Magazine & Occasional Pieces

A Sacred Space

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EXCERPT:

In the silent darkness, spread out in the night across the Maryland fields, I look upon thousands upon thousands of little points of light — small brown bags, each with a flickering candle. One for every dead or wounded soldier both North and South. On this first Saturday in December, volunteers have risen early, as they have for the past 15 years, to prepare this one-night citizen ceremony. Elderly widows, retired generals, and entry-level clerks place the bags across the Antietam battlefield and light each candle by dusk. The tiny flames float in the dark, their twinkling pattern undulating across the gentle hills; it is a haunting image, profoundly moving.

Publication History: Attaché SEPTEMBER 2003

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Categories : Magazine & Occasional Pieces

A Touch of Warmth

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We were studying healing. Bob was 25, sallow, and very sick. Diagnosed as being HIV-positive 18 months earlier, he was now in the final stages of full-blown AIDS, his once handsome features now disfigured by the beginnings of a cancerous lesion of Karposi Syndrome. I don’t know how he had found out about our study, but he had and on that Tuesday morning he presented himself at the clinic. Our research was simple in concept. We were asking 14 men and women, seven of them experienced healers using everything from evangelical Christian laying-on-of-hands, to channeling space people, and seven of them volunteers who had never tried energy healing, to treat 14 men and women suffering from everything from migraines to cancer, while small sealed vials of water were strapped to their hands.

Publication History: Slightly different versions appeared in New Age Journal May/June 1997, and Hot Chocolate for the Mystical Soul (Plume/Penguin: New York, 1998).

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Categories : Magazine & Occasional Pieces

An Arrow Through Time

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There is no siren whose call is quite so exquisite as the music of the future. For as long as writing has existed there are records showing we have sought to know its form. Last year alone literally billions were spent by widows, lovers, spies, and presidents. All seeking, like an arrow through time, some way to answer: “In the future, what will… ?” Serving up answers are prophets, psychics, experts, and fiction writers.

In Biblical antiquity, prophets were recognized because they could interpret dreams. Although not all dreams relate to the future in the Bible, most do, like Daniel’s interpretation of King Nebuchadnezzar’s dream. [1] Alternatively individuals have their own dreams, as Joseph did when an angel came to him and told him “to take Mary as your wife. For the child within her has been conceived by the Holy Spirit.” [2]

But it was a tricky business, one could be accused of being a false prophet, and many Christians believed then, and still believe today, that when such dreams are accurate they do not come from the individual, but from God. As Peter made clear, “no prophecy recorded in Scripture was ever thought up by the prophet himself. It was the Holy Spirit within these godly men who gave them true messages from God.” [3]

Publication History: EXPLORE March/April 2008, Vol. 4, No. 2

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Categories : Essays & Columns, Magazine & Occasional Pieces, Papers & Research Reports

Dr. Franklin’s Plan

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The sudden illness of his wife Martha called his travelling companion Thomas Jefferson back to Monticello. So on a Saturday in late October 1776 Benjamin Franklin, almost 70, exhausted and afflicted by gout and boils went aboard without him, and sailed for France in the 16-gun sloop Reprisal.[i] He did so in the certain knowledge that if Reprisal was taken by a British warship he would be hanged for High Treason. His name was on the inflammatory Declaration of Independence, a document he had just helped Jefferson to write.

Franklin had been home less than a year, after almost two decades spent in the belly of the most powerful empire in the world representing first Pennsylvania’s and, eventually, America’s case at the court of King George II then, when he died, his grandson George III. The experience had made him more familiar with the ways of Europe than anyone else in the new American government, and he was going to need all the expertise he could muster. If he could not convince the French to fund and support the war, those who were leading the revolution all knew their cause would fail. It would be almost a decade before he returned to the country he had worked so long to create.

Publication history: Smithsonian Magazine June 2001. Also selected by the U.S. Department of State
for inclusion on the 225th anniversary website commemorating the signing of the Declaration of
Independence.

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Categories : Magazine & Occasional Pieces

ESPD Blue

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Elise McGinley was desperately anxious about her brother, Andre Daigle. He had gone out for dinner with his best friend, Nick Shelly, and on the way home, the two men had stopped at Mitchell’s Lounge, a local bar, to shoot some pool. After three or four games, as they were leaving, a woman came up to Andre and asked if he could give her a ride. She explained that her friends had left her and she had no way to get home. Telling Nick to go on, Andre agreed to help her out.

That was four days ago and Andre had not been seen since. The police weren’t interested: A single young man meets a woman in a bar and leaves with her; to their minds there was little reason to suspect foul play. The family felt differently. Bar pickups were not Andre’s style, and he had never missed work without checking in. Most telling of all: He was house-sitting for his brother Christian and had made no arrangements to feed the cat. Elise talked with her family several times a day as they organized the search the police would not undertake, but there was little else she could do. They were in Louisiana, and she was in Southern California. Still, as the time stretched on and Andre remained missing, she felt she had to do something. Read More…

Publication history: Intuition Magazine, December 1998, pp. 26-31; and, Kindred Spirits, vol. 47, June-August 1999, pp. 25-28.

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Stephan A Schwartz
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