The Boy in White

For some time, I have wanted to post about the boy in white, but I have hesitated because the story appears in my book, Blest Atheist, and I have generally posted excerpts from that book and my other publications on Mahlou Musings, rather than here. There are differing audiences between the two blogs, but I think the story can also appeal to readers of this blog. So, I will summarize the story here. You can find the longer, more complete story that is closer to the original in the book on Mahlou Musings.

The story of the boy in white intertwines with many of the leitmotifs of this blog. I began this blog with discussions of abuse (physical, sexual, and emotional) and blessings, and the story of the boy in white, which comes from my childhood, contains these leitmotifs as well as hints of the supranormal/angelic, which have also been discussed here at various times. Here is the story in brief:

On one bright, cold winter day, I dragged my sled three houses down our New England street to our neighbor’s teton-shaped hill, where all the children in our area of town gathered to race down to the mostly untraveled country road below on sleds, cardboard, or whatever else was available. I pulled my sled up the hill, waving to the other children in the neighborhood but mainly concentrating on the anticipated thrill of the ride. We were a community of children in the sense that we all knew each other, but our sport was an individual one. We did not share adrenaline-spurred shrieks of fun, but rather we quietly felt the thrill that defined the fun of New England downhill sledding.

That afternoon as I was pulling my one-person wooden sled up the hill a third time, I noticed a young boy, clad all in white and definitely not adequately covered for the sub-zero temperature that rosied our noses as they protruded from the scarves wrapped around our necks and faces and tucked into the hoods on our coats. I puzzled over the boy in white only momentarily as I mounted the hill and then the sled and began my third downhill run toward the road. Suddenly, about half-way down the hill, the boy in white, well blended with the surrounding snow in my visual field, began moving across the path over which my sled was about to speed.

“Get out of the way!” I yelled. I was as much annoyed at his being in my path as I was afraid of hurting him. He stepped back, and I briefly caught his sad look as I zipped past.

The memory is old and the details lodged in the mind of an 8-year-old whose perception of the world had moments of extremism. Therefore, I will not insist that every detail was precisely as I remember it today. What I do remember precisely, however, was being shaken by my own unkind words. I hurried home, towing my sled and a bundle of regret and concern. Somebody had to help the boy in white! He was wandering through the New Hampshire cold with no coat! He would freeze on the hill or anywhere else in our neighborhood. He seemed so oblivious to his surroundings and to the cold. He must be poor, indeed, I thought. We did not have much when we were children, but we always had warm clothes, and we were always bundled up, displaying a “cared for” look.

“Ma,” I called as I dropped the rope of the sled and ran into the house. “There is a boy on the hill without a coat. He is going to freeze! We have to help him!”

“Well, let’s go,” she said. I could not point him out through our window, so we set off for the hill. By the time we got there a few minutes later, however, he was nowhere to be found. We looked farther afield, but we saw no lad in white. Ma asked some of the other children, but none remember seeing him. I was at a loss to explain to Ma why he was not there, but she was not angry this time. In spite of her inability to love her children in an altruistic manner -- indeed, she was a highly abusive parent, one frequently emotionally out of control -- whenever someone in the greater community needed help, Ma was always jolly on the spot. Those two seemingly mutually exclusive attitudes — cruelty to her children and kindness to the community — made it difficult for us children to understand Ma. It also made it difficult for the community to understand our reaction to Ma for the community’s experience of her has always been positive.

As for the boy in white, I never saw him again. My friends insisted that he never was there, that he was a figment of my imagination that had frozen in the cold and was hallucinating snow images. Not a boy in white but a boy of snow. Still, I can see him today as clearly as I saw him on the hill so long ago. Today, I wonder if he was not there to teach me a lesson in kindness, in neighborly love — and to reveal perhaps why Ma may, indeed, live in grace, in spite of all her earlier cruelty and self-absorption for when there was a need for a Good Samaritan, Ma was usually the first volunteer. Perhaps God was using her, too? If God could use an atheist, as I was for so many years, then perhaps a believer with a temper, like Ma, might also be a potential instrument.

The long-ago lessons of the boy in white, unspoken lessons that allowed my subconscious, rather than conscious, mind to develop a morals-based value system, also showed me two important things that have dramatically shaped my life. First, I realized that day that there were two faces to Ma. That provided the foundation for the forgiveness that God required of me years later and which came easily once God pulled me out of my beloved bramble bushes. What God forgave me, I can certainly forgive others. Where God took me back, I can certainly take back others. Tit for tat gains nothing for no one. Forgiveness heals. That is one of the great lessons God has taught me on more than one occasion.

The second conclusion I came to all those years ago on the hill was that unless I was careful I would grow up to be the same hothead as Ma: my instinct had been to yell at the boy in white. Certainly, I did not want that. From then on, I worked hard to be the opposite of Ma. (Of course, I would tell her so from time to time when she was in the middle of beating, kicking, biting, or otherwise abusing me, and that did nothing to endear me to her; rather, I usually got an extra helping of the physical abuse as a result of my “big mouth.”)

How young I was when the boy in white crossed my path! Decades later, I can only conclude that God has always been with me. I have just been slow in seeing the linkages. I am grateful that now I can see them. Once again, God is spoiling me (and I love it).

Lizzie's Angel Story

The lives of my children and me have been filled with blessings (e.g., my miraculous healings and the miracles experienced by Shura and a benefactor). We have also been been helped by real-life angels, i.e. God's kind and talented professionals, as in the case with Noelle and Doah, whose bios can be found here.

Most puzzling and heart-warming was the rescue of my oldest daughter by what appears to be a bona fide angel. Lizzie at the time was living, working, and attending school in San Diego. Coming home late one night after babysitting, she was hit by a drunk driver. The small truck she was driving was totaled. The drunk driver, who did not stop to help, had pushed her into a concrete retaining wall near a place where the highway was being repaired, and that had caused the truck to roll, coming to rest on the passenger door. Lizzie could not get the driver's door open, so she tried to escape via the window between the cab and the truck bed. As she started to squeeze through, she heard a male voice telling her to stop and let him help her. A brawny man, whom she assumed to be one of the road workers, kicked in the window, helped her out of the truck, and carried her across the highway, pointing out that her truck was right in the middle of Highway 5 and she could easily have been hit by approaching traffic because drivers would have had trouble seeing her in the dark. He stayed with her at the construction side until the ambulance that he said had been called showed up, helped her onto the ambulance, then left. She was taken to a nearby hospital, where doctors examined her and found her in perfect shape and the police showed up to take a statement. When she told them about the kind construction worker who had helped her onto the ambulance, the police interrupted her. "Ma'am," one of them said, "the ambulance attendants told us that they found you wandering dazed by yourself at the construction site." (The ambulance had been called by a passing truck driver.) Confused as to what could possibly have happened, Lizzie called Caltrans. No, they had no one working that site on that night, but they put the story on the front page of the Caltrans newspaper, asking for the unknown hero to step forward. No one did. Lizzie, being a psychologist, then determined that perhaps she had dreamt up the incident and had simply exited the truck on her own. She went to the place where the truck had been towed. It was so demolished that it would have been difficult for her to get out -- and the window was broken where someone had kicked it open! Perhaps she kicked in the window on her own and did not know it. However, there were no scratches on her body, and the angle was difficult (directly over her head because the truck had been on its side). So, no evidence of any sort. No clear answer. And there ends Lizzie's story.

I have room only for a summary here, but I wrote about Lizzie's angel in detail in two places. The first was published in a book by L. A. Justice in a fairly straightforward story called "Angel on the Highway." Later, I wrote a more artistic version of the experience in a story called "The Merging," which was published in a collection of short stories from the Middle East. (I was living in the Middle East at the time that I wrote it.)

Tomorrow, I would like to share an Islamic angel story with a very interesting twist. I hope you will return here to read it.

In the meanwhile, Lizzie now collects angel memorabilia - dolls, pins, cards, you name it!

Destiny!??

Just one more angel story from Sufi (Islamic) wisdom, please. I just cannot help myself. I love these stories.

This story is called "Escaping the Design."

A man who lived in Baghdad once saw the angel of death in the market. It was obvious that the angel of death was staring at him.

"He must have come to take me," the man said to himself. "I must escape!"

And so the man went quickly to the governor's house who was his friend. "You must help me. The angel of death is here in Baghdad. He has come to take me."

The governor said, "How would you like me to help you my friend?"

"Send me, send me away on your fastest horse to Damascus."

And so the governor ordered that the fastest horse in Baghdad was to be given to his friend. In only three days, a record speed, the man arrived in Damascus! No sooner had he arrived, however, than he saw the angel of death near the eastern gate.

"You actually are here," the angel said.

"What could you possibly mean?"

"Well, I was very surprised to see you in a market in Baghdad because I knew that I was supposed to take your soul three days later in Damascus. How you managed to get here this fast is beyond my comprehension!"




Many thanks to the bilingual author, Dr. Omar Imady, who translated them from the original Arabic and published them in a wonderful little book, Metaphors of Islamic Humanism, so an English speaking world can read them.


EM: The man tried to escape his destiny but could not. Predestination is a view held by Sufis and some others. What, if anything, do you think is pre-destined? I had to look up Catholic dogma on that question (obviously, I am still new to Catholicism). I was happy to see that it did not depart from my own understanding.

The Angel in the Desert

As promised yesterday, here is the Islamic angel story. It was published in a book, called Metaphors of Islamic Humanism (subtitle) by Dr. Omar Imady and is re-printed here with permission.

The title of the story is "The Angel's Instructions."

There once was a man who was traveling through the desert. The journey took longer than he expected and soon all his provisions were gone except for a small jug of water and a loaf of bread. An angel carrying water and food was sent with this command: "When he drinks the rest of his water and eats his last loaf of bread, give him the water and food."

And so the angel observed the man from a distance, waiting for him to drink his water and eat his loaf of bread. But the man was so afraid of finishing his supplies and being left with nothing that he simply couldn't get himself to do so. Whenever he was about to drink or eat, he would say to himself, "But what will happen to me if I were to finish my water or eat my last loaf of bread? I must hold on to them, they are all I have left."

And so he would continue to walk and the angel would continue to observe from a distance.

Sometime before sunset, the man collapsed on the sand. In one hand, he held that very last loaf of bread, and in the other, that small jug of water. The angel, still carrying the food and water, kept on observing until it was clear that the man had died.

"How strange are the children of Adam," the angel said as it ascended to the sky.


EM note: It all boils down to trust, doesn't it?