One of my brothers called the other night, and we got to talking about our crazy youths, and how we should have died many times over – especially me, according to Pat. I did not protest, as I thought as much as any young guy that I was physically immortal and so acted, but then I remembered something he had told me decades ago that was really remarkable. “Wait – what about you on the Wilbur Cross Parkway in the Woodbridge Tunnel. You should have died or come close to it then, right?”
“Oh, yeah….” Then the story came back like something from myth or a movie trying too hard for its audience, because it couldn’t really be – except it was.
Pat was driving to his university classes in our father’s new blue Honda, a car that I can’t remember at all, but we can take his word for it. It was a winter morning with temperatures below freezing, but the sun was out and as he drove, whatever strips of snow that had been had now turned to liquid water. Until the tunnel.
It was a creepy tunnel similar to the Lincoln in NYC, probably because they were built at around the same time, @ 1940. They used green ceramic tile for both, and for the Wilbur Cross tunnel, barely adequate – really, inadequate – lighting from single lamps along the roof. Really, one had to have one’s lights on to see. And the tiles leaked. The tunnel had been blasted through a cliff of “trap rock,” a crumbly but hard rock that runs through central Connecticut and is used for gravel, which is heavily seamed, allowing the flow of surface water. So at any one time, the tunnel was dark and almost always damp, with water dripping continually from ceiling and walls, as cave-like and dank as one can get.
The snow had turned to water on the highway outside, but inside the tunnel where the sun did not shine, the leaks that dampened the floor had turned to black ice. There was, then, a slick frozen sheet that could not be seen in the poor light and that was not expected because of the favorable conditions outside. As Pat approached the tunnel, all appeared normal and everyone continued at regular speed. Once inside the tunnel, though, everything changed in a millisecond. Pat did not see the first to spin and crash against the tunnel wall, but it must have just happened, as the wreck of more than two dozen cars (he would learn that later from the newspaper account) was still in progress, cars crashing and flipping and skidding all about him. It was pure panic and mayhem, and in that first second, Pat understood that he was either going to die or be hurt very badly and that there was absolutely nothing he could do about it.
Then, before panic could rise to the breaking point, a sudden peace came to him. In that instant, he “saw” – it is impossible to describe just how – the face of our (deceased) grandfather before the windshield. He told Pat that everything would be just fine. Behind the apparition a light shone, and Pat intuitively knew that he must drive directly towards that light. Seconds later, he emerged from the tunnel completely unscathed. No one else followed him out. He then took the first exit and dropped a dime in a pay phone to call the police. They were shocked, as he was the first to report the incidence. Minutes later as he calmed down in the parking lot, he heard the sirens of thirty ambulances and firetrucks (again, as later reported) as they approached a scene of war-like devastation that would top the nightly news.
What a trip. Neither of us doubted that the apparition and miracle were real. Instead, the question that remained for us – for all our near-misses – was, why us? In Pat’s incredibly dramatic case, he was the only one of 27 cars to enter that tunnel at that fateful time to come through untouched. Why was he so special? Of all those others, probably including important and useful people, why did only Pat make it through? It is the age-old question: Why me?
On our latest trip to the UP last week, my son Jeff and I listened to Mitch Albom’s famous book, The Five People You Meet in Heaven, about a common man, Eddie, who sees his life as a failure. It is not until after death, caused by his saving of a small child at an amusement park, that he learns that his life has had incredible meaning. The book is fiction, but the central notion is not, at least as I see it, as it tells us that we are led in life by Spirit to move us closer to union with God. We can reject this path at times, but the movement of Spirit is all-pervasive and weaves its way around even the most obstinate of persons.
What this means for Pat, and for me and everyone else, is that one is ‘saved’ or not, or gets cancer or not, according to a greater plan that most of us could not possibly see, simply because we do not have all the information. It is not good luck that Pat was saved, then, but rather a way for Spirit to widen for him his path to God. And it was not bad luck for the other people in those 26 cars, even though they crashed, damaged their cars, or even died. It was, rather, Spirit’s way to bring them closer to their spiritual path. The tunnel is the perfect metaphor, really, as in this case, one’s spiritual direction could not be denied. We might even say that it was a way to show us that, sooner or later, we are all finally caught in the tunnel, where no one can turn from their spiritual path, whether they want to or not.
Of course, we might instead see life as a series of coincidences with no point. We might instead say that Pat’s vision was only hope springing from the primal id. We might say that the light he saw was the end of the tunnel, the one path where there were no cars, and so he could see a light. We could go on and on denying that Spirit showed its hand, and in that, declare that there is no Spirit and there are no destinies, but why? Why stretch so far one way when the easier way, the way Pat knew it and felt it (even though he was young at the time and not at all religious), is so much more compatible with what happened? Not only more compatible with what happened there, but also with what happens one way or another to us all, if we think about it. We should think about it. The evidence might show us, if we have an open mind, that we do indeed have a spiritual path, knowledge of which could and should change our entire world.
“Oh, yeah….” Then the story came back like something from myth or a movie trying too hard for its audience, because it couldn’t really be – except it was.
Pat was driving to his university classes in our father’s new blue Honda, a car that I can’t remember at all, but we can take his word for it. It was a winter morning with temperatures below freezing, but the sun was out and as he drove, whatever strips of snow that had been had now turned to liquid water. Until the tunnel.
It was a creepy tunnel similar to the Lincoln in NYC, probably because they were built at around the same time, @ 1940. They used green ceramic tile for both, and for the Wilbur Cross tunnel, barely adequate – really, inadequate – lighting from single lamps along the roof. Really, one had to have one’s lights on to see. And the tiles leaked. The tunnel had been blasted through a cliff of “trap rock,” a crumbly but hard rock that runs through central Connecticut and is used for gravel, which is heavily seamed, allowing the flow of surface water. So at any one time, the tunnel was dark and almost always damp, with water dripping continually from ceiling and walls, as cave-like and dank as one can get.
The snow had turned to water on the highway outside, but inside the tunnel where the sun did not shine, the leaks that dampened the floor had turned to black ice. There was, then, a slick frozen sheet that could not be seen in the poor light and that was not expected because of the favorable conditions outside. As Pat approached the tunnel, all appeared normal and everyone continued at regular speed. Once inside the tunnel, though, everything changed in a millisecond. Pat did not see the first to spin and crash against the tunnel wall, but it must have just happened, as the wreck of more than two dozen cars (he would learn that later from the newspaper account) was still in progress, cars crashing and flipping and skidding all about him. It was pure panic and mayhem, and in that first second, Pat understood that he was either going to die or be hurt very badly and that there was absolutely nothing he could do about it.
Then, before panic could rise to the breaking point, a sudden peace came to him. In that instant, he “saw” – it is impossible to describe just how – the face of our (deceased) grandfather before the windshield. He told Pat that everything would be just fine. Behind the apparition a light shone, and Pat intuitively knew that he must drive directly towards that light. Seconds later, he emerged from the tunnel completely unscathed. No one else followed him out. He then took the first exit and dropped a dime in a pay phone to call the police. They were shocked, as he was the first to report the incidence. Minutes later as he calmed down in the parking lot, he heard the sirens of thirty ambulances and firetrucks (again, as later reported) as they approached a scene of war-like devastation that would top the nightly news.
What a trip. Neither of us doubted that the apparition and miracle were real. Instead, the question that remained for us – for all our near-misses – was, why us? In Pat’s incredibly dramatic case, he was the only one of 27 cars to enter that tunnel at that fateful time to come through untouched. Why was he so special? Of all those others, probably including important and useful people, why did only Pat make it through? It is the age-old question: Why me?
On our latest trip to the UP last week, my son Jeff and I listened to Mitch Albom’s famous book, The Five People You Meet in Heaven, about a common man, Eddie, who sees his life as a failure. It is not until after death, caused by his saving of a small child at an amusement park, that he learns that his life has had incredible meaning. The book is fiction, but the central notion is not, at least as I see it, as it tells us that we are led in life by Spirit to move us closer to union with God. We can reject this path at times, but the movement of Spirit is all-pervasive and weaves its way around even the most obstinate of persons.
What this means for Pat, and for me and everyone else, is that one is ‘saved’ or not, or gets cancer or not, according to a greater plan that most of us could not possibly see, simply because we do not have all the information. It is not good luck that Pat was saved, then, but rather a way for Spirit to widen for him his path to God. And it was not bad luck for the other people in those 26 cars, even though they crashed, damaged their cars, or even died. It was, rather, Spirit’s way to bring them closer to their spiritual path. The tunnel is the perfect metaphor, really, as in this case, one’s spiritual direction could not be denied. We might even say that it was a way to show us that, sooner or later, we are all finally caught in the tunnel, where no one can turn from their spiritual path, whether they want to or not.
Of course, we might instead see life as a series of coincidences with no point. We might instead say that Pat’s vision was only hope springing from the primal id. We might say that the light he saw was the end of the tunnel, the one path where there were no cars, and so he could see a light. We could go on and on denying that Spirit showed its hand, and in that, declare that there is no Spirit and there are no destinies, but why? Why stretch so far one way when the easier way, the way Pat knew it and felt it (even though he was young at the time and not at all religious), is so much more compatible with what happened? Not only more compatible with what happened there, but also with what happens one way or another to us all, if we think about it. We should think about it. The evidence might show us, if we have an open mind, that we do indeed have a spiritual path, knowledge of which could and should change our entire world.
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