I have a secret, I am spiritually bankrupt. The reason I tell you this upfront, is that I’ve always worried that it showed.
Commercialing, sitting in any airline passenger seat, I try to establish a pecking order of importance with my neighbors. Peeking at their paper-worked laps or their laptops, deciding this one’s a lawyer, that one’s a Corporate V.P…. I start playing my head-games.
I’m better than he is, smarter, more worldly than that one, but close calls require that I pull out my passports, with their stamps and visas from all over the world, pretending to need some info from these passports (busy work), I break the tie… See, I’m the biggest dog, look where I’ve been, fool!
Considering my need to do this, I have little hope for my future growth towards emotional or spiritual maturity…I’m not better yet! When I try to think why I’m thus driven, I avoid looking too closely. It’s very uncomfortable.
I asked Kiley to listen to my CD of Rach-3 from start to finish… I told her, if she listened to my Rach-3, I would listen to whatever she wanted me to listen to. I wanted (really) to get her impression of the piece, since I love it so.
To give her credit, the first movement is more than 15 minutes long, and the whole more than half an hour. She declared, after the second movement, and unable to sit through any more, “it doesn’t go anywhere!” (too slow moving, is how I interpreted her critique.)
I understood. At her age, she didn’t have the patience to allow the three movements to develop, and to therefore appreciate the whole.
I remember my father calling me over in Synagogue to point out the English versions of passages he must have found particularly meaningful. All the “praise God, Glory to God” stuff… I couldn’t
believe it. He seemed like an idolater. Didn’t he realize, I thought, that any real God wouldn’t need to hear all that bullshit?
I don’t think much about God, but when I do, I’m always brought back to a dark night, in a rain soaked jungle. I am standing still, wet through for days, numb, exhausted beyond caring, I have shorted out. The rain, coming straight down now, pours through the flash suppressor ports of my M-14, slung upside-down from my sopping shoulder.
Staring straight ahead, unseeing, I’m quits. Suddenly, standing there in front of me, within my pool of darkness, is a man. The fact that he’s wearing a Marine Corps khaki poncho and fatigues doesn’t yet register. He is facing me, and sees through my eyes and into my heart. We say nothing, but he knows… without a word, he takes my weapon, then removes the heavy pack from my back. He strips me to my waist. In my pack, he finds a towel and some dry shirts, rolled within my poncho. Briskly, he towels me dry. Working quickly now, he pulls a dry t-shirt over my head, buttons me into a new fatigue shirt, and pulls my poncho down, into place.
Instantly, I begin to come alive, the warmth floods life back into me. The man eases me back into my pack, and re-shoulders my rifle, now with my help. He looks me in the face for a moment, and then he’s gone. That man in the jungle, thirty-five years ago, was Jesus Christ. Through the years, my New York cynic, Jew-brain has twisted and turned-upside down, all religious conviction. I’ve tried every way I can to explain this experience to myself, even believing it to be the delusional byproduct of my then wretched condition.
No… the one thing I’m sure of, as sure as I am of any real thing, is that that was Jesus Christ there, in those fatigues, saving me.
As I said, I don’t dwell much on God, and I hope, after all I’ve done since then, that he doesn’t spend much time thinking about me.
Months later, I’m home, watching the Gulf War Victory Parade on T.V., our proud troops are marching down Pennsylvania Avenue, in Washington, D.C. My stomach involuntarily rebels, and I choke back
the vomit until I just make it to the toilet. On my knees now, spitting the final, sour acid juices from my mouth, I’m wracked with tears, trying to feel patriotic and proud of what we’ve done over there.