s burdens as well. Life is hard enough. No one should eat alone.

This is an edited extract of Jesus, My Father, the CIA, and Me: a memoir of sorts by Ian Morgan Cron (Thomas Nelson, £9.99 (CT Bookshop £8.99); 978-0-8499-4610-3), and appears here by kind permission.