Walking with Father on the Trail

By Richard Mahan

Through a very strange set of circumstances, my family and I found ourselves walking down a trail. This trail led us to a wonderful experience that brought us closer to God than we could ever imagine. That trail was long and hard, literally decades of unexplainable illnesses and hardships that brought us an understanding of ourselves and how we fit into His plan. Those hardships made us believe that we were living in hell on earth. We lost hope, which caused us to commit some costly sins and mistakes in our lives. But then something miraculous happened that changed us forever. I would like to say that we found God, but that is not the way it happened. God found us. One sunny day, my dad was walking on a hike-and-bike trail near my home, and something happened. God began walking with Dad on that trail, talking with him while they walked. Those conversations were kept in a journal that my dad kept. From that journal, we wrote a book about those experiences so that everyone could learn what we learned.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Christian Faith Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Jan 13, 2021
• ISBN: 9781098043094

Book preview

Mom’s Early Years

Richard Mahan Jr.

Mom died in 1946. She was eight months old when she crossed over for the first time. She died from spinal meningitis. In her words, she said she would never forget what happened after her death. She said it wasn’t the dying part that was so extraordinary, it was the experience after she died. Sixty-seven years later, she remembered the feeling of what happened next vividly.

After dying, the next thing she remembers is sitting on Jesus lap, being cradled in His arms. She still remembered His touch, smell, warmth, and love that emanated from Him as she sat in His lap. His garments were beautiful. The white robe and sash, it felt like silk, but at the same time it was soft and not slippery. He was totally charismatic; anyone would be drawn to Him. She wanted to stay there forever; she never wanted to leave. But Jesus gently said, I want you to go back. You will have a lot of pain, but I want you to go back.

The next thing she knew, she was convulsing on a table. The table was steel and very cold, and there was a crisp white sheet that covered her face. She was in the morgue! A morgue attendant in the far corner of the room saw the sheet shaking. As it slipped off her body, she saw the attendant shaking just as badly as the sheet covering her. She was then rushed back into the pediatric unit. Years later, my grandmother told her that her tiny body was so twisted by the meningitis that her feet were bent backwards almost touching her head. And yet despite the twisted up body, she scooted around in the hospital crib until she faced the cross of Jesus mounted on the wall.

Fast forward a few years to when Mom was about five years old. Her childhood was not a very peachy one, in her words. She had two baby brothers that died in infancy before she was five, one at home. She remembered her mother screaming one morning and telling her to go get the doctor who lived next door. She stood in the hallway as the little lifeless body was wrapped in a baby blanket and taken out of the home. Both of the baby brothers were buried at Oak Hill Cemetery, in a special section reserved for infants.

A little while later, her maternal grandfather was killed in a car accident on Christmas Day when she was five years old. The whole family—grandmother, aunts, uncles, mother, father, and her brother and sister—were waiting for him to come home so they could eat Christmas dinner and open presents. Instead, the police came to tell all of them that he was dead. Her grandfather, called Papa by the grandchildren, had been a carpenter. A customer wanted some minor problem with her kitchen cabinets fixed right now, so he went to make the repairs. A train hit his station wagon. He had a large wooden tool box that he carried his tools in while he worked. The wooden box flew forward from the impact of the crash and struck him in the head, killing him instantly.

Her father was a coal miner and a numbers runner. He worked at the coalmine until 12:00 a.m. then changed into a suit and tie and delivered the bet money uptown to the cigar shop with a back room filled with phones and ticket tape papers. The day before her seventh birthday, her father promised he would have a surprise for her when she awoke the next morning. Bright and early just before sunrise, she ran from her upstairs bedroom into her parent’s bedroom. They were sleeping. She ran to the side of the bed where her dad was sleeping. He was sprawled with his right leg and arm limply hanging onto the floor. Mom knew what death looked like. Her father had passed during the night. The next thing she remembered was sitting with the other children on the couch as the ambulance men took her father out of the house. She wasn’t allowed to go to the funeral. She was too young, they said.

Her mother went to work in a tavern as a bartender to make ends meet. At the time, bartending was the best paying job for a woman, but they were still low wages. Several years pass until she was about nine or ten years old. One dawn, Mom was awakened to flashing red lights coming in from her bedroom window. When she looked out her bedroom window to see what was going on, she saw a horrible sight. There was a man hanging from a post on their front porch. The man had lived a few blocks away and had been following her mother to the tavern each day. He had begged her mother to marry him. Her mother had refused, so he committed suicide on her mother’s front porch. His relatives said he was schizophrenic.

Her mother remarried about two years later, when Mom was eleven years of age. Her mother and stepfather had three more children, two girls and a boy. I remember Mom saying they didn’t have a lot of money, and there were a lot of mouths to feed. Because she was older than the other children, she often went without enough to eat. She would give her food to the younger kids, so they would have enough.

Mom wanted to be a nun as a young girl, and she entered the convent school several years later as a freshman in high school preparing for the novitiate. She was sorely disappointed when she arrived there. Mountains of food were prepared every day, feasts of food served every day. The nuns had taken a vow of poverty, but they were never cold or hungry or financially insecure like she had been. Many of the nuns were overweight and were just plain mean and sour-tempered. She got in trouble at the convent a lot mostly for laughing or for practical jokes she pulled. She got into trouble once for humming during Lent as she scrubbed the ten-foot-tall windows. She spent a lot of time on her knees for penance, either in the chapel or in the bathrooms scrubbing floors. She excelled academically and in a school play. She received a standing ovation and praise from the faculty and students. That praise got her kicked out in the middle of her sophomore year.

A particularly mean-spirited nun caught her in the hallway before she went to the dorm that night. There the nun read her the riot act, how she had only gotten the part in an attempt by the staff to focus her religiously and make her more disciplined. The convent staff questioned her vocation, her suitability for the Holy Life. Instead it had only given her a big head, where was the modesty and humility?

Mom stood silently, bewildered by the attack.

Then the nun made a mistake in her tirade. The nun said, You have stood silently while I told you what I think of you. Now you can tell me what you think of me. I will not report it; there will be no repercussions. You can talk freely. You have my permission.

Mom told the nun what she thought of her jealousy and mean-spirited hypocrisy. Mom used her psychic ability with no filters as she outlined the nun’s entire life with precise personal incidents and with detailed descriptions.

The nun’s face turned white as a sheet, as if she would faint right there. Openmouthed, the nun stood frozen to the spot, then turned way, and descended the stairs.

Oops, the nun lied. The next morning, Mom’s trunk was packed while she was at Mass in the chapel, and her mother was called to come and get her at once. Mom was left alone by the front door to wait for her mother to pick her up from the convent. Mom was angry and confused as she waited for her mother to pick her up. Would her mother be disappointed with her?

Because of what had happened at the convent, she began to question the rigid teaching of the Catholic church and the intense fear of God they preached. You were taught to fear doing the smallest thing wrong and going to hell. If you questioned anything the church preached, you would lose your faith and go straight to hell. The fear was a very effective weapon. Yet she still felt His presence all her life and had dreams with Father in them. The Holy Spirit showed his presence many times while she was wrestling with the search for the meaning of all the things that had happened in her life to this point. She stopped going to church.

My parents were married in 1965, and things settled down for a while, but Mom still had many unanswered questions about what had led her to this point in her life. There were still many questions about what the church was teaching, her psychic abilities, feeling the presence of Father and the Holy Spirit, and trying to understand what it all meant. During this time in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Mom began to read all she could on psychic phenomenon, searching for answers about the experiences she was having. She read about famous psychics from Edgar Cayce to Jean Dixon. She experimented with table-tapping, levitation, and other forms of spirit communication. Mostly meaningless isolated phenomenon resulted from these experiments. What was the meaning of her abilities, its purpose, or practical use?

She started to go to church again when we were little. She felt we needed some religious training, and maybe she could find some of the answers she was looking for. In the mid 1970s, we went to the local Catholic church and attended catechism classes offered by the church. About this time, a new young priest came to the parish. He held charismatic meetings and encouraged speaking in tongues and prophecy, a much more liberal priest. He spoke about peace and tolerance, allowing new ideas. Women were allowed to read the liturgy during Mass. She began teaching a Catechism class for the eighth graders, encouraging them not to just recite dogma and beliefs but to think, question, and put the Bible stories to life, as if the events were happening now. The new priest smiled at the progress that was happening. Children flocked to him, parishioners praised him, and he basked in the attention always smiling. The parish flourished.

The charismatic meetings he held in the parish hall were enthralling and emotional, whipping the participants into an emotional frenzy of renewed religious fervor. At last, the breath of fresh air that Pope John XXIII announced at Vatican II in 1961 was introduced into the fundamentalist, dogmatic, fear-inducing church she had born into—at least she thought. The Second Ecumenical Council of the Vatican promised change from the biblical literalism enforced since Vatican I in 1870, promising union and dialogue with other faiths, encouraging social justice and women’s roles in the church. She was sucked into this emotional outreach of meaningful change. The church became a living breathing active force, overwhelming her.

About this time, bloody severed goat’s heads started to appear throughout the area. Throughout the county, cattle would be found dead with only their genitals missing or the cattle’s eyes were gouged out of the skulls. People in town were frightened of these incidences of devil worship. Then a neighbor stuck a bloody severed goat head on a fence post. She had seen enough! Dad had to stop her from confronting the neighbor who had placed the goat head on the post. Frantically, she was going to personally stamp out this local paganism and devil-worshipping. Dad began to worry about her sanity during this time of renewed religious fervor.

Also about this time, the young priest announced that he would be helping celebrate the first charismatic Mass in the diocese. A monsignor would lead it no less! Mom and a girlfriend went to the Mass held at a much larger parish, the Riverton Apostolic Center.

As they entered the building, they saw people pouring in. Many were crippled, blind, or obviously mentally ill. A large crowd had gathered at the church; it was full. The only lights were candles that flickered remotely in the dark church. Even with the large crowd packing the Cathedral-like structure, it was strangely silent, still. Eerily, voices from the edges of the crowd and then from the middle of the crowd began to speak loudly in tongues. It sounded like gibberish, singsong trilling of voices screeching from the once silent church. As each of the tongue speakers stopped, people in the crowd would shout, God bless the prophets! A procession of incense swinging altar boys appeared from the back of the church, followed by multiple priests draped in their finest garb and were led by the regal bearing Monsignor. In the middle of the Mass, the priests asked any who wanted to be healed to approach for the laying on of the hands to receive communion and for the crowd to pray for them. The crippled and the desperate went forward, filling the aisles. She was filled with sadness as she saw their despair and desperation, their willingness to believe etched on their faces, their hope and trust in this sanctioned magical spectacle.

After this had gone on for a while, she could see that none were healed or helped that she could tell. She could see the disappointment reflected behind the hope and faith determinedly glued on their faces. Thoroughly spooked, she and her friend rushed from the church. She began to suspect that the new priest was glorifying himself, sucking people under his control. This was going too far, reason was lost. Something was really wrong here.

A little later, Mom found out the young priest she had admired was messing around with a girlfriend of hers. She also saw something else that struck her as odd and vaguely suspicious about the same time. Teen boys spent the night at the priest’s house for instruction and prayer. It was all innocent, of course, according to the girlfriend and the priest. The priest bought flowers for the girlfriend out of parish funds often. He bought flowers for a lot of people. The priest and the girlfriend got caught for the flower expenditures through a parish audit. The priest had practically bankrupted the small church buying presents and flowers for numerous favored parishioners. The whole parish rose up in arms and outrage, mainly over the bankruptcy threat. Soon he was quietly transferred elsewhere.

Disappointed by the church once again, she stopped going to church once and for all. It didn’t mean that she quit believing, she continued to read her Bible and attended an ecumenical retreat in the spring with her friend. At the retreat, she and her friend were the only ones with a high school education, just ordinary housewives. All the other people attending the retreat were highly educated and very successful church leaders, scholars, and administrators of large hospitals and universities. Oddly, they didn’t feel like outsiders and weren’t treated like they didn’t belong there. She was introduced to psychological testing, thoughtful discussion of psychic phenomenon and consciousness, communication between different Christian faiths, and practical, successful social action. She learned of Carl Jung, a contemporary of Freud, who was searching for the practicality and meaning of spiritual experiences. She was with important, highly educated executives and religious writers who were not phony and who actually walked the walk of humility with service to the sick and poor. They waked the path as Jesus had and not just talked the talk. All of it extremely interesting, but what did it mean to her at this point in her life? She would soon find out the hard way.

A short time later, maybe a few weeks, she was sitting on the hill behind our house in the country, thinking. She had searched for answers and so far had not come up with anything meaningful. She didn’t understand, she had the ideal life—a home, family, security—all the things that society said were meaningful, but she felt miserable. She asked Father why she was miserable.

The next day, she was grooming a horse in the barn, and for whatever reason, the horse kicked. The horse’s kick landed squarely on her forehead. Somehow she made it into the house and went to the bathroom to see how badly she had been hurt. There she fell unconscious onto the bathroom floor. Mom said at this point she went into the tunnel of light, dimly in the distance. She could not move up toward the light or back toward her body. She remembered the sensation of nothingness—no sound, no touch, and the inability to speak or move. She was very frightened and struggled hard to move back into her body. Finally, she came back but couldn’t move and spoke only in a whisper as she tried to shout for help.

Dad came in to the bathroom finally to see if anything was wrong when she didn’t answer him when he called for her. The ambulance ride was like a rollercoaster, in and out of consciousness.

At the hospital, she continued to drift in and out of consciousness. Sometimes she could hear and feel the touch of the nurses and doctors as they pinched her foot or shouted in her ear to respond to them. Then suddenly, she would completely wake up and hold a conversation, only to drop back into unconsciousness. This happened many times throughout the day. There wasn’t much the neurologist could do, as her brain swelled inside her head, except wait. During the times the brain swelled, she was paralyzed. She could still think, but she could not move.

The next day as she lay in the bed in another paralyzed state, she heard God’s voice in her head. He was angry and said, How do you like this paralysis? If you do not talk, you will remain this way for the rest of your life. Don’t hide your light under a bushel!

All she could say was Yes Sir. She didn’t understand what light she had or what she was supposed to say. It took a long time to recover from the head injury.

After she had recovered, the only thing she could think of was to go back to college. She had taken some courses after high school but had not gotten a degree. So that is what she did—went back to college. After several years, she attained a master’s degree in psychology. That degree and her psychic abilities would prove invaluable later on, helping others overcome problems in their lives. Her vast knowledge of symbolism in psychology also helped me learn how to interpret a lot of the signs and symbols I see when I do readings for people.

Dad’s Early Years

Richard Mahan Jr.

Dad didn’t have the greatest start in life either. He was born with a prolapsed umbilical cord. He recovered from that but was sick most of his young life. He