I was taught my Even Prayers by my beloved grandmother. Now I lay me down to sleep. I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take…. Wait! What? What was that middle thing again?
It was right then I started looking for a way out.
A way out. I’m going to draw a distinction between thought and belief. What we know intellectually is different from what comes to us as belief. Intellectually, it becomes obvious that every system of belief that posits some continuation of an individual identity or soul is really just an effort at denial. Denial of the finite nature of our existence. No hell below us, above us only sky.
Well, that got outta hand pretty quick. Did you follow that? There may be a quiz later.
All I’m trying to say is, I think when I die, I’ll be dead. It’ll be just like before I was born but when I think of others, I irresistibly imagine them in Heaven. Not just any Heaven but Thorton Wilder’s Heaven from “Our Town”. Having just rewatched “Our Town”, I’m tempted to open another can of worms by saying, "White People’s Heaven" but I won’t.
I think that the idea of coincidence plays a bigger role in life than we think. I also think that the idea of synchronicity explains an awful lot but then the idea of ‘mystic cords’ begins to build a bridge from intellect to belief. Beyond even synchronicity, at times there seems to be an almost mystic connection between us one to the other.
How do you explain this? Out of the blue, I emailed my eldest daughter with an innocent question: Were her grandmother, and two aunts sisters? They were. It was an idle question on something I never really had clear. I was surprised to have an immediate, terse answer. “Yes”. I was working on something and never expected my middle-of-the-night email to be answered until the next day. That caused me to respond with a recounting of these feminine familial connections even to my daughter’s great-grandmother. I was just thinking out loud, kinda half connected to the thought I was working on about the one extraordinary aunt.
My daughter responded that the reason she was up in the middle of the night was her daughter, my granddaughter had just had a daughter of her own. I was a great grandfather. That’s way cool. It’s something I would have discovered the following day in the normal course of things. What was it that told me to insert myself in that moment? It was a feeling of presque vu.
That whole thing is a bit much to be explained by coincidence or synchronicity, especially the recounting of the female lines in the family before knowing the lines had been extended. Then, to top the whole thing off, I said, to a friend of mine, the first friend I told about the new arrival, that Penny and I were great-grandparents. Penny and I certainly are my daughter’s parents but we haven’t been together in over 40 years. Hell, the woman has been dead for 15 years, apparently occupying a ladder-back chair in Thorton Wilder’s Heaven. Did she rise from that chair, break the quiet contemplation of eternity to whisper in my ear that something important was afoot?
I don’t know what I think of that idea and I don’t know what I believe about that idea.
That’s a selfish thought. Is there something beyond my sphere that’s important about the arrival of that beautiful child? Something that warranted a general announcement thru the ether or is it just the way things work, if we can listen?
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