My Invisible Friends

The Seen

My Best Friends

We were out on an errand in the car, my mother, my stepfather and me, heading down the road. As I sat in the back seat, pressing my 9-year-old face against the window that reflected the freckles and crew cut features of a typical boy of the mid-50s, I was watching with an intensity that somehow I knew my parents could not sense and certainly would not have understood. What I was watching was thrilling, amazing, vivid, and wonderful; it was Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, and Howdy Doody sitting in a little Tonka Toy pickup truck, careening down the road beside us, holding on in fear at the speed, laughing and talking, and winking and waving at me. They went everywhere we went in those heady days and I loved to watch them driving alongside us. I want to make one thing very clear: I could actually see these characters. They were dimensional. The sunlight played off of them like off of any object. They threw shadows. They were vivid.

Back at the house, in my room, I had set up a cardboard box on its side. I had cut windows and doors in it, found a woven placemat that made a perfect living room carpet, cobbled together pieces of furniture including a cigar box bed with scraps of materials that made the blankets and sheets. My invisible friends lived in the box. My mind was afire with a fever that envisioned these friends so completely that they seemed completely real and visible to me. At the same time, I had actual Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, and Howdy Doody puppets that I would use in my fantasy, but, when the puppets weren’t available, such as when we were traveling, Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, and Howdy Doody were there, nevertheless, and nonetheless visible, vivid, tangible, and full of expression. We had a wonderful relationship, full of love and communication.

But this was a dark time in my childhood, and I’ve often thought that this incredible fantasy, which for me was a major event in my childhood, necessarily emerged to take the edge off the reality of our lives, a life of deceit, loss, and insecurity.  My mother, pregnant, was humiliated by a philandering and drunken husband who, on one hand, though could be charming,  needed to grow up. He was somewhat younger than my mother. Her anger was palpable and her depression spread over our lives. Like shades drawn over sunny windows, my mothers troubles darkened my boy days casting a pallid yellow light across the landscape. My life was beyond my control. I turned to happy lives that I could control. And so my invisible friends came to life and, no matter what happened beyond my boy’s life, we had happy adventures and marvelously funny conversations.

Death of a Fantasy

My fantasy evolved one day at a toy store where I saw a figure, a kind of “hobo” doll based on the famous clown Emmett Kelly (right). When I saw the doll suddenly the fantasy moved to another level, his realism grabbed me, his accessible sadness spoke to me, and this minature human person was all I wanted. Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, and Howdy Doody began to lose their gloss and I could think of nothing else but my Hobo. Even I, in my dazzled boyhood craze, sensed that my fantasy had taken a dark turn, that somehow this was no longer just fun, but some kind of obsession, though I certainly didn’t know the word. Nevertheless, I wanted him for Christmas, which was just around the corner.

The painful climax of this obsessive fantasy took place at Christmas. My stepfather, an Air Force sargeant, had received his transfer orders and they fell in such a way that we were forced to move out of our rented house and live in a motel suite for two weeks. The baby was about six months old now, sick with flu, and Christmas was on us. They were in the main room wrapping Christmas presents and I was in the second room of the suite when I heard arguing. It soon became clear that the argument was over the hobo. My mother had obviously bought the hobo for me and my step-father objected to the gift. The essence of his argument was that it was “playing with dolls” and I should grow up. “Playing with dolls” hit me like the back of a spade to my face. Embarrassment, anger, hatred, in that order.

The tragic fate of the hobo, poor unsuspecting figure that he was, is a sad story that has parallels elsewhere in life. Suffice to say that he was not an invisible friend. He was real and in the world and the infatuation I had with him turned to hatred and I “killed” him. I have always thought of it that way. Killing. He represented something lost. He was a visible, tangible reminder. Not long after we left the motel and were moved into our new place, I spent an afternoon throwing him up in the air and letting him fall on the cement driveway. Finally, after an hour of this he was barely recognizable. One last throw landed him up in a tree where he remained until he vanished.

The Unseen

Air

In my early childhood, my parents and I lived in the corner house in a post-WWII neighborhood with unpaved streets on a patch of land that had once been a walnut orchard. My mother’s parents, Grandma and Grampa, lived next door to us to one side, and to the other side lived my grandfather’s brother, my Uncle Bill, and his wife. An old walnut tree stood between our house and my grandparents house, and around the tree a cement patio had been poured. This was my world, going from my house to theirs for anything I could forage as a little boy, and spending the dreamtime of early childhood playing under the tree.

At the end of every day, my grandfather would come through the old gate, and I would turn to run to him, jumping up in to his arms. He would hug me, smelling of cut wood, sweat, and tar. He was a carpenter and a roofer, swabbing tar on the roofs of hot L.A. homes. His hair, black as tar, slicked back, fell into his eye. He was tanned dark and muscular, dashing. Sweeping me up in his arms he’d yell “Bobby!”, and the world became lucid and sparkling in his arms. That was our daily routine without fail.

One weekend he took me with him to do some carpentry repair on a church that, I suppose, he and Grandma attended. I went inside the little wooden church alone, while he stayed outside working on what I now think was a mail slot. Inside the church, I went over to the hole he had cut in the exterior wall, and I stuck my hand out through the slot and wiggled it at him. He grabbed it. Then he went back to work and I turned back into the dark church. There were windows up high, ordinary windows, not stained glass. Shafts of light angled down into the dark room onto the pews and the altar. It was quiet, empty, but the look of the church interior gave me a little tickle in my stomach, butterflies. I felt excited somehow, to be alone in this sacred space. The room was so dead still that the shafts of light were almost audible, little particles floated in the air, little sparkles. I regarded them, ignoring the muffled sounds of hammering and sawing.

Then I heard something new. It was a soft, sweet swelling of music. The music grew until it filled the room and amazed me. As I look back on this early memory, I really can not quite remember the style but it has left me with the impression of a rather sentimental orchestral piece, full of great, sweet passion, like the Air on the G String.

It was beautiful music to me. I looked around to see where it was coming from. I looked this way and that but I could see no radio or person playing. It was just in the air. I ran over to the mail slot and yelled through it “Where’s that music coming from, Grampa?!” But chills ran down my spine when Grampa answered “What music? I don’t hear anything.” I turned around fast, frantically searching the music filled room. But the music was coming from nowhere. It was in the air floating, played by unseen hands. And because I alone was hearing it, I became afraid and ran out of the dark church and into the brilliant sun.

Though I told my mother about this incident, I realized, even at 6 years old, that there are some things you can tell your parents that they just don’t take seriously.

Message in a Bottle

Several months later, Grampa and Grandma were sitting in their tiny living room in the house next door to us. It was dusk after a clear, sunny day. There was a sound at the door and the door knob rattled and turned. Grampa jumped up and flung the door open. No one was there. Perplexed, he went back in and sat down again. Again the door rattled and the knob turned ever so slightly. This time they both got up and flung the door open, hoping to catch the prankster. But no one was there, and there was no time and nowhere to hide. They stepped out onto the little cement porch.

My grandmother described that moment vividly to me: As they stood on the porch at dusk, wondering who or what had turned the knob, a deep peace fell over their world. She said it was like someone had placed a glass dome over the house and the yard, as if they were bottled up like a model ship in a glass. She felt like they were beyond the ordinary world somehow, that everything within the yard was still in every sense of the word. Still, but not dead, the air sweet, pleasant, vibrant with a soundless humming energy. Beyond the rose bushes and the little picket fence was the rest of the world, but they could not hear it and it did not impinge on this momentary peace. The sun had gone down and the evening was darkening. She told me she had the sense that she was being told something, that some message was inherent in this, but she just couldn’t figure it. When they went back inside, my grandfather was thoughtful, pensive. After a little while, Grandma asked him if he understood what it all meant. Yes, he said. He did not explain what he meant by this yes and she didn’t feel it was right to ask. The next day he began putting his affairs in order.

Two weeks later, while at work on a carpentry job with Uncle Bill, the two were taking a break when my grandfather said “Bill, go get me a soda pop. I don’t feel so good.” He sat down on a stack of two-by-fours. When Bill came back, soda pop in hand, Grampa was still sitting there, but he was dead. When my grandmother heard the terrible news, she understood the message that she couldn’t quite make out on that bell jar evening of the mysterious visitor at the door.

I’ll See It When I Believe It

As a child I was drawn to a vague idea of God and even of Jesus, but we rarely went to church. In fact, I think we only went two or three times and so I understood little to nothing of what drew me to God. But, of my meager church experience, it was the Holy Communion, or Eucharist, that caught my mind. Even a child can understand, at some level, the eating of sacred food, food that is somehow sparkling with holy substance. As a child we may experience things more directly, with less clutter in the mind, less doubt. We may just know something is sacred. Whatever the reason, I was impressed with the Communion and felt connected to something through it

What I knew of God in my early years came to me through movies and through my Grandmother, though she rarely attended any church. I later understood that she and my grandfather had attended a Unity church, perhaps the same church where I heard the mysterious music. From her and from movies, I knew that God is invisible and yet God is everywhere and very nearby. God sees everything. This gave me chills down my spine when I thought about it. Since I was not taught how to think about this information, I saw God as a voyeur who, though benign, was lurking about, watching me. Sometime later in my childhood, I pictured Jesus this way in a childish image of him, dressed in his long white robe, poking his head around the corner watching me and shooting me with a pea shooter, like a prankster, when I wasn’t being aware.

Despite my impaired education on the subject, I nevertheless had a spiritual bent from the very earliest days. I was ten years-old when my neighborhood friends banged on my door one day trying to get me to come out to play. Usually the most playful of all the children and always ready to be a wild boy running amuck, that day I was “reading the Bible, leave me alone.”. I’m know my friends were perplexed, amazed and yet respectful of this because, in the 1950s, God was a still alive. It was a fact, I was completely absorbed in the Book. Being just a child, and not having a parent to foster my interest, and being that the Bible is a pretty difficult read at ten, this obsession only lasted a few days. Yet, I still remember it well as a telling incident.

No one in our family prayed. Prayer is ridiculous to those who don’t believe in God, or to those who do believe, but don’t believe that God listens, or to those who only see the negative in the world and find it hard to believe in anything other than what we can see and touch. I never heard mention of God or prayer from my parents, only from my grandmother.  I understood, as a child, that praying is talking to God. I understand it in more depth now, of course. Suffice to say that I only came to prayer when, after a lifetime of being an avowed Buddhist, my life had become a disaster in every way. Immensely unhappy, searching for some kind of spiritual peace, some way of salvaging my life, I came to realize a disturbing and depressing fact: that my life as an atheist had always, and in every way, been a lie at its core. The truth was, I had always believed there is a God. I realized that I had been fighting this belief, running from the god I didn’t believe in, running until He caught me.

This realization may seem like a wonderful thing, and certainly in one way it was, but in another way it was horrifying. The very thing I had denied as false, and feared I would embrace, had now happened. I was a believer and, worse, I was in mortal peril of becoming, God forbid, a Christian! Admitting this was like coming clean, however, and in a single moment, a whole lifetime was swept away. The tension of this dammed up feeling burst, and I tossed and swirled about awash in the current of something I wasn’t sure I wanted. I wasn’t embracing Christianity just yet, I was embracing God. Now I was willing to explore what church might offer. After all, church is about God, the very One I now understood is real. If I was to abandon refuge in the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha, I must find God, the Truth, and the Congregation.

I really have condensed this long exploration in this post, so just let me say that I explored and read about many things and had come to some conclusions based on logic and my own experience. One concept was that of the “still, small voice”, a biblical way of thinking about the voice of God speaking as the Holy Spirit. In this idea, the Holy Spirit speaks to each of us from within. In other words, God speaks to us through the Holy Spirit and the voice we hear is the “still, small voice”. Another way of thinking of it is as intuition. Whether it is the Holy Spirit or just intuition, the voice does speak to each of us, I came to believe, if we listen. I began to listen. To ask, and to listen.

A Guardian Angel

And there were answers. Just one quick example.  One day I went to the library to find a message. No, I didn’t go to find a book, I specifically went to find a message. I wanted to ask and be given an answer. My question was whether I was following the right path, the path of fine art painting. In this spirit, I walked down the aisles of the library running one hand along the books and trying to be “open” to a book that might stop me. I just wanted a word, of encouragement, of advice, something, anything. It didn’t take long. It was the old cliche of “Lord, give me a sign!” My hand came to rest on a book. I hadn’t been looking at the titles, but just walking slowly along brushing my hand along the books. Something made me stop at one book. I turned and pulled it off the shelf.

It was “How to Know God” by Deepak Chopra. Now, I had already read this book recently and Chopra had explained clearly how the universe is created moment by moment, blinking in and out of existence, thousands of times a second, how God maintained this coming into being everywhere and at all times, from the closest breath of existence to the furthest blade of alien grass on some distant world a million light years away. I loved this exlanation. Here was this book in my hand again, almost as if it had pushed itself off the shelf into my awareness. I opened it and flipped the pages. Immediately, something in the book caught my eye. A marker or a card or a piece of something. I caught my breath. I closed the book, not daring to look at the item in the book.

I was looking for a message, and in this book was a something that someone had left as a bookmark. No, I didn’t open the book to the page with the marker. Instead, I closed the  book tight and hurried for the check out, excited, heart pounding. I had asked and now I was about to receive! I checked the book out and ran outside, jumped in the car, and opened the book to the marker.

I opened the book with a great feeling of expectation. Think about it. I had purposely asked for guidance, had walked the aisles of the library specifically to be spoken to, to have something reach out to me and tell me something. Here was the book in my hands. The day was hot. The windows of the car were up. I was sweating. Would it be a disappointment? Would the card be a receipt or a scap? I opened the book to the page where the card lay. It was a card the size of a playing card but not a playing card. I could see right away that it was a card from a deck of divination cards, a deck of angel cards. The angel on the card was Gabrielle , the female version of the Angel Gabriel, the very angel who whispered the miraculous news to Mary. In the early days, Gabriel was female. Here was Gabrielle in purples and blues and with some words for me. The word went something like this: “You are a creative individual and you have a gift to give to the world. Do not worry. I will help you.”

Under the Apple Tree

There is a line in a beautiful hymn that goes “I’m weary with my former toil, Here I will sit and rest a while:Under the shadow I will be, of Jesus Christ the apple tree.” So, there I was at that moment, not a Christian but seeing in Christ God, God in our world. And God had just run me down, tackled me, and threw me to the ground, had spoken to me through his angel, the Holy Spirit, the still, small voice, had written it out on a card and placed it in a book for me. Later, listening to this old hymn about Christ, the idea of laying down my toil, my burden, and resting in His shadow “a while” was irresistible. The “a while” worked for me because it was non-commital. I could try it out. After all, I had a promise that there would be help.

This asking and receiving led me to real prayer. I was scientific about it. From my reading, I understood this much, that you have to give everything over to Christ. Everything. The good and the bad, The worst in you and the best in you. This is the only gift you have to give. Most of all, you must forgive. It’s all about forgiveness. So my first prayer lasted a very, very long time during which I enumerated every horrible thing I could think of that I had done, every bad and thoughtless act, every lie, everything that I would be embarrassed to admit openly. I enumerated every good thing as well. All of these things, the good and the bad, I lay as a gift before God, before Christ, as a sacrifice. It was a sacrifice because these good and bad things were mine, I was attached to them.

Then I forgave everyone who had done me wrong, I forgave every hurtful thing. Some of these things were hard to forgive, for they had affected by whole life and I was still angry. But I was determined to give them a way, to be done with them. They had happened, but they would no longer be mine. So I gave the anger and the hurt to God as my gift. After this lengthy enumeration, I was very emotional from the sheer volume of “gifts” I had given Christ. Then, in tears, I asked for forgiveness, letting myself fully and whole-heartedly believe “Ask and it will be given to you…” (Matthew 7:7 NIV). The forgiveness of others is a key to our own forgiveness and, once forgiven, a great burden is lifted.

My Invisible Friends

So I come to my invisible friends. Not Mickey, Donald, and Howdy Doody. No, they were visible. I could clearly see them. Not the hobo. He was real but lifeless. I come to my invisible friends who are not friends really, but three ways of looking at one friend. And not really a friend, but much more than a friend or a mother or a father.

My invisible friends are God my Father, Christ His Son, and the Holy Spirit, that still, small voice, the voice of God. To those of you who may find this idea ridiculous, take a moment, try to be open-minded and open-hearted, and consider the possibility: If you can agree that the universe did not create itself from nothing, but was created, then you can agree that the Intelligence that created it might be called God, that God is clearly the ultimate mystery, the creator, the sustainer, the destroyer; that an Intelligence that can create and sustain this vast, immeasurable universe can do anything He/She/It chooses. God is the Father who created us.

But who is this Jesus, the “Son” of God? Another primitive and ridiculous idea? It is really straightforward. Jesus, or Christ, is God in the world. Christ is God in the world, and God comes into the world to grace us with a way to be born anew. The Holy Spirit is God inside the world, inside you and I, inside each and every molecule, guiding, speaking to us, helping us, creating us moment to moment. We speak to God through the Holy Spirit and God speaks to us through the Holy Spirit. But, don’t be confused, it’s not like God is three things, as the concept of the Trinity can be misunderstood, but God is One thing, and we limited, simple creatures, experience God this way. God the creator, God in the world, God inside the world.

No matter how you look at it, whether you divide God into three parts or not, in the end, it is only God and his love for us that matters. Everything else is just details, details, details. If one can agree that God exists, and that God created us and is our Father, and that a father loves his children, then all the rest falls into place. It is a wonderful fact that God blesses us with His invisibility so that we may struggle with doubt and faith to rely on, and walk hand in hand with, our invisible Friends.

God Bless +