Vitale Christy didn’t want to give up something for Lent. He wanted to spend the 40 days giving something to God. The young adult committed to writing a poem a week, but the project grew as he reflected on passages from the Bible, the lives of the saints and his own journey back to the faith.
“What started out as Lent turned into a project” — a collection of poems written over several months, said Christy. “For the entirety of it, I tried to keep my focus on, ‘Why am I doing this?’ At the simplest, it was a gift, a Christmas present for my mom.”
Christy, 30, spent the first four years of his life in Kazakhstan before being adopted by his parents, who raised him in Great Falls. “It’s one of those bittersweet things because I know that I’m an orphan, (but) at the same time, I look at the overwhelming amount of blessings that God has showered upon me,” he said. “(My adoptive parents) saved my life.”
The family attended St. Thomas à Becket Church in Reston, where Christy was an altar server, sang in the choir and took religious education classes. After graduating from Bishop O’Connell High School in Arlington, he studied performing arts and creative writing at the University of Tampa in Florida. But in college, laziness led him to drift away from his faith.
“I didn’t really understand why I should care. I had traveled 900 miles across the country so I was free to do whatever I wanted. The world was my oyster, and I wasn’t going to waste it,” he said. “I never stopped believing, I just stopped putting in the work. It led to a greedy self-mindedness.”
The self-destructive path led him to a point where he was 50 pounds overweight and struggling with alcohol, which led to problems in his personal and professional life. After one binge, “I didn’t care if I died,” he said. “And that’s when I realized, this is really bad.” He began to change his life. “I started going (to) boxing, started taking church seriously again. I was able to find forgiveness, not perfectly, not with everyone, but I found it with the Lord and I was able to forgive myself,” he said.
After moving up and down the East Coast working in various fields, Christy recently returned to Northern Virginia to work in finance. Last year’s Lenten project became his first self-published book of poems, “Life Chosen,” which he dedicated to his parents. He hopes his story and his poems will help others rediscover God, too.
“Young people who feel like they’re struggling with their relationship with God and who want to know that they’re not alone, maybe they could find that in the book,” he said.
