the dream may be about. So I am inclined to follow it…who knows where, but west, somehow. I almost want to go on a westward pilgrimage, but I have no real idea of where to. Otherwise I might.”
Then the whole group walked down the hallway to an early evening chapel service. The boy played Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring on his classical guitar, and Rev. Welles gave a little sermon on how the pelican is a Christian symbol of love because it plucks its breast vein if it has to in order to feed its offspring. The pelican is the school symbol at St. Paul’s for that reason, explained the Rev. Welles. Finally, they all had dinner in the dining hall before the boy and his teacher drove back up Route 91 to New Hampshire.
Sometimes at the start of his philosophy class, where the boys read about psychology and religious experience that can shift emotions toward tranquility beyond time and place, Rev. Welles would ask, “How real does that dream feel?”
“Well, like more than just any dream. It has a glow to it, and it feels real enough to puzzle me. It calls me, it pulls me,” the boy answered, to the delight of his accepting peers. After all, the boy had visited Yale Divinity School and taught the students there about universal Mind, which to them was kind of wacky but also impressive. They wondered why the boy did not want to apply there for college, but he didn’t want to. Nothing Ivy would do.
“It feels a bit like I am actually headed west to do something. It’s only a dream, and I don’t really believe in angels, and then I wake up and it’s gone, but I remember it clearly. It’s hard to explain. It’s like I am sleeping but not really, kind of in some special zone. Sometimes I think this is infinite Mind telling me something that I don’t understand yet, something that I have to discover and not give up on, because in the long run I might find out where I am headed. Guys, you know you are all trying to get to someplace or other like Harvard or Yale, but not me. If I have a goal, I am going to be lured to it by divine Mind, because it isn’t coming from me. Goals are desperate detours from destiny.”
The other boys were not at all surprised to hear this, because they knew the boy. “Well, if you are into this infinite Mind stuff, who really needs school?” one asked.
The boy answered, “Good question.”
There was a beautiful life-size bronze statue of St. Paul outside the chapel, and the boys would pass by and touch its outstretched hand with a smile on their way to dinner at the Upper.
“For luck,” they would exclaim, but the boy had read enough Jung to reply, “For synchronicity, not luck.”
“Hey, whatever floats your boat, Babylon!” his classmates said. “So where does Jesus fit in?” they asked in class.
“Well,” answered the boy, “we are all sinners and can’t get to high goodness on our own, but there is a power of goodness in the universe that we could all draw on and use if we let it come our way. Something needed to happen to close the gap. Jesus had complete God consciousness, and this explains his amazing healing and creativity and love; it made his sacrifice very special and far more spiritually transformative than anything anyone else could do to open a window into the divine. I don’t recite Creeds much in church, but I believe that Jesus had the unique spiritual calling that got him betrayed and nailed to a cross while maintaining the dignity of perfect love and forgiveness, so that God could overlook the fact that human nature is not a pretty thing and cherish us all anyway despite ourselves. The test for infinite love is the manner of response to infinite adversity.”
In the library, the boy read spiritual classics and Frankel and Huxley and Bly and Kerouac. At Rev. Welles’ suggestion, he devoured the ancient philosopher Plotinus because he was into the One, the infinite Mind and its continuity with every human mind. He dug into scriptures of the world’s religions and wrote essays about how material things, competition, and glory do not constitute success, but that an awareness of our connection within the divine Mind can spring from sensing the emptiness of it all.
“Thoreau-like,” his English teacher, Mr. George Carlisle, called him more than once. “The boy is a good kid, but not in a very useful sense.” Occasionally, instead of going to watch the teams play soccer or hockey on a Saturday afternoon, the boy would wander the wooded paths up at Turkey Pond, pondering some passage from a book by whichever mystic he was reading that week. And he would read while walking around the library pond, uplifted by the magnificent fall colors or the snow, sometimes tripping on a rock. His good friend, the poet Ned Perkins, who edited the literary magazine and whose grandfather Malcolm Perkins was the editor for F. Scott Fitzgerald, referred to the boy as a “peripatetic spiritual road duck.” “Peripatetic” means that you walk around reading stuff on paths, and road ducks sometimes get run over.
Most Sundays the boy joined a handful of other students with a Catholic history in the cab ride to attend Mass at Concord Carmel—short for the Carmelite Sisters of the Monastery of Our Lady and St. Joseph—down Pleasant Street from St. Paul’s. They practiced silent prayer there and seemed to get the idea of a connecting Mind that we become more aware of when we stop talking and thinking, when we get away from reason and logic and go deeper into a still awareness of the divine Mind.
The boy was a natural-born Carmelite mystic, and sometimes also stopped by Carmel on Saturday afternoons on the way to Charlie’s Pool Hall in downtown Concord, which was about a three-mile walk. He liked the nuns a lot, and often spoke with the sisters when they were out on the grounds and not sequestered about how they experienced what they called the Mind of God in their quiet rooms.
He then would continue on to Charlie’s because he thought pool was Zen à la Kerouac, bumming cigarettes from the townies to look Bogart-cool in his old trench coat, even though he didn’t smoke them really. It was just to blend in at Charlie’s. They liked the boy because he tutored their little brothers and sisters at the Millville School, a red brick grade school across from St. Paul’s on Pleasant Street. The students were mostly poor and lived out in the country. In his last year the boy tutored math and reading most afternoons for a few hours and got to know a lot of the parents. He liked the Millville School and it felt like his kind of place, where he could be who he was. Giving was living. He felt a giver’s glow.
Then there was the mandatory Sunday mid-morning Mass in the school chapel, a thing of beauty to the boy, with sermons and music and common prayers that shaped him and made him who he was and would be.
Working with Rev. Welles, he had written his Sixth Form or senior paper on this infinite Mind and love that pervades the universe, and from which our individual minds at least mostly originate. That was a core belief for the New England Transcendentalists, who borrowed it from Hindu metaphysics. Our minds, wrote the boy, are more than matter; they have their origins in a Mind that preceded the universe and matter. Plato and Plotinus both thought so, and the boy agreed. “My mind,” he wrote, “is a very small part of the infinite Mind such that I have a separate identity and individual destiny, but without ever being separated from the wholeness of a universal Mind that includes all other minds as well. We are all small points of light in the endless field of divine luminosity.”
“Honors in Ancient History and Sacred Studies” was the sole distinction conferred on the boy at graduation, except for La Junta—the Spanish club—and cross-country. The other boys had a lot more items listed under their photos in the class yearbook because they were aiming high. The boy wasn’t aiming at all, which made all the difference. He was runner-up for the math prize. The boy kept it simple.
At graduation, when Rev. Welles asked the boy about his plans in life, he answered, “Well, Sir, I am supposed to go to Swarthmore College, as you know, and thanks for the letter of recommendation. Gerry Studds wrote a good one too for American History class. They let me in off the waiting list a week ago. But I really just am not sure I need college. Maybe there is some westward road. Sir, you have been the best, the best—and Julie
