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 play sports?” the good professor asked.
“Well, I run cross-country well and do cross-country skiing, because that’s more me than the team stuff, and it keeps me independent. People call me ‘the boy’ because that’s what the cross-country coach, Señor Ordonez, calls me when we’re out running. ‘Okay, Boy, up the hill,’ he yells out. He never calls the students by their first names, only ‘the boy so-and-so,’ like ‘the boy Smith.’ But he just calls me ‘the boy’ and says that’s all I need, because my older brother was in school there a couple of years ago and he already claimed ‘the boy so-and-so.’ Plus, he and I are not much alike, and Señor Ordonez liked my brother a lot.”
“So people just refer to you as ‘the boy’?” asked the professor.
“Yes, they do, or at least many do, and I like that because Rev. Welles says that we should all go through the whole course of our lives staying a little childlike, keeping connected with the child within us all, like Jung wrote. That’s our true self, the self that isn’t beaten down by disappointments and loses the mirth and joy of the child. Plus, I look a little more boyish than some in maybe a slightly mischievous, half-Irish kind of way, and as I grow older I want to stay a little immature to balance out aging. Even when I am an old man, I will still be the boy, and that is how I want it. I don’t want to grow up if that means losing the boy. I almost think of growing up as an illness and aging as a disease, just because look at what happens to people, all bent over and stuff! I still like old folks a lot, but they have hard times ahead.”
The students all smiled and discussed this inner child, and they said that if he could stay spiritually young all his life it would be great.
Rev. Welles chimed in, “You just have to put aside all the pressures of life and look deep into your soul and remember yourself as an innocent happy child and connect with that image. We all are only here a while anyway, and we are spiritual children so long as we don’t get completely bogged down.”
“And that drop of the Mind within us that we talk about in philosophy class that is beyond time and place, that is really the child within,” offered the boy.
Professor Dittes was, like Rev. Welles, a Jungian, so he understood the boy. The boy was fun for all the Yale folks, and he helped them reclaim their souls in a way that all their theology books could not. He liked to challenge people to reclaim their souls, and that’s why he spoke of the dream when he might just have easily pretended that he never had it. Being a blue angel dreamer does not quite pack the resume like hockey does, and it is no way to begin a college interview.
After a couple of hours, the professor thanked the boy, saying, “Well, some dreams happen for reasons we do not know. We are all connected in the collective unconscious, which Jung thought was the core of all spiritual experience and symbolism. So for next week, everyone, write a little reflective essay on the boy and his blue angel dream.”
“Yes, we are connected,” added the boy. “I mean, Alan Watts says even physically. Look at my glasses—thousands of people helped make these. Someone gathered the sand and melted the glass, and someone made the machine to do it with, and someone had to mine iron ore to make the steel to make the aluminum frames, and someone drove a truck to deliver these but there has to be a road and workers and it just goes on and on and on. We depend on the kindness of countless others for every detail of our lives. But, Professor, what I believe is that we are also all connected spiritually, all part of the divine Mind and so all kinds of spiritual connections are possible that completely go beyond the limits of time and place. The problem is that we think we are more separate than we are, so bad stuff happens.”
“Do you think anyone will ever prove that this God, this infinite Mind, is real?” he asked the boy.
“Well,
