I’ve had several similar dreams that actually came to pass specifically as dreamed – but most were more symbolic and none came true so soon after the dream. Perhaps the most memorable was the one that set me on a course to becoming a practicing Catholic adult after a stoically faithful-to-my-parents atheistic childhood and adolescence. I was the only atheist kid I knew – even my sister and only sibling rebelled and attended church with the family up the hill from us, receiving the sacraments of the Roman Catholic Church in the era when Quo Vadis and Ben Hur were the big Hollywood production company Oscar sweeping blockbusters.

I was a year or two out of high school, involved in heavy drug and alcohol abuse, without a girlfriend and unable to connect with one since I lost the first and only girl I thought I would or could ever love. My friends and I had been hanging out with Mike C—–‘s friends who were a very able Beatles cover band. They were going for a weekend to visit someone at a college in Worcester, Mass. The whole weekend is a blur in my memory. I know we went to see the city of Boston, but spent most of the weekend in an apartment smoking pot, drinking and taking uppers. I remember a quite lovely brown haired young woman who was obviously interested in me, but I just couldn’t get past my inner inertia to try and communicate with her. This behavior was of personal concern, because even the alcohol and drugs did not loosen me up. I felt I was falling into a lonely and depraved pit that I would never escape from.

There was one beam of light that seemed to momentarily shine on me. There was a little turntable in the apartment, and they had a copy of James Taylor’s very popular “Sweet Baby James” album, and an acoustic guitar. I had been teaching myself to play along with that very record. I picked up the guitar, tuned it, turned on the record player, put the needle down on the first song and began to play and sing along with the JT. Mike P—–, drunk, high and stoned, like the rest of us, began to listen and then get that amazed stare that is common to those in that state of medicated mindlessness; he began to proclaim, “Look, Chuck is James Taylor!” Soon everyone in the room had become consumed in Mike’s infectious mesmerization. And I got the notion that I might have some musical talent after all.

The next day – a cold late-winter Sunday – we drove home. I got dropped off at my house at the corner of Gleaner Lane and Bloomingdale Road, at the bottom of the “hill” that in most other regions wouldn’t be noticed as more than a slight rise. But it was one of the few such rises in this mid-Long Island flatland. This “hill” had somehow represented to me the edge of the future that I had heard so much about in school and on television and in movies. There was not much talk of the future in my household. That would involve faith and hope and give rise to the necessity of love – and these things were not allowed to dwell in the heavy and dark atmosphere that permeated 103 Bloomingdale Rd., Levittown, NY 11756 in those times.

I guess because I couldn’t see over the hill when I lay on the floor looking westward out the double-paned window panels that lined the outside back wall of our and all Levitt houses, it was an able metaphor for the mysterious future that I would one day meet. I spent hours as a young boy just laying by the attic window on the other side of the house; it was a similar sized single panel that had its base on the floor on the east side second story. From there I could watch the wind and the birds in the trees, see the house across the street and the roofs of the houses beyond. And I could watch the traffic that often got heavy on Bloomingdale Road, especially during Grumman rush hours –this the biggest single employer on Long Island for many years with it’s main headquarters just across from the multiple intersection at the northern end of Bloomingdale. Grumman traffic was so heavy that the braking wheels would eventually leave depressions in front of our house at the stop sign at the corner, no matter how often it was repaved.

The future on the other side of the hill was never bright in my eyes. Others were looking for great things from me. I had an intrinsic ability for learning, especially in the natural sciences. I would get A’s in these subjects, and rarely studied. I quite often went home on the bus from Island Trees High School with no books, as I would get all my homework in these courses done in class or study hall. But the future to me was a dark and dangerous wasteland, full of things foreboding and unfamiliar. I did not want to go there.

That began to change the Sunday night that I returned from Worcester. My parents had purchased our first color television. And the first thing I saw on it was the network premier of the movie Born Free. It touched me and for the first time in years I actually cried at the end of this movie when Elsa, the lioness, returned from the wild with her cubs to show to her own human surrogate parents. As I had done many times as a young boy for sheer survival purpose, I hid my tears, went into the bathroom to sob quietly and dry my eyes, quickly stealing up to bed before anyone noticed and inquired into the nature of deep emotions the were welling up from inside, as if it were a violation of some sort of insular commandment.

It was 11pm. I got down to my briefs and undershirt and, turned on the electric heater, as there was no household heat upstairs; I got under the covers and turned out the light. I suppose I dozed off, but what I saw was not like a dream – it was too real and vivid. It was a darkened landscape, and prominently in the foreground was the oval of a head facing me. Before my mind’s eyes in an incalculable instant in time passed the faces of everyone that had ever really cared about me and reached out to help me with their love and concern and prayers – not out of familial obligation, but out of pure and simple loving kindness. Instantly this changed to a brilliant blue sky. I was standing out on Gleaner Lane, looking up the hill to the west, as I often did while hitting self-pitched soft ball fly pops to my father on summer afternoons.

In my dream I saw a brilliant blue sky as I stood at or about “home plate” at the bottom of the hill. There was a high, elongated and brilliant white cloud and I began to scan it from bottom to top. It had a shape; it was the figure of a robed man having a crown on his head, his left hand on his heart and his right hand raised in a blessing. It was the form of Jesus Christ standing in the posture of the statuettes my friend’s mothers had on their car dashboards and in the little shrines in the dens and hallways. I shuddered, said in a frightened whisper “It’s God!” and sat up in the dark, shaking. I turned on the light, and It was just me in bed in my room. But I was afraid to lay my head back down on the pillow.

When I finally got up the courage to turn out the light and lay down, every time I dozed off, I saw brilliant and beautiful sunsets on the water. As I write I can feel their brilliance light up inside me. This happened several times before I fell off to sleep.

The sunsets returned for two more Sunday nights in a row, each different and each gorgeous. And they ended the following Wednesday night with a vision of a noon day sunlit thunderhead that somehow let me know that I was destined to rise up into the clouds with the rest of the blessed one day. This image was disrupted by my friend Tommy T—— knocking on my closed bedroom door. When he came in, he saw I was napping and he told me not to get up, but he had something for me in his closed fist. I opened my hand and he dropped into it several guitar picks he had procured especially for me. And then he left.

The next day was Holy Thursday, the following Sunday being, of course, Easter. No more visions on Sunday nights, but I then and there embarked on a years long search through almost every major religion of the world and every Christian sect, finally finding a home in the Church of most of my childhood friends and families, my parent’s forebears, and yes, my sister. I have played the guitar and sang solo in restaurants and at catered parties for pay. And I am a career commercial fisherman, having seen literally thousands of serene and spectacular sunsets over the water. I carry a camera on board and have photographed dozens. And ever since that “Born Free” Sunday night, with few moments in exception, the future has looked bright and full of promise.

I now see the people whose faces flashed before me that night as my heroes — the tragedy of my dysfunctional, alcoholic, hopeless, faithless and loveless childhood that left me to be, as the Baltimore Catechism of the Roman Catholic Church put it, a “near occasion of sin” for the children of the devout Catholic parents in my Levittown neighborhood, was actually the God-willed occasion of bringing out the best in those people and for no other reason than that I needed their loving care, without which I surely would have perished in the pit on the other side of the hill.

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The dream was this – I was in a classroom taking a test (a recurring dream scenario for me of late), and there was a noise outside. I went to the door and looked to the right up the highway; there was a towering dark cloud, like a tornado, only emanating from its sides, like leafed branches of a tree, were outcroppings of fire and electricity. I knew this was an ‘act of God” and that if it came my way, it would be my end of life on earth. But it went across the street and hit a one story cinder block building with people inside. I saw the people get tumbled in the twisted wreckage. I started to go out to the disaster to see if I could help, but my teacher told me that if I didn’t finish the test, it would not count and I could not take it over. I told her that people needed help and I was going. I ran to the building and found that the inside had not been as damaged as I thought and no one was killed. I helped several people out, one man saying that he needed to get into the bathroom, but it was blocked. I assumed he wanted to see if someone was trapped inside. I went to look, and woke up.

I laid in bed pondering this vivid dream/adventure, then got up. After going to the bathroom unimpeded, I sat down with a bowl of cereal and checked my email. A friend had sent me a message about a dream she had had about being up in a hot air balloon with the late actor John Ritter. They had kissed, and she was disappointed with it. She wanted to know what I thought about it, having had some experience with my ability to interpret dreams, both mine and those of others. I said it seemed to be that she was looking for “the perfect love,” like in the Jackson Browne song “The Late Show”, ” . . .without dreaming of the perfect love and holding it so far above that if you stumbled onto someone real, you’d never know.” I thought about trying to tell her of my own dream, but decided not to get into it.

Later that day – late morning/early afternoon – I glanced at a TV news program and saw a clip of a cinder block building that had mysteriously blown up in Huntington Station with people inside – it was the building I had dreamed of, destroyed just as the one I had seen. At the time they weren’t sure if there were any fatalities – the disaster had just taken place – but it seemed that all the employees of the Haberstadt Nissan used car dealership had escaped without serious injury. This fact was deemed to be miraculous by witnesses. The explosion had been so loud and powerful, that everyone assumed that all had perished. When I spoke to my girlfriend later that afternoon, I told her about this event and the prescient dream I had had that morning.

The next morning, I checked Newsday.com as I normally do, looking in particular for the details of the explosion. It was believed to be a natural gas explosion, although it seemed there was no gas service directly to the building. The main part of the article was about a man who had been across Jericho Turnpike at an Auto Barn buying transmission fluid because his truck was acting up, an activity which I have become quite familiar with recently. When the building blew up, this guy dropped what he was doing and without hesitation for his own safety, rushed into the ensuing inferno to help those trapped inside to escape. Others followed his lead, and they together saved all the occupants from further injury and, perhaps, certain death, as the building became engulfed in flames soon after all had been removed to a safe distance.

The part of the dream that dealt with the event that happened in the real world later that day was so starkly vivid both visually and in how it had intruded upon the drab and familiar dream of a classroom setting, that I knew I was going to have to decipher its meaning. Most surprising was that I knew that it was God’s direct will that the building be destroyed with people inside. Normally I would think that He was a passive observer of this random event – intervening in His wisdom at some point at the behest of deceased holy relatives or the prayers of living loved ones, or some such thing, knowing beforehand that this was going to happen, but letting it happen anyway — after all, we are not living in perfection here on earth. My explanation and rationalization to myself or anyone who seemed interested in my theological apologetics would have been that God will fill all the voids left by our earthbound tragedies later in His perfection after this life is completed.

But here it was God, or His angel at His bidding, entering this reality to overtly destroy a building, injuring souls and disrupting lives. Was He angry with the Nissan people? Or was there something going on in that particular site that was so egregious as to merit such wrath? Was He providing a way for me to get a cheap truck so I wouldn’t have to keep pouring transmission fluid and other petroleum products into my old Chevy, wondering when the engine would blow up in its own cloud of fire and electricity?

I had seen the event from the point of view of the bystander/hero – the Good Samaritan/amateur-auto-mechanic who had unknowingly rallied the others who together saved the lives of nine people. He rose to the occasion — or was this the occasion of his and the other’s rising . . .?

Take warfare, for example — Many buildings are destroyed, souls lost, lives disrupted. Could God be in all those destructive events, too, as He was in the destruction of the Haberstadt Nissan used car depot? Could He also be just as intimately involved in all human tragedies – fires, floods, earthquakes, storms, diseases, abuse, dysfunctional relationships? We pray for Him to enter these things after the fact – heal the hurts, the sickness, the broken hearts, the empty lives. But He’s already there. He planned it all, allowed it all, did it all.

to be continued ….

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On his biographical DVD, THE HERO’S JOURNEY, Joseph Campbell, the late professor of comparative religions and author of many books on cultural mythology, recounted an incident on a radio talk show that led him to a personal epiphany on the subject of belief in God. After arguing with the host on the air about the value of myths as metaphors, he realized, he said, that “God is a metaphor for that which is beyond all categories of human thought,” and that personal belief in God stems from a person finding their chosen other-worldly metaphor to have value to their earthly life.

Granted, objectively speaking, this analysis has value in giving perspective to pure fundamental belief in the tenets, stories and descriptions of a particular religion. Biblical Abrahamic monotheism is belief in Almighty God as transcending the physical realm, which includes the darkness of human comprehension – “…and the darkness comprehended it not.” (John 1:5)

But the first part of that verse from the Gospel of John belies a fact of Christianity that Campbell, a former devout Roman Catholic who crossed “east of Suez” (as he oft put it) to the Eastern faiths of an impersonal godhead, seems to ignore. John begins that verse by stating, “And the Light was the light of men …”. This “Word” that was also “Light” which was “from the beginning with God” and “was God” also “became flesh and dwelt among us.” By interpretation, this account indicates that, while knowledge of the Divine cannot be attained by the power of human intellect, God has revealed himself in the person of the man Jesus of Nazareth.

Jesus never came out directly declaring to the world that he was the Son of God, but is depicted as having implied this in many places. This point is summed up in his reply to the Apostle Philip when he asked to be shown God the Father:

Jesus said to him, ‘Have I been with you so long, and yet you have not known me, Philip? He who has seen me has seen the Father; so how can you say, ‘Show us the Father?’”

We create metaphors as a means of communicating ideas that otherwise might defy description. We do this by conceiving in our minds of something in life and/or our imaginations that appears to us to be an effective parallel to something else, and then either write it down or tell it, or both. So a childrens’ story about three billy-goats and a troll under a bridge might have been told in antiquity to comment about some situation involving serfs held material hostage by a greedy and malevolent nobleman.

If there is a transcendent Almighty God (and there is, of course) our darkened minds may not be able to get their arms around him, but he can surely make himself known whenever and wherever he so desires. The Gospels are the accounting of the time when God did just that by conceiving of his own metaphor for himself in the womb of a Jewish virgin, then telling this metaphorical tale in the form of the life of a Jewish man who had been born in a manger in Bethlehem, the City of King David. As the Jewish joke about the proof that Jesus was a Jew goes, “He went into his father’s business, he was sure his mother was a virgin, and she was sure that he was God.”

There is great value for anyone who wants to see this Jesus as he really is in focusing on the fact that he was a Jew among Jews, being descended in the line of King David. There is a tendency for Christians to somehow see Jesus and the Apostles and his mother Mary and surrogate father Joseph as being something other than Jewish. But the fact is that they were, and that, for the first generation of believers at least, they believed they had followed Jesus into true Judaism. Maybe another parallel project for this particular purpose might be called “The Gospel of the Nice Jewish Boy.”
However, the effective principal of this human metaphor of God was not based in his cultural origin. It is in the nature of his being. And that was loving kindness. And it was completely human. He did nothing Godlike as far as we know; he left the Godlike acts to his Heavenly Father. He did not produce the signs of his power and authority as the Jewish leaders demanded of him and some of his disciples were hoping for. When miracles were produced he prayed beforehand and gave his Father the credit afterward. He even said that through faith those listening to him would produce “greater things than these.” And all of his miraculous acts had loving kindness at their core.

If we compare Jesus of Nazareth to himself, vis a vis his actions to his words, we can argue endlessly of the nuances and connotations of who and what he was portraying himself to be. But when we compare him to other deities and avatars that have purportedly walked the earth, the distinctions of this particular “one solitary life,” a phrase made famous by an adaptation of a sermon recounted in Dr. James Allan Francis’ book, “The Real Jesus,” come into bright line focus. He really did very little, by historical standards, in his life, and we have no independent corroborative evidence that he ever really existed. But a line can be drawn through the development of humanity on earth where the standards of all human behavior began to rapidly change, eventually allowing for great “free” societies made up of hundreds of millions of people living basically shoulder to shoulder and, quite literally, on top of one other, in relative peace and harmony.

The classic Christian belief doesn’t end it there: “On the third day he rose again. He ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father,” the Apostle’s creed puts it. In my particular chosen belief system, the Roman Catholic Faith, people crowd into churches to sit in uncomfortable wooden pews on cold and bleak winter mornings to listen to a man dressed in funny clothes reciting the same prayers that were read last week and every week before, that not because they are afraid that they will rot in hell for eternity if they don’t. For the most part, it is because they have felt the kind, human touch of the Divine at some point and at many significant points in their lives. There is only one belief system that I know of that allows for such life experiences, and that is the one that identifies the Divine active principle with a eminently kind and compassionate Jewish man who was killed over two thousand years ago, rose again from the grave and reaches with a still human hand to touch lives from God’s transcendent dimension.

No threat of punishment under the law enforced by ethereal threats of eternal suffering or by paramilitary troops and prison terms and death could alone bring about the cultural changes the world has undergone in the Christian era. What has brought us into this place in human history was the one solitary life that displayed pure loving kindness to every person that was brought before him, regardless of age, gender, class, genealogy, status in the community, and even religious belief. No one who looked to him for help went away unsatisfied. He had the power and authority of his Father in heaven to back up the loving kindness in his heart, and his Father did not hold anything back.

Starting first in the land of Canaan and then spreading into Europe and the Middle East and finally all over the world, the stories of the spontaneous loving kindness of this Jewish man who could calm the stormy seas with a word, give sight to a man afflicted with congenital blindness with mud he made with his own spit, feed hordes of hungry followers with a couple of dried fish and a few loaves of bread, and give women and children an eminent place in his work in the midst of a culture that had rendered them all but irrelevant, have been and are being told and retold. The result is that being kind to your neighbors to the point of your own detriment and despite who and what they are – even if they are your sworn enemy – is the universal norm as to what being “good” is. Jesus of Nazareth, in effect, has become the “good angel” on the right shoulder of the world. And in those places where such is not yet the case, the dominant national powers of the world apply political and military pressure that these governments clean up their acts.

I’m not saying that the current state of affairs is that the Kingdom of God on earth will break out with more forced regime changes at the point of armored fighting vehicles and smart bombs. To the extreme contrary, I am merely pointing out that, as with the example given by Jesus, the Davidic Galilean Jew, the power of God to change the world is unleashed through individual acts of pure human kindness.

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One sunny summer afternoon I was out in our yard tilling the little victory garden that I had enhanced with the carcasses of otherwise underutilized sea robins and summer dogfish. Our second child was pensively dangling from a swing on the swing set I had erected not twenty feet from me. I noticed her head turned to the ground below her, her dirty blond curls hanging in front of her round, angelic face. As her feet slowly scraped along the eye-shaped brown bald patch of hard packed soil surrounded by lush green grass that is typical under heavily used swing sets, I readied myself for what was surely to come. Rebecca’s four year-old mind had begun to notice worlds beyond her own little one, and she was in the habit of asking remarkably insightful, and exquisitely and delightfully uninformed questions. She had recently inquired of her mother if they had to kill cows to get milk.

“Daddy, could you raise the swing?” she called.

“Sure, Honey. Why?” I asked, playing the good straight man, as all loving fathers must from time to time.

Without looking up, she said wistfully, “Because I can’t stand the sound of the worms screaming.”

Becky has always thought and acted “out of the box”; she is currently pursuing a Doctorate in Switzerland, having achieved a Master’s at Oxford, where women make up about five percent of the student body. But, today, reflecting on this cherished memory after having read the latest proposals to come down the fisheries policy pike, I realized that she had the makings of a good marine environmentalist back then. In particular, local environmental scientists seem to be responding to the anguished cries of the dwindling numbers of sandpipers known as red knots, cries they alone can hear, as they starve to death for want of horseshoe crab eggs. Their own numbers put adult horsefeet (as we local Long Island bayman are fond of calling them) in the millions while the the particular pigeon sized endangered fowl has dwindled down to less than ten thousand individuals. I guess they need lots of horsefoot eggs.

But, as with my little girl on the swing, they have no classical science to back up their theory. There is no physical evidence that the disappearance of these red-breasted shorebirds is at all linked to the numbers of horseshoe crabs in our estuaries. In fact, the evidence would normally indicate the contrary, since it has been reported that while the numbers of these above-the-high-tide-mark egg-laying helmet-shaped crustaceans are booming, the red knot is still in dangerous decline. We can only assume that these concerned environmentalists must be hearing subliminal — and quite specifically detailed — SOS’s from these wide ranging tundra breeders.

From my own experience the problem may not be that there aren’t enough female horseshoe crabs. Their numbers have increased exponentially in the few years since the promulgation of “emergency” horseshoe crab measures, enacted to insure that shorebirds of all kinds would continue to come and populate our shores. I suppose they may have gone to the mountains or our city streets in search of this all important food source. But, not to worry. There are so many horsefoot trains — large egg laden females always followed by one to three males attached boxcar-like — of these extraordinarily prolific creepy-crawlers along our beaches from early spring through the Fourth of July that if they suddenly acquired a taste for human flesh, all those within a mile of the water would be skeletons by morning.

May I submit that it may be that there are too many land birds living near our waterways that is causing the suffering for the cherished knot of red. I can always tell when there has been a horsefoot orgy on the overnight high tide on the sand spit next to the town dock where I launch my boat, this by the hordes of sparrows, starlings and blackbirds feverishly flailing away at the sand with their stout beaks designed to pick bugs and seeds from fields, and shrubs. The environmentalists are right — there are no red knots among them.

Come to think of it — in my nearly half century of fervent and studied bird watching along Long Island’s shores, I’ve never seen a red knot. Those damned sparrows and starlings. Aren’t they in this Country illegally??

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In our experience are many things, but in our minds are many other things that we somehow believe to be in our experience and are not. We experience the sun coming up and going down every day, but we imagine that we know by experience that the earth is rotating causing this “illusionary” rising and setting that we experience. We somehow have let the scientific cosmological explanation displace our own experience of the Cosmos.

Science can claim many victories, some complete and others partial. The battle over polio was a complete victory — as for cancer it is only partial. Al Gore has depicted global warming, aka climate change, as a cosmic illness. “The earth has a fever,” he says in his documentary. This is the first time that such a global “disease” has been “isolated and identified” by science, but there seems to be an overwhelming consensus as to the diagnosis and cure. Science has been after cancer for decades, a disease involving a small number of rogue cells in an individual living organism. Global warming involves an entire world made up of everything and everyone that makes up life as we know it. And the culprit pathogen …? Carbon dioxide, the very gas that nearly all living things either breath out or breath in.

If science can’t claim complete victory over cancer, why should we trust them to predict our future over this so-called “earth fever?”

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Many creation myths involve great struggles that result in the separation of originally unified elements bringing about the pairs of opposites that is our experience of life: male and female, birth and death, day and night, etc. The Old Testament creation story is not one of these. God brings form to an empty and formless earth and then brings living things out of the earth, already differentiated into species and gender. Adam, the first man, comes along, the lone human, a male, formed from the soil. The only conflict in this part of the story is that he has trouble finding a companion out of all the creatures God has placed in the Garden of Eden with him. God puts this first human into a deep sleep and only takes one layer of protective bony tissue from his torso, out of which He makes Eve, Adam’s female counterpart.

We later see many great struggles in both the Torah (the Old Testament to Christians) and the New Testament. There’s the disobedience of the first couple and their fall from grace resulting in you and me and all other humans being barred from the peace and beauty of the Garden, and whence come all the rivalries, murders, floods, wars, etc., all stemming from the original sin of Adam and Eve.

Jesus Christ, in answer to a dogmatic enigma put to him by Jewish theologians about the pair of opposites that is inherent in earthly humanity, unexpectedly explained that in the Kingdom of God to come after the resurrection of the dead there will be no male and female, but people there “will be like angels walking the earth.” He seemed to intimate that one of the problems causing strife and misunderstanding in this earthly human life that will be solved in the life to come is the temporal separation into a pair of opposites. Did he mean that all the women will disappear back into the male rib cages from whence they came? I think not.

Modern conventional cosmology purports that at the beginning there was a unification of elements that was separated in an incomprehensibly stupendous explosion. We know this as the “Big Bang”. Some of the biggest “bangs” ever witnessed by humanity have resulted from humans purposely splitting the atoms of a man created substance called plutonium. But, far from being a creative act, these bangs bring horrible sickness, death and desolation that can go on for decades. Out of the aboriginal Big Bang came awesome beauty, and on this one resultant sphere of congealed, sun warmed matter called planet earth came a vast plethora of life forms yearning for life itself, bringing forth like life forms, giving their life’s energy and even sacrificing their own lives so that life can and will go on. What, exactly, could have possibly been split that caused all this beauteous stuff called the Universe to be called into existence?

Paul wrote that “Christ was crucified before the foundation of the earth.” Now, if, as it is taught, the suffering and death of Jesus of Nazareth, the Only Begotten Son of God, who was with God and was God from the beginning, was only intended to counteract the effects of human sinfulness, both original and personal, why does it need to be an act that occurred before the foundations of the earth were laid?

If we analyze what we know from what the New Testament authors tell us about the crucifixion of Christ and place this in the intellectual atmosphere of modern secular cosmology, an interesting juxtaposition occurs. Let us assume that before the foundations of the earth and, hence, the entire Universe were laid, the Trinity of Christendom was in a complete, loving and eternal Union. It follows that when the cataclysm of Divine separation that came into being when the Son of God, one-third of the Triune Godhead, was “abandoned” to the death by God his Father took place, we have now the establishment of a situation that, in the light of what happens when a few tiny atoms are split, could do nothing less than to bring forth a mammoth and prodigiously creative and life giving “Bang“. Into the void of this eternal moment of loss, grief and yearning for reunion between this, the most loving Parent and Child relationship that has ever been and could ever be, poured creative love from both sides bringing forth a Universe of Life made up of pairs of opposites yearning for each other and for Life itself.

Each and every loving relationship that forms in this life has an eternal quality to it, and yet all in such life giving unions will lose the other to suffering and death. But in the lexicon of the spiritual Universe being explored herein, all have the Promise in the Resurrection and Ascension of Jesus Christ that there will be the Great Reunion in the Kingdom where all will be together again, One in Him and Them.

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 How is it that our pets seem to know exactly when to be in the wrong place at the right time? The cat wants attention but you are busily trying to get ready for work. You put your morning tea into the microwave and the phone rings unexpectedly. It’s your sister and she wants to talk about the upcoming surprise anniversary party being planned for your parents. You’re annoyed at this — she should know that it’s the wrong time. You constrain yourself from scolding her, knowing this will only prolong the conversation. You hear your beloved pet whimper a “meow” from the floor and see her out of the corner of your eye. But you’re running out of time. You promise to call your sister from work later, and get her off the phone. Now where are the car keys? You remember that you put them in your coat pocket when you got home from the store last evening so you could bring the recycle can back in from the street where the trash man tossed it on his morning scoot through town. You go to the coat rack, reach in the right hand pocket and there they are. Just then the microwave rings out. You put your coat on, and fix your tea to take with you. You realize that this is not your usual morning routine, but you’re rushed for time. And then you remember that you forgot to check your email, and your boss has been harping about personal use of work computers. You quickly run in the bedroom and there’s the cat, on your comfortable computer chair. You pick her up and snuggle her for a moment, amazed at how, no matter what kind of chaos is happening in your day, she always knows how to get what she wants from you. And you wish you knew her secret so you could try it on your sister and the other people in your life.
I finally saw a segment from “The Dog Whisperer,” a series on the National Geographic Channel about the amazingly successful canine behavior specialist Cesar Milan. On this particular episode he was able to, with the help of his own two young sons, get an Australian shepherd over its long embedded fear of children in an incredibly short amount of time. He claims the key to connecting with our pets is to “live in the now.” And in the above hypothetical, that’s Kitty’s secret.
Anything that keeps time consists of two basic components: a modulator — something that makes a repeated motion at a regular interval — and a counter. The basic interval the work-a-day world relies on is the second, but atomic clocks now divide this interval into millions of parts called nano seconds, useful in quantum science. Your boss may not be counting time in nano seconds yet, but minutes on the clock do count, to say nothing of hours and days. But to Kitty, it’s just a useless plastic disc you hung over the sink and some folded paper on the wall you make marks on and flip over once in a while.
Nothing exists in the past or the future — there is only the now. This we know. If this is true it should be eminently easy to live in the now. But it is actually the most difficult thing there is for us. In fact, it is the “now” that we are working so hard every day to keep away from us. Homeless people live in the “now“. The tornadoes that hit central Florida last week were deliverers of the “now” to those unfortunate people. Thousands in Indonesia are still caught in the “now” that the tsunami swept over them the day after Christmas two years ago.
We give up this daily “now” in hopes of a more fulfilling, safe and healthy one this weekend, next month or next summer. But, in my experience, at least, it doesn’t really work that way. The best “now’ moments can no more be planned than can the tragic ones. They just “happen“, too. We live here in the Western World, working so hard all week long avoiding what we perceive as what’s bad about the “now”. Maybe the “Now” in this scenario has to be like Kitty, following us and watching us intently and waiting for the right moment in the patterns we repeat every day to surprise us with something good.

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Dear Professor Silver:

I’m a first year evening student, and on my second night back this semester I happened to pick up a copy of last semester’s Restatement and I read your article about the Renaissance Lawyer Society, and the personal problems many lawyers are having with lawyering that this organization is addressing. It was quite serendipitous that I found your piece at that moment, as I was actually looking at the paper to find out how I could submit a piece I’ve been formulating about my own intense experience with these things in only my first semester at Touro Law School.

I wanted to write about the disorienting feeling that I and my fellow students have encountered as we became inundated with the dozens of cases to analyze and the plethora of principles of American jurisprudence that is the culture shock of first year law school. I’m a commercial fisherman by trade; I was spending my days this semester on a 42′ boat picking, packing and cutting fish 10 miles out of Shinnecock Inlet in seas often running 6-8 feet. I’ve been doing this for most of my life, but I never knew seasickness until this semester – and I began to get it every time I opened up a case book.

This was very strange to me, because before I enrolled at Touro perusing case law was one of my favorite hobbies. However, I had always done this with issues I had a vested interest in. I came to the conclusion that my own bewilderment was because we are being taught – required, in fact, at the penalty of grade point deduction – to absolutely not naturally identify with particular parties in a case or sides of an issue when we read, and this is thoroughly new to us. It is as if we are learning to identify and understand the physical laws that act upon the individual material bodies of the universe while we float in the weightless and frigid vacuum of outer space. I’m getting seasick just thinking about it.

But these “individual material bodies” that have been acted upon by the laws we are aspiring to ascertain are real people – the cases bear their names. And these cases are very often windows into the worst moments of their lives. Few people are happy to be before a court of law, and few even of the winners of civil cases would chose to experience the benefit of the verdict and award, rather than to have had the event that brought them there never to have happened. I began to have this sense of being an intruder in a massive mausoleum of shipwrecked lives as I walked the halls and perused the aisles of the Touro Law Library. And I began to wonder if I could survive law school with this kind of sensibility at work within me.

One evening in the cafeteria I was reminded of a scene from Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan while observing several classmates collaborating on the open universe problem we had been assigned in Legal Methods I. One classmate, who is employed as a paralegal, was proudly brandishing the printouts of the cases he had decided were the ones important to the ascribed hypothetical fact pattern, emphatically calling out the identifying case names. Captain Miller’s squad, in the Hollywood hypothetical, was also given an open universe case. Like a team of associates in a large law firm, they were given the task of representing the mother of a soldier whose three brothers were killed in action. Winning this case meant putting their own lives in the same peril James Ryan was in in order to deliver him safely home to the arms of his grieving mother, while they themselves would still have to stay and fight and possibly die. None of them liked it, or would have volunteered if given the choice – but, soldiers, like law students and associates in law firms, have little choice in such matters.

The scene I am referring to is when the squad, now less one companion (killed, by the way, when he gives in to his sense of compassion and attempts to help a little French girl who reminds him of his niece,) sits down in view of dozens of Airborne Rangers at a rallying point in a clearing in post D-Day Normandy to nonchalantly search through a pile of dog-tags. These belonged to Rangers killed in action and the squad was hoping to get a way out of the “case” by finding that Private Ryan was already dead. Wade, the medic, shook them out of their self-centered disinterest by scoldingly pointing out that, while they were jokingly tossing the bloody metal medallions around like so many discards in a poker game, “The whole Airborne is watching!”

“Could this be the source of lawyer jokes?” I wondered. I began to see us students and practitioners of American lawyering as flocks of birds swooping down into these forests of the terrible moments of peoples lives that are law libraries, searching for the tasty tidbits that are sometimes fruits on the branches, sometimes parasitic insects, sometimes the sap still seeping from ancient wounds – whatever will help us with the assigned hypothetical fact pattern. And we must cheerily and quickly flit from tree to somber tree to survive. I began to wonder what law school would turn me into, and whether it was something I wanted to be.

On the day before the Contracts I final, I was given a saving moment – a real life changing epiphany. I had been almost drowning in my notes, case briefs, restatements and outlines for weeks. This was to be the last final and the end of the horrific first semester. And I needed a break before the grueling three-plus hours of essay writing was to begin that Monday night. I accepted the invitation to accompany my girlfriend and her mother to a performance of Handel’s Messiah by the Moriches Choral Society at a local church.

I had been bemused and frustrated by the subject matter in this field of law, particularly because of its amorphous nature. Contracts law seemed to be herds of amoeba-like entities that have a common nucleus – an agreement between two parties – that constantly change shape. Each and every principle seemed to be a matter of debate and contention in every case; the casebooks, the restatements – and all these volumes were all about determining one thing – whether or not there was an enforceable agreement. I watched and listened to this symphonic and choral performance before me, with all its instrumentation and arrangement and the sub-themes that played and replayed in seemingly endless variation – all in accompaniment of the elegantly sung theme of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ – the story being that this is the New Covenant – the unbreachable Contract between God and Man. It occurred to me – was quickened unto my spirit, to put it into Biblical terminology – that contract law is like a symphony. It is the endless intertwining of common law principles all centered on the essential human theme of exchanged promises and their effects on people. The courts are listening for a certain harmony of these principles to determine whether or not the agreement rises to the level of being an enforceable contract.

And so, I went into my Contacts I final with a real sense of peace.

This revelation has expanded to encompass all the Law to me. It occurred to me that American common law jurisprudence is the result of what we all – all of us in our cultural past and present – have decided is the proper way to treat each other. I then posed the question as to when we all do this within our primarily mundane and uneventful lives. The answer came back that we do this in our dreams. This is when we act out the potential within our fears and desires, and determine by our reactions what is acceptable behavior and what is not. It is the only safe place to do this kind of experimentation.

And so, if I may be so bold, being a first year student of law and all, as to offer a conclusion – a personal and (I hope) original adage in this regard:

The source of the Law is the vibrant symphony of human interaction composed by the People in their sleep.

May I also suggest that a course of study in the Anthropology of the Law should be required of all first year law students.

Thank you, Professor Silver, for providing me with an avenue with which to get this off of my chest. Please feel free to respond.

Chuck Tekula

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