I know that I am small— very small— and fragile, and that I am being held in her great and gentle arms; and I know that this is the safest place that I can be, just now.
I was younger than a year, perhaps six to nine months old. I could not have been much less than that, nor any older.
This room is enormous and dark, and there are many others sitting about me, and they are all staring silently at a great, lighted picture that keeps changing up ahead of us. There is music, and singing.
The movie theater may have been in San Francisco, or Berkeley, I’m not certain where. I was with my mother, and other children including, perhaps, my older brother.
A boy and a girl are running up a golden stair into heaven, are dancing through a great castle, are talking to their little sister before she is to be born into their family— and a small blue bird is flying along ahead of them.
In an attempt to capitalize on the popularity of MGM’s “Wizard of Oz” during the previous year, 20th Century Fox had quickly brought out another enchanting folk story as a motion picture— Maeterlink’s “Blue Bird”— with an impressive cast that included their famous child star Shirley Temple. And yet, despite their child star and winning an Academy Award for special effects, the film did not do well at the box office, and quickly drifted out of public sight.
Still, I remembered this indelible movie well throughout my life, in part because I had told the story so often. I never saw it again however, until my own children rented the video for us to watch together, some fifty years later. I wept, watching, carried back decades to those great, gentle arms I had rested in, and to those perceptions and passions that had swept through my small frame, at the origin of this life.
A boat with silver sails comes slowly toward the landing, and pauses like a great bird while the souls that will be born begin boarding— some excitedly, some fearfully. I know that this is only a story; it’s not really how it happens, before we are born. But I also realize this is the only way these humans can begin to understand how it really happens, with a story such as this.
My children knew the story well, about my first memory and this admittedly rather sentimental movie. They looked back at me sitting with their mother on the sofa in the livingroom, weeping, and they smiled, knowingly.
The images on the screen were exactly as I remembered them, and their message remained exactly the same. The message was not about a time before this, nor a time after this, but rather a time other than this. The message was about a time greater than this that penetrates this human time with meaning— gently, safely embracing the tangible, fragile Here and Now in the great arms of an inchoate, ineffable, Infinite Eternity— forever and everywhere.
A story such as this the only way these humans can begin to understand what is really happening; but whoever told this story clearly still remembers how it really happens, or he could not have invented this story to tell.
And then, I remember making my very first decision, as firmly as a sacred vow:
I will never forget how it really happens otherwise than in this human life into which we are, temporarily, born— I will remember, and I will help others to remember as well.