I persuaded my wife to wear her new maternity bathing suit on the beach so she wouldn’t be embarrassed. Summer was coming to a close, and before going back to teaching, I wanted to spend a few days up on a Canadian beach North of Buffalo. Back in those days I had no idea I would one day become a professional psychic, but in retrospect, I can see that there were hints. Our little cottage had a light-it-yourself hot water heater, so I turned on the gas, leisurely lit a match, put my arm in the space and poof! Second degree burns.
The local doctor was neither old nor young, and a very nice guy. So we got to talking while he dressed my burned hand and arm. “I turned my life around,” he confided, “after reading Ayn Rand’s book, THE VIRTUE OF SELFISHNESS.” He must’ve caught my look and said, “The title is deceptive. To catch a reader’s attention.” Since I was still a young man, the story of an older doctor fascinated me. He’d been a dedicated over-zealous young physician who’d been working himself into an early grave and propping himself up on alcohol and drugs. It was the 60s and doctors in Canada were not getting rich.
“That book taught me what I should have known, that you have to take care of yourself first in order to be best for others.” As an able and caring young physician in an area where his services were in great demand, he couldn’t say no and ended up alcoholic and suffered chronic fatigue. Sartre wrote that a man’s freedom lay in his ability to say NO. The idea has many applications, including one such as the doctor’s. “So what did you do?” I asked. “I cut back. Got off the booze, fell in love with my wife again, and took my life back.” He assured me that the book, THE VIRTUE OF SELFISHNESS, was a “must read” so I wouldn’t fall into a similar trap. I wasn’t overworked at the time, but I was too fond of alcohol, and being perceptive and intuitive, if not downright psychic, he’d picked up on that.
My wife and I were a strange sight on the beach, she with long dark hair, and being very pregnant, waddled along in her blue and white stripped maternity bathing suit. I wore rubber thongs, cut off Levis, and a towel around my neck. I’d let my beard and hair grow long and untrimmed over the summer to match my hairy chest. We both wore sunglasses. Movie stars we were not.
A dozen or so children played noisily on the beach. The air off Lake Erie was cool, almost cold. Even if I wanted to brave the icy water, swimming was out because of my burned and bandaged right hand and arm. As we walked through the gray sand hand in hand, the children stared at the sight we made. Suddenly we had a following. Me especially. “Moses, Moses, bless us, Moses,” they called out. One started and the others followed. Dogging our heels, there was only one way to satisfy them. Only in retrospect could I see how that event presaged the psychic-spiritual vocation to come.
One by one each child knelt before me saying, “Bless me, Moses.” I made the sign of the cross with my red swollen fingers the best I could. “Bless you, my child. Bless you, may God be ever with you.” As I said the words, I felt that I’d been overshadowed somehow by a spiritual presence greater than myself. When I was their age, I’d been a fairly religious kid, but not in the usual way. After taking my first degree in Philosophy and becoming, in my own mind, a sophisticated thinker, I called myself a combination Agnostic-Atheist. Agnostic necessarily because of our limited ability TO KNOW, and Atheistic by belief or choice.
But as I blessed each child... “Moses, Moses, bless us...” I experienced what I’d now call a spiritual warmth flowing through me. I felt as if I’d strayed, and once again touched the hem of Him who I had once revered. My long beard caused the children, Roman Catholic no doubt, to associate me with Moses, the bringer of the Tablets, not the Master Jesus, the healer-teacher. But the impulse was the same. Blessing each of them, I felt blessed myself. It was a game, and yet not a game.
It would be almost ten years after that incident on the beach... Bless us, Moses, bless us... before I returned to Spirit. And then the emergence of a psychic opening. That drama, I understand, somehow presaged things to come, my return to Spirit, to God, in a new way. That outstanding day brought two important messages. First that we must first take good care of ourselves in order to be best for others, and second, that Spirit is ever present and constantly offers to ally with us if we let It.
Richard Lee Van Der Voort, M.A. Please see my website that includes books, blogs and psychic services at http://psychicconsultingbyemail.com. For more information about psychic readings my e-mail my address is psychicmind.vandervoort231@gmail.com
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