Several years ago I had a trusty handyman.  He looked like a handyman, he talked like a handyman and he did excellent handyman-type work.   

I found Mike, or maybe he found me, in a Sears hardware store.  He mixed paint for me and we got to talking.  He said he'd been laid off from his full time job and was working part time to make ends meet.   One thing led to another and before I knew it, he was at my house on a regular basis, fixing things, painting, power washing and more.

He was reliable, his work was top notch and his hourly rate was much less than any other handyman I'd used. 

Mike was chatty and easy to be around.  He was a pleasant looking middle-aged fellow with a slight paunch and the kind of loose, beat up jeans that rode down a little too far in back when he bent over, just like any respectable handyman's or plumber's jeans.    

He joked around with my young children and they loved it when he came by. I'd lucked out with him, I thought to myself.

There was an added bonus.  If I had to run an errand while Mike was at my house, as I tried to round up my reluctant kids to take with me, he'd say, "Oh go ahead and leave them here. They'll slow you down.  I'll keep an eye on 'em." 

That just made me like him more.

One day I called him and had to leave a message.  He didn't return my call. I called again and left another message.  Still no return call.  That was unusual.   So I made a trip to Sears.  

"Hey Mike," I greeted him.  "Was it something I said?  I have a bunch of stuff waiting for your expert touch." 

For the first time in three years, Mike was neither friendly nor chatty.  He was gruff and almost rude.

"I don't do that kind of thing anymore.  I hurt my back.  Sorry.  I've got to get back to work." 

I was hurt and confused.  If his back bothered him, why was he still working at a hardware store, I wondered, a place where he had to lift heavy objects and climb ladders.

Not long after that I got my answer.  Someone told me they'd seen his name and photo on a sex offenders website.  He was there for unlawful sexual conduct with a minor.  I refused to believe it; he had a common last name.  It just wasn't possible. 

I didn't want to go to the site but I forced myself.  I stared in disbelief at Mike's picture while I went numb as I thought of the times I'd blithely left my children alone with him.

To say I was blindsided is an understatement.  He was nice man.  He had a nice family, I'd met them a few times.  He looked and acted exactly like what I assumed he was.  A friendly, benign, middle-aged handyman.

Some dormant thought, one that had been buried in my brain for a while began to take root and grow and it was this:  Is there nothing in life that can be taken at face value and accepted for exactly what it seems?

I know when the seed of that thought blew into my head.  It happened when I began hearing about the  Catholic clergy sex abuse scandal.  As it grew in magnitude and overflowed, much as my faith had over the years, I found I could never look at a priest quite the same way again.  I'd think of the priests I'd known and admired through the years and against my will, I wondered about them and the altar boys.  Altar boys who'd been my neighbors, my friends, my cousins.  And later, my nephews.

Something ugly and hard to ignore forced itself on the beautiful Catholic Mass I loved so much.  The rituals I never tired of, the mystery of faith, and the priest like a ringmaster, front and center in his flowing robes, calling us to pray and believe and have no doubt that an extraordinary change was possible.  

He did this via the Eucharistic sacrament which resulted in that most cryptic yet bedrock element of every Catholic's faith:  transubstantiation.  The priest was the only one who could change the bread and wine into something they were not:  the body and blood of Jesus Christ.  

I believed this and still do, with absolutely no proof. 

Then the priests themselves changed, although they still looked the same.  They became something they were not, or shouldn't have been. Not all of them, of course not.  But how could one know the difference? Faith was suddenly not good enough, not for me.

With all the ugly revelations of sexual abuse of minors in the news these days, the face of sports in general and football in particular, doesn't look the same to me either.  The notion of those big macho football players and tough-as-nails-coaches who only care about the game ("Winning isn't everything, it's the only thing, boys!") now gives me pause.  It seems the score may not be the only thing on some minds after all.

But how many minds?  Which ones?

Suddenly lots of things, everywhere, don't look the same to me because they may not be what they seem.  I find myself questioning everything.

When a charitable organization for troubled youths may actually have been founded as a hunting ground for a sexual predator, how does one process that?  When institutions that have stood for one thing for years and even centuries, become something different seemingly overnight, how does one make sense of it and not question every other institution.

I don't know what to think anymore.  When trusted coaches, and respected pediatricians and beloved teachers and maybe even the nice family man next door are arrested for possessing child pornography or worse, sexually abusing kids, it shakes the very bedrock of a person's beliefs about lots of things.

Sometimes I find myself staring at a man and his child, laughing and horsing around and I think things I shouldn't.  Things like, "Looks good, but what happens when you get your kid alone." 

I don't like thinking this way.  I try not to.  I feel like I'm also changing, against my will.

Recently, I read something in my newspaper about a task force set up to catch sexual predators who prey on kids.  I read the quotes of a male investigator as he referred to child molesters as "sickos" and "depraved" and "the worst of the worst."

My first thought was not "That's wonderful, and it's long overdue."

No, my first thought was, "How do I know you're not doing this work so you can get closer to kids.  How do I know you're not just like the guys you call depraved.  Because in your newspaper picture you look like them." 

They all look the same.   Some are handsome, some are not, some are old, some are young but they all look the same.  Unremarkable.  Ordinary.  Benign.

My question is, have they all undergone transubstantiation, turning from one thing into another without a change in appearance, or were they always like that.  Either way, it's nearly impossible for me to accept let alone understand, although I don't doubt it for a second.

The fact that sexual abuse of children is commonplace is even more difficult to grasp.  Knowing it happens on a regular basis, almost everywhere in the world, just like the consecration of the bread and wine at countless daily Masses, is testing my faith in many things, in ways I'd never imagined.

The Bible says, "And God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them."   In His own image.  That was always a difficult concept to grasp but I never questioned it.  I accepted it at face value.   Now, I doubt.