Petrus Faller - And The Heart Is Mine

The 2nd World War with its gruesome repercussions had impacted the family circumstances of my parents in such a way that their childhood and younger years were a sheer nightmare. My mother grew up with nine siblings in a large family. She had lost her favorite brother and her father in the war. Her father had refused to give the Hitler salute. He sympathized with communist ideas. He was sent to Dachau into a so-called education camp and died in the first years of the war in Poland. The family of ten was tormented by the most severe restrictions of the Nazi regime and denied any kind of support by the state. Two of her brothers came back from the prisoner of war camp with the most severe injuries. She herself experienced the war and the constant presence of soldiers as a permanent threat of encroachment and sexual harassment. As she gave birth to a child out of wedlock right after the end of the war it became a lifelong stigma for her. This circumstance was tantamount to a mortal sin in the rural Catholic setting. Even within her own family she was insulted and labeled a witch. Together with her older sister and her mother she had to provide for the rest of the family in the post war years.

She was an incredibly passionate woman, very attractive with long red hair and an irrepressible zest for life.

My father came from a respected and wealthy family from a small village at the foot of the Black Forest. When he was fifteen he was assigned to the front in the last months of the war and was severely wounded. He came back with wandering shrapnel and chronic pain in his body. He could never really settle down in his life. He had many jobs, adored and loved women, frequented the pubs and the dance halls and died at the age of forty-two in my mother’s arms. I was five years old.

Due to the unexpected death of my father my mother suffered a deep depression from which she never fully recovered. She continued to work on an assembly line in a factory and the shift work now divided our life into ‘early’ and ‘late’. ‘Late’ meant we saw each other in the morning for breakfast and then not any more for the rest of the day. ‘Early’ meant we saw each other in the afternoon when my mother came home, exhausted and disheartened by the piece-work, and we could spend the evening together.

After the sudden death of my father my life changed dramatically. Now it wasn’t just fear that was my constant companion but also aloneness. I had time to do everything – or nothing. Mostly I was spending time in the streets or in the woods. I ran, I had to run, I lived in a different, very energized world that for most of the people around me appeared strange or even crazy. There were no boundaries, neither regarding education nor the imagination. Via the power of my imagination I could hallucinate myself into any possible place and could envision just about anything in my mind.

All my actions contained a great deal of energy and passion, but rarely could I find rest, so I stumbled about as if driven. That caused my shoes to wear out at the soles or the seams were falling apart at a rapid rate and my mother had to buy new ones every two to three months. The record in durability for new Adidas shoes was two weeks. The energy shot out from my head and from my feet. What could I do? In the night during sleep I would feel how my body would lift up slowly as if it was rising up like a balloon. When I became aware of my floating body I would wake up and crash down onto the bed.

When I was six years old a luminous circle started appearing above my bed on a regular basis. It spoke to me, seemed full of happiness but also was quite insistent. It appeared whenever it wanted to, I had no influence over it. On one hand it made me feel happy but on the other hand it made me feel somehow pressured in a strange fashion. In later years I drew the connection between the light and Jesus, because this was the religious atmosphere that was surrounding me while I was growing up. However, both my aversion and my fascination remained. Why did this stupid light appear above my bed? What did that mean? I neither wanted to become a priest nor have any kind of so-called vocation. But I spoke to no one about it.

When I was nine I became an altar boy in our Catholic community. I loved the nuns when they were praying in devotion kneeling down on benches in the front rows, even though some of them looked like iron brooms and had withered faces. I sat in front in the chancel, red skirt, white shirt and red collar, squinted while looking at a candle and sank into the light of a bright star, which slowly rose in my inner eye and directed my awareness into a shining radiance. That was my happiness. I didn’t need more. I didn’t want to do any altar service, I was afraid of it and I found it weird and boring. I didn’t want to make any mistakes and thus catch grumpy glares from the priest. I didn’t want to talk or to always repeat the same monotonous prayers. Only to sit there in silence and gaze – that was it.

Our Catholic priest was from the old school. He was extremely fundamentalist in his views. He scolded and preached against everything that was not Catholic. He had refused, years ago, to give my father the last rites because he was divorced. He even had to be persuaded to perform the funeral ceremony because at first he had refused to do even this. Naturally, the priest intuited and felt that I wasn’t really interested in doing the altar service. And I on the other hand knew that he was jealous of my ecstatic condition, which I didn’t try to consciously create but was spontaneously drawn into.

Deep in my heart I felt that everything that was happening here in the name of Jesus had nothing, absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with Jesus himself, with his real presence or the Revelation. ‘He’ felt so different. While the creeds were addressed I deliberately remained silent. After only a short time I knew the liturgy by heart and was very proud when I could detect an ‘error’ or an omission in the liturgical texts. Guilt and atonement struck me as strange concepts, and my first confession was also the last because I didn’t know what I should tell and to whom. Even the deep happiness that I often felt during mass I never really connected directly to Jesus. It was much broader, without any name or a person. It was the space itself that simply shone and radiated. It was happiness, infinite fullness, self-oblivion – and only the heart knew it was true. At the same time I was becoming arrogant and presumptuous when I became aware that the others were not able to perceive the same happiness. I let them feel it, especially the priest.

When I played with my friends I connected with them more on an emotional and psychic level, with that which was not so very visible, rather than on the level of what they apparently said or did. The connection to my mother was very close in spite of, or perhaps because of, the limited time we had together due to the work in shifts. I could feel her even when she was not present.

One day, in the beginning of my puberty, approximately at the age of eleven or twelve, some strange things started happening in my proximity. I was sitting on the toilet and was staring at the floor. Suddenly there appeared a face on the carpet, I looked at the wall, and there was also a face, on the ceiling, again and again the same face everywhere. Jesus. When I went into the hallway his face was everywhere. I became scared and didn’t want to look anywhere any more. Everywhere Jesus. In the evening I told my mother about the phenomenon. She nearly jumped out of her skin: ‘Are you totally mad? Stop that immediately otherwise I’ll have to go with you to the doctor!’ That was the only and also the last time that I told anybody about my perception and the phenomena. These visions lasted for a while and then they died away.