The Looming Tower - Lawrence Wright [197]
After the incident in the FBI parking garage, O’Neill began reading the Bible every day. In Yemen, he kept a Bible on his bedside table, along with a recent biography of Michael Collins. He returned to Catholicism in the spring of 2001, attending Mass every morning. He told Val that a priest was counseling him about getting a divorce. That August his wife, Christine, signed a property agreement, which gave her custody of the children and the house in Linwood, New Jersey. But his impending freedom seemed only to add to the spiritual burden he was carrying.
O’Neill bought a book titled Brush Up on Your Bible! As a preacher’s daughter, Val knew the Bible far better than O’Neill did, no matter how hard he studied. They got into heated discussions about salvation. He believed that a soul was saved through good works; Val thought it was only through belief in Jesus Christ. She always had the sickening feeling that he was doomed.
Soon after he returned from Spain, O’Neill happened upon a children’s book titled The Soul Bird. Val was in the bathroom getting ready for work when O’Neill came in to read it to her. She was only half paying attention. The story is about a bird that perches on one foot inside our soul.
This is the soul bird.
It feels everything we feel.
O’Neill, the tough guy, with his service automatic strapped on his ankle, read that the soul bird runs around in pain when someone hurts us, then swells with joy when we are embraced. Then he came to the part about the drawers:
Do you want to know what the soul bird is made of?
Well, it’s really quite simple: it’s made of drawers.
These drawers can’t be opened just like that—because each is locked with its own special key!
Valerie was taken aback as O’Neill began to weep. But he continued to read about the drawers—one for happiness, one for sadness, one for jealousy, one for contentment—until suddenly he was sobbing so hard that he couldn’t finish. He was completely broken.
Immediately after that episode, he buried himself in prayer. He had a couple of prayer guides, and he marked his favorites with ribbons or Post-it notes. He was particularly drawn to the Psalms, including number 142:
On the way where I shall walk
they have hidden a snare to entrap me.
Look on my right and see:
there is not one who takes my part.
I have no means of escape,
not one cares for my soul.
I cry to you, O Lord.
I have said: “You are my refuge,
all I have left in the land of the living.”
Listen then to my cry
for I am in the depths of distress.
In the back of one of his red-leather breviaries, he clipped a schedule of Catholic prayer times, and on July 30 he began to obsessively check them off. It is now a rare practice for ordinary Catholics to pray four or five times a day, as Muslims do, but the ancient practice is still available to members of the clergy and extremely fervent believers. Perhaps in his worship O’Neill drew parallels between the early church and certain aspects of modern Islamism, since the church calendar is full of martyrs and stern ideologues who would be seen as religious extremists today. He began this regimen on the feast day of Peter Chrysologus, the bishop of Ravenna, who banned dancing and persecuted the heretics. The next day, July 31, celebrates Saint Ignatius of Loyola, the indomitable Spanish soldier who founded the Jesuit order. The vision these saints had of a society governed by God is far more like that of Sayyid Qutb than that of most modern Christians.
In his schedule, O’Neill checked off every prayer until Sunday, August 19, the day the article about the briefcase incident finally appeared in the Times. Then the marks abruptly stopped.
“THE DUTIES OF THIS RELIGION are magnificent