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Conversations with My Molester: A Journey of Faith
March 27, 2020 @ 7:00 pm - 8:30 pm
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A Stage Performance about Forgiveness and Healing
Starring Michael Mack
Date: Friday, March 27 at 7pm
Stage Performance Held at: Aquinas College, Kretschmer Recital Hall (In the Music & Art Building, 1700 Fulton St. East, Grand Rapids, MI 49506)
Ticket Cost: Adults $15 College Students $5 (Aquinas Students are free with Aquinas ID at the door or with Aquinas email address for on-line tickets).
Like many Catholic boys in the 1960s, Michael Mack grew up wanting to be a priest. That dream ended at age 11 when he was sexually abused by his pastor, an experience that haunted him for decades. Forty years later, Mack landed on his former pastor’s doorstep for a conversation, and what happened next went beyond anything he ever imagined.
Michael Mack’s solo, 90-minute play, Conversations with My Molester: A Journey of Faith recounts that odyssey, chronicling the events that took him full circle away from – and back to – the Catholic Church. Mack’s story offers a moving testament to hope and renewal. The play at its heart is about reconciliation, social justice, and healing.
About Michael Mack: Award-winning poet, playwright, and performer Michael Mack is best known for his autobiographical solo plays Hearing Voices, Speaking in Tongues, about his mother’s recovery from schizophrenia, and Conversations with My Molester: A Journey of Faith, about the spirituality of trauma. Mack has performed these plays throughout out the United States, including US Library of Congress, Off-Off-Broadway at the Times Square Arts Center, at Harvard and Yale universities, Catholic Dioceses, and for scores of mental health conferences– even at the FBI’s 32nd Annual Hostage Negotiation Seminar.
Mack served in the US Air Force before graduating from the Writing Program at MIT (where he studied under Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney and Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Maxine Kumin). His poems have appeared in America, the Beloit Poetry Journal, Cumberland Poetry Review, Journal of the American Medical Association, and Southern Poetry Review. They have aired on NPR and are anthologized in Best Catholic Writing (2005 and 2007).
For more information about Michael Mack please visit his website at http://www.michaelmacklive.com
This play is co-sponsored by the Cathedral of Saint Andrew, the Catholic Information Center, Dominican Center at Marywood, Dominican Sisters~Grand Rapids, the Paulist Fathers & Aquinas College Campus Ministry.
