Sweet Dreams

I was fourteen years old when I awoke in the middle of the night with the radio on. Whenever I had difficulty sleeping, I would leave the radio on for company. That night I was listening to WBCN, a rock radio station in Boston. Growing up I loved listening to rock music. It just made me feel good and transported me to another realm away from the pressures of high school and the general anxiety teenagers felt. Anyway, that night I was having trouble sleeping and the radio provided the background music to the thoughts that kept me from falling back to sleep. As I lay in my bed tossing and turning I looked out my bedroom window on that starry night and wondered: What happens to us when we die? My parents were both raised catholic (my mother was Italian and my dad Irish), but brought my brother, Brian and me up Episcopalian. We were both baptized in the Episcopal Church, took communion and read from the Book of Common Prayer each Sunday and attended Sunday school. It was in church that I learned we all have souls inside of us and when we die our souls leave our bodies. How they did that I didn’t know, but they did. I understood that they went up to heaven, in the sky, but I was confused. I was thinking of the logistics of every human being who ever lived and died from the cave men and the ancient Egyptians – who to my teenage knowledge were the earliest humans on earth - to that night and the poor souls who would die in the future. How would all those souls fit in the sky? Wouldn’t it get crowded? It was then that I imagined myself dying and my soul floating up to heaven with the other souls packed side by side and one on top of another like books on a library shelf that went on forever. And I gleaned from those church sermons that if we don’t get saved, we would go to hell. I expressed this concern to my parents, so then my brother Brian would taunt me on the Sundays when I didn’t want to go to church. He would say, “If you don’t go to Church today, Rosie, you’re gonna go to hell.” I envisioned a frightening place at the core of the earth with red hot flames and deep, dark inescapable caves. Then my logical side spoke up. Really? I thought, could there actually be a place worse than living on earth with war, poverty, people abusing others and themselves, murders, animals being tortured, starvation and hatred. That year Jimmy Carter was president; the beginning of an epic classic, Star Wars flew into theatres; the punk rock group, The Sex Pistols released their debut album; Atari introduced a new video computer; and both Groucho Marx and Elvis Presley died. I didn’t know it then, but it was also the year I had that first inkling about what happens to our souls that would ignite a spark and eventually start me on a spiritual odyssey.