The God who is kind, loving and forgiving

Charles Hagerman, 65, had been drinking for so long – since he was a teenager in upstate New York and later as a store detective – that he scarcely could remember a day in his adult life when he was sober.

He went from drinking four or five beers a day to chugging three beers in his car on the way to work as a liquid appetizer. Then, after his wife died, he graduated in 2019 to four or five pints of vodka a day.

“I knew if I could drink that pint of vodka in an hour and a half, then I would black out and I wouldn’t have to face anybody,” Hagerman said. “I don’t know if you’ve ever seen the movie ‘Leaving Las Vegas’ with Nicolas Cage. He moves to Las Vegas and he’s going to drink himself to death. At that point in my life, I didn’t care whether I lived or I died. I didn’t want to die, but I didn’t care one way or the other.”

And so, in June 2019, Hagerman blacked out in his RV and took a fall so vicious that it shattered his C3 vertebra. He was found by a friend, bleeding from the head, and rushed from Slidell to University Hospital in New Orleans.

One false move with his neck could have led to paralysis.

His blood pressure was 76 over 58, and he was diagnosed with congestive heart failure, cirrhosis of the liver and ulcers.

“I had drunk so much vodka that it hardened the left ventricle of my heart, so it doesn’t pump the right way,” Hagerman said. “I spent six weeks in the hospital and two weeks in rehab learning how to walk because my legs were all swollen.”

Hagerman finally got enough mobility to return home, but he started drinking again.

He remembers he was going to buy a rotisserie chicken to cook for Thanksgiving but doesn’t remember if he actually bought it or cooked it.

“I don’t remember Dec. 8, which is my granddaughter’s birthday,” he said. “I don’t remember Dec. 12, which is my son’s birthday. I don’t remember Dec. 19, which is my birthday. I don’t remember Christmas. I don’t remember New Year’s Eve.”

What he did remember when awakening from a blackout on Jan. 7, 2020, was that he had a doctor’s appointment scheduled for Jan. 9. He kept the appointment and finally found the courage to tell the doctor he was drinking far more than three or four beers a day.

He went into rehab and found out he could get an extra cigarette break if he agreed to attend a Mass at St. Dymphna’s Catholic Chapel in Mandeville on the weekends.

“I said, ‘Sign me up for church,’” said Hagerman, who as a kid went to Mass twice a year with his mother, at St. Mary’s Church in Baldwinsville, New York, just outside of Syracuse.

On the second Sunday he attended church at St. Dymphna’s, Hagerman sat in the first pew, and Benedictine Father Lawrence Phelps, the celebrant, dropped his walking cane. Hagerman reached down and picked it up and handed it to the priest.

“Bless you,” Father Phelps told him.

“I was like, ‘OK,’” Hagerman said. “The next day I woke up in treatment, and there was a different person. I wanted to recover. I wanted to get better. I started participating. Why, I don’t know.”

Hagerman later found an Alcoholics Anonymous sponsor who could keep him accountable. The third step of the 12 Steps program is turning your life over to a higher power – God.

“It was a Saturday morning, and I told myself, ‘I’ve got to figure out what I’ve got to do to get closer to God. He’s doing all this stuff for me, and I can’t even imagine what he would do for me if I got to know him and love him like he loves me,’” Hagerman said. “I just said, ‘I’ll figure it out some way because I’m smart.’”

As Hagerman was cleaning out the inside of his RV, he saw a bunch of Mardi Gras beads wrapped around his rearview mirror, which was a flashback to too many New Orleans blackouts.

“I was like, ‘I don’t need that reminder,’ so I start pulling them off,” Hagerman said. “But one of them is stuck on the mirror. And I look, and it’s not a Mardi Gras bead – it’s my mother’s rosary. That’s when I said, ‘Oh, my God, I’m supposed to be Catholic!’”

In AA, he had been studying various images of God, and Hagerman’s personal image fit someone who had hidden from God for too long.

“He’s got to be kind, loving and forgiving, because I’ve done a lot of stuff in my life,” Hagerman told the counselor.

Hagerman started searching online for how to become Catholic, and he stumbled across Our Lady of Lourdes Church in Slidell, close to his home but never before on his radar.

At one of his first RCIA classes, Deacon Michael Whitehouse asked Hagerman a simple question: What did he know about God?

“I said, ‘I don’t know much at all,’” Hagerman said. “And Deacon Michael says, ‘Well, the God of the Catholic Church is kind, loving and forgiving.’ I said, ‘What? What!’”

Along the way, Hagerman soaked up so much Catholic teaching that he may have unlocked the mystery of the Holy Trinity, which Deacon Whitehouse realized was a very complex concept.

“I finally got it!” Hagerman told the deacon. “The Trinity is like spaghetti and meatballs and sauce. It doesn’t come with just meatballs – it’s meatballs, spaghetti and a plate of sauce. You’ve got to have all three. He was like ... ‘OK.’”

Blessings amid global tragedy
All of this took place during the pandemic. Hagerman was confirmed at Our Lady of Lourdes on Dec. 20, 2020.

“You know, 2020 – with COVID, the pandemic, politics, unemployment, civil unrest, everything that went bad – it was the best year of my life,” Hagerman said. “I got sober and found God. I just had this passion and started sponsoring other people. There are a lot of Catholics, especially in AA, who say they’re a ‘reformed’ Catholic or a ‘used-to-be’ Catholic. They were raised with the idea of a vengeful God. I tell them, ‘That’s not it. He’s kind and loving and forgiving. Mercy to me is that God didn’t give me what I deserved. God gave me more than I deserve.”

 Hagerman is so on fire that in addition to becoming a sponsor to several people at AA and bringing them back to the Catholic Church, he is the force behind a planned presentation by author Scott Weeman on “The Twelve Steps and the Sacraments: A Catholic Journey through Recovery.”

Weeman will speak Sept. 14 at 6 p.m. at Our Lady of Lourdes Church, 400 Westminster Blvd., Slidell. His talk is geared to those who are either afflicted with or affected by substance abuse or addiction.

Hagerman also will be there to share his story. Just last summer, he reunited with his son, to whom he had been estranged for many years. In his first visit in 2020, his son’s wife was understandably wary and cold, knowing of her husband’s painful childhood with his dad.

“On my second visit this summer – 18 months sober – I go to my son’s house to see my newest grandson, but my son isn’t there,” Hagerman said. “My daughter-in-law answers the door, and she says, ‘Welcome!’ And she gives me a hug and lets me into the house.

“There is this 4-week-old baby lying in the bassinet. And my heart is melting. And she says, ‘Would you like to hold him?’ And she lets me feed him and burp him. And I hold him for 3 1/2 hours, and she was the one who asked me to pick him up. That joy – I can’t even express it. It’s so overwhelming. My life has been so blessed, and now I want to share that with others.”

Hagerman can be reached confidentially at (985) 285-9243.

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