Saturday of Easter Vigil, April 19, 2025
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Be with me
In my Father’s house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you.
What are the memories that remind you of that precious part of life – times when someone chose, with no thought of self-protection, to BE WITH you? Remembering may take some doing, but those experiences gave you life then, and they will give you life now.
God said, “Let there be light.” And there WAS light. God saw how good the light was, and He separated the light from darkness.
Kodak harnessed the power of light and put it in a Brownie camera. Sometimes what came out deserved enlargement, and the Kodak folks put on a grand show at Grand Central Station for 40 years, enlarging our universal desire for family harmony and attachment into one 60 foot tableau after another.
My own family’s harmony was as incomplete as any, and I certainly contributed to that with my determination to live life the way I wanted. Between my 1968 high school graduation and 1978 I was married and divorced twice, and I lived at least 19 separate places. In 1976 I hitchhiked to San Francisco intending to get certified in the Alexander Technique, after hearing its teacher at an American Humanistic Psychology conference in Chicago.
I was excited to start out, fascinated by the experiences on the way, thoroughly exhausted and depressed by the time I arrived. In Berkeley I met Angelina, a friendly woman with Mom’s name, and in her care I soon became a live-in member of the Unification Church, a religious group Time Magazine dubbed the Moonies. My enthusiasm regained, I listened to the theology and followed the lifestyle of our Korean pastor, Rev. Sun Myung Moon.
I stopped drinking and smoking pot when I joined the church. I also stopped dating, waiting instead for Rev. Moon, whose mass weddings were famous at the time, to choose a wife for me. I began sleeping better, getting up at 5:30 am for prayer and falling into my sleeping bag at 10 or after, working one way or another all day, every day.
After traveling all over the United States on what we called a Mobile Fundraising Team (MFT), I was eventually enrolled in the Unification Theological Seminary in Barrytown, New York. For the summer months of 1978, I traveled with my new seminary friends to London to spend the summer listening to Rev. Moon on Sunday afternoons.
We spent our time canvassing the neighborhoods where we had settled. “Hi, my name’s Dave and I’m a member of Rev. Moon’s Unification Church. How can I help you? Can I wash your windows or rake your lawn?” But during this summer, left mostly alone, I fell illicitly in love with Maria and did not tell a single soul. When I returned to Barrytown, my mind was deeply divided. Fall semester was about to begin. What should I do? Where did my loyalty lie?
One afternoon after visiting Angelina in NYC, I saw the bank of pay phones in Grand Central Station as I looked for my train back to Barrytown. I’d made up my mind to go home to Lincoln. I dialed zero, asked the operator to make a collect call for me and called Mom and Dad, using the same number they had for at least a dozen years before.
“Mom, are you and dad still planning to attend Sherril’s wedding in Rhode Island?”
“Oh, David, I don’t think we’ll make it. There’s too much work to do here getting ready for harvest.”
“Ah,” I said breathlessly. “I was thinking of coming home with you.” Nothing more, none of the torrent of conflicting thoughts rushing through my mind.
Mom didn’t speak for a moment. No more than a few seconds.
“Well! Then we’ll be there, David. We’ll see you in Rhode Island.” No hesitation. “I love you! I can’t wait to be with you.”
We made a plan or two and hung up our phones, 800 miles apart. I turned and saw the Kodak family colorama 60 feet across the Grand Central wall. The scene blurred as my eyes filled with tears.
God created man in his own image; in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them, and God blessed them. And so it happened, then God looked at everything he had made, and he found it very good.
I will praise you Lord, for you have rescued me.
In my mind, in Sunday School classes, on paper I have told this story over and over. It remains unfinished. But each time I remember, a door opens in my soul, perhaps opened by my mom, certainly opened by the Holy Spirit. Like Jesus speaking to his disciples after their Last Passover Supper, I hear the sound of heaven all around me. I will BE WITH you. Nothing else matters. I can’t wait.
And I imagine that Jesus also couldn’t wait. Death be damned. There is no sting.
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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