The boy in the yearbook
You must learn to get in touch with the innermost essence of your being. This true essence is beyond ego. It is formless; it is free; it is immune to criticism; it does not fear any challenge. It is beneath no one, superior to no one, and full of magic, mystery, and enchantment.
—Deepak Chopra
The Dream and the Car: How the Journey Began
We wake, if ever we wake at all, to mystery.
—Annie Dillard
It was early morning, misty and silver-gray, at the end of a long road to the unknown west. High above the sea, a long-haired blond youth leaned outward over a ledge, about to let go, when out of the mist appeared the light blue image of an angel’s face. Speaking softly and with great love, the angel said, “If you save him, you too shall live.” Then she faded back into the silver-gray mist.
The boy’s dream was vivid after he awoke, and it stuck with him over the course of the day and beyond. It started with a silvery-gray luminosity like a Tiffany stained glass window, and then came the leaning youth. Slowly it brightened into light blue, and out of that blue appeared the beautiful angel’s face. Then spoke her deeply soothing and peaceful voice, after which she faded into silver-gray.
The boy was asleep when he dreamed this dream but felt as though he was in a state different than mere sleep, though nothing like usual wakefulness. It was a strange feeling of being beyond place and time, and, when he awoke from this dream into the quiet of the dawn, he was unsure of where he was but felt secure and in oneness with something mysterious and peaceful. But then his sense of time and place would come back, and the day was upon him with all its chronological demands, and he would get dressed for breakfast and eight o’clock morning chapel.
The boy had a fabulous sacred studies teacher, Rev. Rod Welles, an Episcopal priest who loved the Buddhism of Alan Watts, and the boy told him about the dream over a formal Sunday dinner in the school’s large North Upper dining hall. North Upper was as elegantly constructed as the great dining hall in a Harry Potter novel, with sweeping varnished wooden beams pointing skywards, and oak tables and chairs in which sat five hundred young boys—a dozen boys per table—all suited up and just returned from mandatory Sunday chapel. Rev. Welles listened carefully, nodding his head, and said, “Well, in scripture an angel is a symbol of protection and brings messages, and light blue stands for purity and truth.” The other boys rolled their eyes and smiled, but no one actually laughed because they agreed that the boy was an okay kid, even if a bit ethereal and independent.
“Who knows, maybe there is synchronicity at work, and a youth on a ledge awaits you somewhere in the future,” Rev. Welles added. “Anyway, it’s just a dream. But it could be from God; it could have a true message and reflect something more than your own classroom worries about that ‘swirling downward vortex slowly sucking you into an immoral universe,’ as you tend to put things.”
“Maybe,” the boy responded, and now his friends around the table nodded in wide-eyed approval.
The boys of St. Paul’s called their teachers “Sir” at the time. They dressed in jackets and ties, lived simple and disciplined lives, and studied hard. It was a pure and good place to be, and Anglican in style and litany as it was a school still firmly rooted in the Episcopal tradition. He had just a few close friends because he preferred to remain self-possessed and simple. There were lots of people he got along with well, but they knew they had to give him space to be himself, and that was all he wanted. He figured it was simple to be happy but hard to be simple, and not everyone valued simplicity.
These were not tough times in the boy’s life—he was not spending long afternoons under a hot sun raking fall leaves for Mr. Chapin to work off his very occasional demerit points, nor was he eating dyspepsia-inducing hotdogs or flunking courses, and he had not been bullied or abused by anyone. Though he was surely outclassed up there because he was from Long Island and not New York City, St. Paul’s was a beautiful place that got him out of Babylon. Rev. Welles came to refer to the boy as “the Babylonian dreamer” and would mirthfully mouth Namaste with palms touching and fingers pointed upwards when the boy walked past his seat in the Chapel of St. Peter and St. Paul each morning. The boy was really from Babylon, literally, but not the ancient one with hanging gardens, rather the one on Long Island by the Great South Bay, which was for the boy an isolated commuter town far away from anything interesting other than the clamming.
He took to reading about ancient Babylon because all the other boys in history class knew about the great city in Mesopotamia, yet the boy knew nothing of it, drawing gasps from his more sophisticated peers when he proclaimed before all in his first class as a freshman Third Former, “Oh, I know all about Babylon because that’s my home town. We have hanging plants in Argyle Park on Main Street. And I snag herring in the little waterfalls.”
Sometimes Rev. Welles would seek the boy out in the crowd of “Paulies” scurrying from the chapel to the main schoolhouse along ice-covered, winding red brick paths in the cold New Hampshire mornings and ask, in a tone of pastoral warmth, “So, Babylon, any more blue angel dreams?”
“No, Sir. It’s just once every few months at most, but nothing for a while, no, Sir.”
Rev. Welles enjoyed hearing about the dream because he was always spiritually curious, and sometimes a good Episcopal priest needs a whispered hint that “God” is not dead. Kids can sometimes have spiritual experiences that adults can’t even begin to understand. The boy had tea on occasion with Rev. Welles and his lovely wife Julie in their dorm apartment, and they were a bit mystified by the spiritual side of him but found hope in the idea that maybe there really is an inspiring universal Mind and they really had eternal souls. The boy was entertaining in his simplicity, telling only tasteful light jokes and keeping things memorably mirthful. He was a natural starry-eyed wanderer, and he felt comfortable speaking of the dream to the right sort of people to get their opinions. He was never overbearing or overly serious because he liked to see people smile, but he raised a lot of sincere, big questions without becoming unwelcome. He was the one who asked that one last big question when everyone thought the conversation was done and wanted to head out the door.
Over time the boy came to think that certain dreams are inflowing gifts from the infinite Mind that our little minds are a part of, like small points of light within an endless field of brightness, but we lack awareness of this. If we were more aware of this spiritual connectivity, we would harm no one, do good to all including ourselves, and we would be healed and healing in every encounter without exception. Some dreams can reveal destinies and should be followed, although following them brings testing…there must always be tests. He believed in destiny more than goals because if he had many goals he would never be open to destiny. He couldn’t be filled with his own little goals and be open to having a larger destiny at the same time. This frustrated many of his teachers because they thought he had good potential but was markedly different from the other boys. He started to read about dreams and symbols, and he wore a simple silver ring with a green stone in it because a book said that green was the color of the Holy Spirit and comforting, like when you rest on a grassy field under the summer sun. He would wear that ring, which he purchased for five dollars in a little spiritual store in Cambridge, all of his life.
If the dream did nothing else, it awakened in him many questions and endless possibilities.
Why the Boy Was Known as “the Boy”
In the fall of his last year at St. Paul’s School, the boy and Rev. Welles drove the four hours down