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vendetta asked me to post a little passage from this boy's life ... so here you go ...

Toward the end of the week Father Karl came in. He talked to Mr. Bolger in the storeroom for a few minutes, then called me outside. "Let's take a walk," he said.
We followed a footpath down to the river. Father Karl didn't say anything until we were at the riverbank. He picked up a rock and threw it into the water. I had the cynical suspicion that he was going to give me the same sermon the chaplain at Scout camp had given to every new group of boys on their first day last summer. He would walk up to the edge of the lake, casually pick up a handful of stones and toss one in. "Only a pebble," he would say musingly, as if the idea were just occurring to him, "only a pebble, but look at all the ripples it makes, and how far the ripples reach ..." By the end of the summer we camp counselors all held him in open scorn. We called him Ripples.
But Father Karl did not give this sermon.He couldn't have. He had come by his faith the hard way, and did not speak of it with art or subtlety. His parents were Jewish. They had both been killed in concentration camps and Father Karl barely himself survived. Sometime after the war he became a convert to Christianity, and then a minister. Some trace of Eastern Europe still clung to his speech. He had dark good looks of which he seemed unaware, and a thoughtful manner that grew sharp when he had to deal with pretense or frivolity. I had felt his sharpness before, and I was about to feel it again.
He asked me who I thought I was.
I did not know how to answer this question. I didn't even try.
"Look at yourself, Jack. What are you doing? Tell me what you think you are doing."
"I guess I'm screwing up," I said, giving my head a rueful shake.
"No baloney!" he shouted. "No baloney!"
He looked about ready to hit me. I decided to keep quiet.
"If you go on like this," he said, "what will happen to you? Answer me!".
"I don't know."
"Yes you do. You know." His voice was softer. "You know." He picked up another rock and hurled it into the river. "What do you want?"
"Sorry?"
"Want! You must want something. What do you want?"
I knew the answer to this question, all right. But I was sure that my answer would enrage him even more, worldly as I knew it to be, and contrary to what I could imagine of his own wants. I could not imagine Father Karl wanting money, a certain array of merchandise, wanting, at any price, the world's esteem. I could not imagine him wanting anything as much as I wanted these things, or imagine him hearing my wants without contempt.
I had no words for any of this, or for my understanding that to accept Father Karl's hope of redemption I would have to give up my own. He believed in God, I believed in the world.
I shrugged off his question. I wasn't exactly sure what I wanted, I said.
He sat down on a log. I hesitated, then sat a little ways down from him and stared across the river. He picked up a stick and prodded the ground with it, then asked me if I wanted to make my mother unhappy.
I said no.
"You don't?"
I shook my head.
"Well, that's what you're doing."
I said nothing.
"All right then. Do you want to make her happy?"
"Sure."
"Good. That's something. That's one thing you want. Right?"
When I agreed, he said. "But you're making her unhappy aren't you?"
"I guess."
"No guessing to it Jack. You are." He looked over at me. "So why don't you stop? Why don't you just stop?"
I didn't answer right away, for fear of seeming merely agreeable. I wanted to appear to give his question some serious thought. "All right," I said. "I'll try".
He threw down the stick. He was still watching me, and I knew that he understood what had happened here; that he had not "reached me" at all, because I was not available to be reached. I was in hiding. I had left a dummy in my place to look sorry and make promises, but I was nowhere in the neighborhood and Father Karl knew it.