And so Rev. Welles and the boy drove through New Haven along Prospect Street to the Divinity School and sat down in a seminar room around a wooden table with about twenty students, and the boy described the dream in detail, concluding only that maybe God was calling him to an unknown western ledge. This scared them a bit. To everyone’s consternation, the boy revealed that the dream had prompted him to apply to a far-out West Coast college in distant Portland, where the Jungian Beat poet Robert Bly taught the musicality of words and no St. Paul’s boys dared to venture. The boy would sometimes quote Bly and veer off into a stream-of-consciousness word flow like Beat poets do, like his favorites Kerouac and Muhammad Ali, and later Maya Angelou.
“Yes, the ledge and the angel and the road to the west, and the feeling that the road will find me when I stumble on it,” the boy summarized, after telling the students about his dream. The students were cordial and asked many probing questions until the two hours were over. The boy had a few of them on the edge of their seats. They took notes.
“So what does it all mean to you, spiritually?” asked one of them.
“Well, I think it is about finding my destiny. It is Emerson’s Over-Soul reaching down and saying that my destiny lies within its wisdom, not mine, limited as it is. We all read Emerson up at school because it’s required, but no one really takes him seriously. I do though. He inspired me to read Hindu scriptures a bit. The Hindus write about the “Supreme Mind” or “God,” and we are all of us a part of it because each mind is a precious drop of this infinite Mind, plus it underlies the whole universe. It is infinite, universal, and supreme. So we are free but connected with one another, and that explains a lot of why we have spiritual feelings of oneness. It makes the blue dream I had maybe something that was given to me rather than something I just imagined after a long day.”
Professor Dittes asked, “Well, that’s what Jung would say, more or less, with his collective unconscious. The Hindus get it, too. Western folks think it’s a little crazy. We in the West have no idea what Mind is all about. So what is God to you? Mind?”
“Sir, God is an infinite universal original loving Mind that is all around us and within us, and all of our individual minds are a part of God’s mind like small flames in an eternal fire, which means we are all connected with God and one another and even with nature, and that explains spirituality,” answered the boy. “So I sometimes call God ‘IM’ for infinite Mind, but it so happens that in the Hebrew Bible it says God is the unnamed ‘I am,’ so it works out. Maybe universal Mind is better in some ways. It sounds less far away, and I agree with the idea that Mind is right within everything. But infinite Mind seems to work best. And when I stare into the fireplace, I see all the little shoots of flame flickering around in the big flame: they are parts of it but also distinct. God is the big flame and we are the little ones, but all is one. I like the passage from Acts 17, ‘For in God we live and move and have our being.’ ”
The professor was a bit startled. “That’s a little fuzzy. Do you think that there is just this single Mind?” he asked.
“Well, Sir, I feel it mostly. But yes, Mind is one, and we all have this indwelling Mind that is beyond place and time like Emerson wrote, and this explains why we can have blue angel dreams and intuitions and premonitions and feelings for the oneness.”
“Anything else?” asked the professor.
“Well,” said the boy, “I also think that, because of this oneness of Mind, when we help someone else we also help ourselves, and that may be what the blue angel was saying with ‘If you save him, you too shall live,’ but I do not know for sure and I do not know how I will find that out.”
“So are you okay? Did Grandma Emily tell you too many times not to put your peas on your fork with your thumb? Did she teach you too much etiquette?” one of the Yale students asked with a laugh.
“Ah, Rev. Welles must have mentioned that,” and the boy nodded toward the Reverend.
“Hey, I feel great. And Emily wasn’t really my grandmother because my granddad Edwin divorced her when he got involved with a great-looking Broadway chorus girl in 1906 who became my real grandma, most likely. I don’t know for sure because my folks are never very explicit about these details. That’s when Emily started writing those books about manners because Etiquette paid the bills. I only met her once in New York when Dad was visiting his half-brother. I was a little kid. But Ned Jr. wrote me a letter to get me into St. Paul’s. Grandfather Edwin lost all his money and his seat on the Stock Exchange in bad railroad investments, so Babylon was really the end of the line for him. But she got her last name from him and a couple of sons.”
Everyone cracked up.
“So what’s the blue angel message?” asked Professor Dittes.
“Well, like I said, maybe there is a message in the words ‘If you save him, you too shall live.’ Maybe the words will find me before I find them. But I am not headed for a gray flannel suit à la Sloan Wilson or drinking martinis.”
“But all Episcopalians drink martinis, and Jesus drank wine,” the students responded collectively, with smiles.
“Well, folks, if I were living back in the days of the Old Testament, I would have been a Nazarite, one of those people who abstains from wine and alcohol by some sort of vow. The idea is that you want to keep your mind clear and open to the infinite Mind, to divine inspiration, to intuitions and things, and drinking just gets in the way. It’s an obstacle. Jesus did drink wine, but that was all they had back then, and he got to a point where he said he would no more drink of the fruit of the vine in Mark 14 as he got closer to the end. And John the Baptist was a lifelong Nazarite. St. Paul was too. Nazar means “set apart,” but it really means staying clear-headed and mindful of spirit. It doesn’t make me better than anyone else, but different. See, my Uncle Gary, for whom I was given my middle name, died of liver failure, and I went to his funeral in Groton. He was only forty-five or so. I don’t look down on people who drink, but I don’t understand why they do, and I wish Uncle Gary was alive. He gave up so much in life for one thing when he could have given up that one thing and had everything, including a good nephew. I drank beer a few times a year ago, mainly to try and fit in with the Long Island Babylonian guys that summer, or even once last fall with some St. Paul’s guys on a long weekend in Boston at the Statler Hilton Hotel by the Commons, but it just made me feel blocked and stuck, so I am now officially a lifelong Nazarite and plan to stay this way. I don’t want to miss true inspirations of Mind. Why should anyone give up a feeling of the living presence of the infinite Mind to drink?”
The Yale students looked shocked and wide-eyed, and one responded with a “Well, whatever floats your boat. But it isn’t our culture.”
“So how do you fit in with people up there in New Hampshire?” someone else asked.
“Well, okay. I am mostly happy to have escaped Babylon and for being up there, but those guys are really into big financial goals and Ivy League schools and I just don’t think about those things. I fit in really well with nature up there—I love the woods and the architecture and the sermons on Sundays. I am lucky to be there, and people treat me better than on Long Island. The Babylon that I know is pretty rough. There are a lot of hoods and bullies, and St. Paul’s is like a really cool orphanage and folks leave me in peace, even though I don’t go to hockey games because they are mostly violence interrupted by long unnecessary meetings and guys blowing whistles all the time.”
“What about the dream’s ledge?”
“Who knows, but aren’t we all a little on the ledge? Aren’t we all running on empty a little and that’s why you’re here listening to a kid like me? I’m not actually on the ledge in the dream, it’s the other guy. But this whole world is on the ledge.”
“Do you