SOMETHING DIFFERENT

Spacewalk by Ralph Hamilton Collection of Rudy Schild and Jane Struss

My husband, Rudy, is an astrophysicist, and also an open-minded scientist who has become something of a hero to many people because he is willing to listen to the stories of those who are “experiencers.” That is, they have had the experience of being abducted by extra-terrestrials, usually more than once. He got into doing this through his collaboration with the late, great John Mack. Back in the day, this was pretty shocking unbelievable stuff, made worse by the fact that the experiencers really couldn’t talk about it, or process it in any way. They were very mad at scientists who put them down without really looking at the evidence, or listening to them.

Granted, this is a pretty tough call. Hard science depends on verifiable and reproducible evidence, and if there are indeed UFO’s on the earth, they seem to do a very good job of controlling their garbage output. And the government evidence is presently classified, no matter what it is, so no one can get a look at it to check out what reality is and what isn’t in this area. And researchers disagree on what they do know. One claims that there really are no “UFO’s”, they should be more accurately called “IFO’s” (Identified Flying Objects), because what is seen is actually stuff being built by our own government. Others claim that there’s a government conspiracy to cover up the fact that the planet is teeming with ETs. All this leads to unending conspiracy theories on both sides, and a huge amount of misinformation all around.

I’m not an experiencer, neither is Rudy, but our friends who are, on the whole, are sane, articulate, and to a man or woman committed to making life better for others on this planet. To me, that speaks volumes. The abduction event, (or events) have transformed their lives….and drawn a real line in the sand for them. Everything is either “Before” or “Since”.

I was at an event this weekend which brought together 30 people, experiencers of various kinds, not just alien encounters but of other kinds of psychic and spiritual encounters which changed their lives (and by the way, the Native Americans don’t call them “aliens”, but “star relatives”). The agenda of the group evolved to be about listening, and trying to make connections between the “normal” experiences of people, and paranormal, or not-so-normal experiences of other people and how they might grow to understand each other, and learn from each other.

A few weeks ago, in response to the Vatican’s welcoming disaffected Anglicans into their ranks, James Carroll wrote in his column for the Boston Globe about the “large and urgent challenge facing every religion and every religious person, which is how to positively reconcile tradition with the massive changes in awareness, knowledge, and communication that come with the scientific and technological breakthroughs that daily alter the meaning of existence.” I couldn’t agree more with him, and it occurred to me that this group of such disparate people was embarking on a conversation about how to do this, and that it’s very urgent.

After the meeting, a number of us went to dinner at a restaurant in Harvard Square. A good friend asked me about my own church, which is St John the Evangelist, Bowdoin St in Boston. She wanted to know that if, since it was so High Church (“smells and bells” as we affectionately call it), had we gone over to the Anglican position. “Oh, no”, I replied, “we were the first church in the Diocese of Massachusetts to openly welcome gays and lesbians and to have a healing ministry during the time when HIV/AIDS was a big crisis, and when people who were gay, and especially those with AIDS were excluded from having a religious home. We did a good job, almost all Episcopal churches are open and welcoming in that way, and so we need to be involved in something new now, in welcoming other groups of people”. “Oh yeah?” said the experiencer across the table, “would I be welcome?”

And I didn’t know how to answer that.