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 to Yale Divinity School, where the Babylonian spoke of the dream in a class on adolescent psychology and pastoral care taught by one Professor James E. Dittes. Rev. Welles was a Yale Divinity grad and still very much a part of things there, and he wondered what these aspiring ministers would think about his Babylonian boy. The boy was happy to get out from classes for the day and take such a special trip. The Rector of St. Paul’s, Rev. Matt Warren, thought this would be a great educational adventure so he supported it, although he himself did not know much of the dream.
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
