THE INVISIBLE HAND OF HELP

The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City is home to one of the world’s most famous sculptures, The Hand of God, by the French Sculptor, August Rodin. You may know some of his other sculptures - The Kiss, The Thinker, and The Gates of Hell. I admired this sculpture many years ago when I visited New York. From a block of rough marble a smooth and strong hand emerges cradling the rudimentary entwined bodies of Adam and Eve. At the time I didn’t think much about it beyond admiring it for it’s artistic beauty, but as my life progressed and I learned to ask for help at difficult junctures it has taken on a more profound and symbolic meaning for me.

I recently turned 81, so I’ve had time to think about the challenges and successes, twists and turns of my life. I have come to view life as a giant school where we have endless opportunities to learn. Sometimes the lessons are hard, and even when we’re quite certain we’ve learned a particular lesson it comes back to us in a more subtle form until we have mastered it. I have also observed that many people decide not to learn the lesson that is being presented, either because it appears too hard, they feel they don’t have time, or it’s just too much of a bother. Then they get whacked and get another chance; they may choose to learn or not, and if not they get whacked really hard. Even then some do nothing to try to figure out what’s going wrong in their life.

I’ve been whacked several times. At the time of a whacking it’s hard to see what’s going on because you are in the middle of the problem - a divorce, a job loss, a failed business - and you are feeling a lot of emotion from what’s happening. You feel completely lost and sometimes even abandoned if there isn’t a close friend or family member to lend you support. Even after the emotion subsides, you have to get to a calm enough place to attempt to see what happened and what your role may have been.

In my mid-twenties I got a series of whacks, three actually, close together. After I returned from the Vietnam War I brought my fiance home to meet my parents. Shortly after we arrived, we visited my younger brother, Jim, at a Saturday night fraternity party. It was the last time I ever saw him. On Sunday he didn’t come home for dinner, nor did he ever come home again. He had drowned the previous night in the Mississippi River two months before he was to graduate from college with honors. We were very close and I was devastated.

A couple of years later I lost my first job working for a Congressman because he decided to run for the Senate against a well known former Senator. A few years after than I got divorced. Each of these events helped me examine my life deeply and find a way to carry on and then move forward. During college I abandoned the church I grew up in because it wasn’t serving my spiritual needs. Ancient Bible stories didn’t help me figure out my present life. During my early career years in Washington, D. C. I attended a few Transcendental Meditation sessions and then began practicing meditation every morning. The practice of sitting quietly and watching my thoughts go by without trying to stop or censure them brought me peace and a quiet mind. Eventually at the end of my meditation, I would also simply ask to be shown the next step that would be helpful in my life.

After Jim disappeared a series of seemingly unconnected events helped me find him. In retrospect they were very connected. A year before his disappearance I had read about a famous Dutch Psychic, Gerard Croiset, who helped police and others locate missing persons. Police have used psychics to find missing persons since at least 1845. A 1993 survey of US police departments showed that at least a third of police departments in the 50 largest cities have used psychics for this purpose.

The morning after my brother’s disappearance I read a small front page news article in the Minneapolis Star and Tribune about a couple parked along the Mississippi River near the University campus who thought they heard someone in the river crying for help. They called the police. The river was running very high that April. The fire department came and tried to launch a boat, but the river was too turbulent for them to succeed. After reading the news article I felt strongly that the person was my brother even though no one knew he was missing or dead at that point. I asked what I needed to do. The answer I received was that Jim had indeed drowned, and I needed to find his body to bring closure to my family. My brother didn’t come home for Sunday dinner, which was the first clue he was missing. Despite phone calls to his roommate and friends no one had seen him, and our search in the following days went nowhere. I never told my parents about the news article because they had hope that he had gone to Canada to avoid the Vietnam War.

I now had an important decision to make, whether to continue looking for Jim near home or embark on a trip to Europe that I had planned with my Army buddy, Ellis. Another answer came. Our first meeting place was to be Holland because I wanted to reconnect with an old friend, Joop, whose family had hosted me when I was an exchange student in high school. What I now remembered was that Joop had been a student at the University of Nymegen, the city that was also Crosiet’s residence. I called Joop and asked if he could set up a meeting with Croiset to see if he would help locate Jim’s body. Joop phoned me back in a day to let me know he had set a meeting the day after Ellis and I were to arrive in Holland.

Joop lived in the village of Driebergen, a short tram ride from Nymegen. He indicated that Croiset spoke almost no English, so he offered to accompany me to the meeting and I gladly accepted. When we got to Croiset’s house, he opened the door after we rang and Joop introduced us. Instantaneously his bright blue eyes riveted on mine and he said matter of factly in Dutch, “I’m sorry, but your brother is dead.” I told him I knew, but I needed his help to find Jim’s body. He motioned us into the kitchen and offered us seats at a simple wood table. I handed him Jim’s T-shirt that I had brought at his request. While holding the shirt he closed his eyes briefly, and when he opened them he began the story of Jim’s disappearance. He said that Jim had left the fraternity with two other people after my visit. They walked past a building that looked like a theater and then down to a big river where a large tourist boat was docked. They were hoping to get another drink, but the boat was closed and shuddered. On the landing a discussion or argument took place between Jim and the other two. Then Croiset said, “your brother is in the water, but I don’t see him.” He closed his eyes again briefly and when he opened them he said that Jim’s body was about two kilometers (a little over a mile) downstream. His body is caught on a piling that jutted into the river to support a loading dock for barges. He also said that the dock was easy to locate because there was a factory building set back from the dock with three tall smokestacks protruding from the roof.

When we returned to Joop’s house I wrote my older brother in Minneapolis to tell him what I had learned and asked him to have the police investigate the location where Croiset indicated Jim’s body was trapped. I thought about Croiset’s vision and how well it fit. The University of Minnesota Theater was a building used for plays that they would have passed on the way to the river. At the end of that route an old paddle wheel steamboat was docked that took tourists on river excursions in the summer. The next day Ellis and I resumed our journey by Eurrail south through France, Spain, Italy and other countries. I hoped I would soon hear that Jim’s body had been found, but our travels continued with no word. I was getting frustrated and decided to write my father. It was now close to two months since we had met with Croiset. A few weeks later we were on the west coast of Scandinavia and took a ferry from Stavanger to Bergen, Norway. It was a rainy blustery day, and after we landed we went directly to the local American Express office, as we usually did after arriving in a new city, to see if we had mail. When we checked with the clerk he handed me a telegram from Minneapolis. I sensed what it would say even before I tore it open. “Jim’s body found. Return home. Love, Dad.” The news was more a relief than a shock because I felt my long painful mission had been accomplished, perhaps the way a Marine feels when he has dragged the body of a comrade back to friendly lines after a fierce battle. I had been carrying this pain and uncertainty for over four months. Now I felt at peace. I found a flight home the next day, and after I arrived and settled my father told me that Jim’s body had been found exactly where Croiset had said it would be, lodged against a piling supporting a loading dock on the Mississippi. The police believed that the body was that of an older man, but that didn’t make sense to me because it wore cut off jeans like a college or high school student would wear. It had been in the water a long time and was badly decomposed. My father then called our family dentist, a neighbor, who was an expert in identifying WWII soldiers by comparing their teeth with dental records. He said there was no doubt in his mind that the body was Jim’s.

We could finally have a funeral for Jim. A few months later I got married in New York in October. It felt too soon because my family and I had barely had time to begin grieving, but my bride’s mother had set everything in motion and said it was too late to cancel. That decision to keep the original date was emotionally difficult for us. I was happy to be getting married, but sad about my brother being gone forever from my life.

I won’t get into the other two whacks I got in my mid-twenties except to say that both presented other life problems. I did resolve them using the tools I had learned earlier. I sat with as open a heart as I could muster at the time and I asked for help from the Universe, God, the Creator or whatever name you choose to call that force. I have always received help to get through and move forward. Those experiences have also taught me lessons about the best way to ask. First, I found it important to get as clear and detailed as I was able in defining my situation or problem. A murkily defined problem lead me to ask an ill defined question. Second, I found it useful to take more time if needed to clarify the exact nature of the problem before asking for help. When I can clearly define the problem and ask a well defined question, I get a clearer answer.

I’d like to return to my earlier theme that the world is a school providing us with numerous opportunities to learn. We start as kindergartners, progress through grade school, then high school, and if we have developed the curiosity and discipline to go farther there is graduate and post graduate school. Everyone who’s gone to school knows that to proceed to the next grade you have to do the homework and fulfill the requirements. As you move along the requirements get stiffer - more homework, more complex problems to solve that require deeper understanding. Although we tend to think of school progressing from younger to older students, my experience in life suggests that many adults stop progressing in their thinking at any given age or level. Most of us knew the high school football hero whose life thinking is stuck at that level when he was at his peak of fame and glory. When I think of how people have progressed along their life path, the school model makes it easier for me to understand why there are so many different levels of consciousness, and why some young people’s thinking has progressed farther than some older people. It’s sometimes less a matter of age than of curiosity, discipline, and wanting to grow, although years of life experiences usually helps most people to learn.

It wasn’t that long ago that completion of high school was considered a high achievement and many people stopped there to go to work to support themselves or their family. As the economy and job skill requirements changed, more people opted for a college degree, and it’s only been the last few generations that job seekers needed technical and other sophisticated skills in order to make a better living. But everyone is different, and many opt not to go to college or obtain technical skills. It takes time, perseverance, discipline and money to go farther, and many choose to forego those opportunities. That’s fine if you are truly satisfied with your life; however, in recent years there seem to be more people blaming others, the system, or some other nebulous thing for their inability to get closer to achieving their life’s goals. Rather than taking responsibility and thinking about what might truly make them happier, exploring the steps that could get them there, and then taking action, they prefer to blame someone or something else.

We all make choices every day that will help make our lives better or more difficult. The key is bringing these choices to our consciousness, not just continuing on the rote path that we have been on without questioning it. You can begin the process by asking a friend, a colleague, a mentor or the universe for help. You can pray for guidance, but asking for a specific outcome tends to thwart the process in my opinion. If you are open and sincere, you will begin to get answers. That is how The Hand of God became important for me; it is a visible symbol for an invisible process. I have always felt supported in the most difficult circumstances, even in the midst of war. We are all cradled by an invisible hand. It makes no difference whether you are Atheist, Christian, Muslim, Jew or any of the other myriad religions or philosophies of this world. All you have to do is open your heart and ask. And then you have to listen.