Norm Pattis came to talk about Donald Trump. He ended up talking about the .22 with which he once planned to shoot his stepfather — and what he takes from the story of Jesus’s resurrection about the possibility of a new life.
Pattis didn’t intend to talk about Easter and aborted murder. The ponytailed criminal defense lawyer — whose outcast clients have ranged from Occupy New Haven protesters to right-wing fabulist Alex Jones and Jan. 6 Proud Boy Joe Biggs — agreed to come on WNHH FM’s “Dateline New Haven” program Tuesday to defend the Trump administration. To offer an aggressive rebuttal to the notion that fascism is on the march in America.
But this is the home stretch of the penitential season. And it turns out that the resurrection has loomed large in Pattis’s consciousness since his peripatetic Detroit youth through to his pugnacious courtroom career. As he nears his seventieth birthday, he has reached conclusions about the daily role of the search for renewal, about the daily opportunity for a new shot at life.
Stepdad Had A .38
Pattis got off on that tangent when asked about the looming fascism question.
“I think something more fundamental is at stake than fascism,” he responded. “I think it’s really a struggle against the overwhelming efficiencies of AI. I think people are clamoring for significance in any way that they can against impersonal forces.
“I’m less worried about AI than many are. I think that we are spiritual beings. And if you can find a computer algorithm that’s sophisticated enough to have longing, a longing to know God. What makes us unique is our longing to know our Creator.”
Pattis recalled discovering that longing while diving into the New Testament and finding support in a church youth group as a young teen. It may have saved his stepfather’s life while pointing Pattis himself to a better path.
His biological father had left in 1963. Pattis’s mother sent young Norm to sleep on a relative’s couch for a while. Then he accompanied her on annual moves through a rooming house, a small apartment, an unheated attic — along with a series of unfortunately chosen male partners.
At one point, at 13 or 14, he ran away into the woods for a few weeks. He got “sick as a dog.” He landed in juvenile court.
What’s going on? a juvenile officer asked.
“My mother’s living with this guy. He’s a complete asshole. I got to get out of there,” Pattis replied.
That’s not a crime. So they let Pattis go, without any help.
The next year, Pattis’s mother settled in with a “very violent man — so violent I intended to kill him.”
Pattis, 15 at the time, purchased a .22 caliber rifle. He practiced by shooting pigeons outside his window. He laid out the plan.
“I thought I’d walk in and blow him away. I knew what kind of gun he had, because I checked out his .38, you know, snub nose. He kept it at bedside. So I figured I got to get him before he gets that, because he’ll win the caliber war.”
Outside the home, Pattis found support. He attended a Thursday evening church youth group in a woman’s home, where he found kindness. A local attorney and insurance man was matched with Pattis through the Big Brother program; he visited the man’s home one weekend a month.
In both homes, Pattis found an alternative model for how to live. Maybe he could live a version of it one day.
“What are you doing? You know, you’re actually sitting here contemplating killing another man,” Pattis recalled thinking one day. “If I do this, what will I have done? I will have invited all sorts of chaos into my life. I’ll be back in juvenile court. You know, I don’t know what the consequences will be. I’m at the beginning of my life. I should go make whatever I can.”
New Blood
One night, a year later, while praying in his bedroom, Pattis pulled his hands from his face. He was crying. He noticed blood on his face.
Then one day he was called to his school guidance counselor’s office. Having switched schools so often, Pattis didn’t excel in his studies. But the counselor saw something in him. She urged him to think about college. With a “mother’s club” scholarship, he landed in a community college, then Eastern Michigan University, then Purdue. There he wrote a paper on Easter and the resurrection, about the possibility that God does, in fact, intervene in a person’s life.
“What I found so profoundly relieving about the notion of the resurrection was that there might be a God in the world who cared enough for us to give a sacrifice, to make it possible for us to know Him to live eternally, and thus this solved the riddle of being,” Pattis recalled. “I’ve struggled for a lifetime with depression of one form or another. I think I was in such despair about the state of my being in the world that the notion that there could be a reason to hope, or that there could be a loving God who cared for me, was an overwhelming possibility.”
He wrote about that again in an application to Columbia, where a St. Augustine scholar named Herbert Deane happened to sit on the admissions committee. That earned him a free ride to graduate school — then to teaching at Columbia, then to a celebrated law career.
Isolated Atoms
Pattis has revisited some of these questions recently. He and his wife have studied Talmud with a Chabad rabbi. He reads and reflects on Daily Roman Missals before starting his work day.
As Easter Sunday approached, Pattis offered his version of Pascal’s Wager. The 17th century French mathematician decided to bet on immortality and the existence of God — because betting otherwise would condemn him to eternal suffering in life if the bet proves wrong (as opposed to eternal happiness in heaven).
“I’ll call it Pattis’s wager: We are either isolated atoms moving randomly in space in an infinite universe, where everything occurs over and over again and it’s absolutely meaningless, and as matters of mere complexity, it’s only a matter of time til the machine exceeds what we can do, and we’re extinct. It’s either that or we’re created in the image of God.
“I think that life is an absolutely astounding miracle, and that none of us understand more than the sliver that we’ve been given to see. I cherish each moment as a gift that I didn’t deserve, and hope against hope for a better outcome than what I often expect.”
Click on the video below to watch the full conversation with attorney Norm Pattis on WNHH FM’s “Dateline New Haven” program. Click here to subscribe or here to listen to other episodes of “Dateline New Haven.”