Daniel Sheehan’s vital and compelling memoir, The People’s Advocate: The Personal and Legal Memoir of America’s Most Courageous Public Interest Lawyer, shows us the author and his friends in spirited combat with the bald-faced lies of government —combat conducted through our legal system, the last and ultimate venue in which our democracy publicly adjudicates the truth. His book is clear testimony to the enormous difficulty of this mission in the face of the vast means possessed by government, industry, and, on occasion, even the judiciary itself to prevent the truth from willing out.

Sheehan takes us inside many of the most important civil liberties legal battles of recent decades—beginning with two of the five cases he litigated while still a student a Harvard Law School, then moving briskly towards the case that electrified the country, United States v. New York Times (better known as “The Pentagon Papers trial”), followed by the Watergate burglary, several critical cases surrounding the American Indian Movement’s coming-of-age at Wounded Knee, the American Sanctuary Movement, the Greensboro massacre, the infamous Karen Silkwood trial (about which Sheehan makes stunning new, headline worthy revelations), and culminating in the epochal investigative and legal battles surrounding the Iran-Contra scandal. His storytelling is gripping as a John Grisham thriller. What makes The People’s Advocate so thoroughly unique, however, is that Sheehan’s passion for the law carries him into precincts few associate with the lawyer’s craft and calling anymore—namely philosophy and religion. 

Judges are allowed to pose as philosophers, but we are not used to seeing lawyers take that role. Yet Daniel Sheehan readily abandoned what any ambitious lawyer would have regarded as the job of a lifetime—he was one of just three litigators in the office of F. Lee Bailey, at the time the world’s most famous trial lawyer—to return to Harvard to study of all things the philosophical and religious foundations of ethics. Sheehan had happened across the Harvard political philosopher John Rawls’ profoundly influential A Theory of Justice, a dense tome that he read in a single weekend. Affter a long private meeting with the good professor, he enrolled in Harvard Divinity School to study the spiritual foundations of a true social ethics—hardly a move we associate with lawyerly ambition.This is but one moment in what turned out to be a life of notable departures from the normal career path.

Whether it be courtroom antics worthy of a Perry Mason episode (in one of the book’s most hilarious passages, Sheehan snatches an envelope from the lap of a prosecution witness, dumps its contents on the defense table, and holds up to the court an audio tape exonerating his client that the prosecution had been consistently swearing did not exist), his revelatory moment of transcendence on LSD, dangerous clandestine meetings with CIA whistleblowers, or joining his soul mate and enormously talented lifelong collaborator, Sara Nelson, in giving birth and raising their first child while the couple lived in a recently celibate Jesuit rectory, we can understand why sometimes the author himself seems amazed to be playing a role in such an over-the-top movie.
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Daniel Sheehan grew up mostly in small upstate New York village towns in a home dominated by his father Pat Sheehan’s alcoholism. The elder Sheehan had returned home from World War II battlefields a broken man. He found a job as a nighttime prison guard but dedicated his weekends to being a good cheer drinker at the local bar. Danny’s mother, Margery, struggled endlessly to rescue enough money from her husband’s paycheck to feed and clothe her children.  After moving the family to California, at some point the struggle overwhelmed her and Danny (the name, he points out, that was on his birth certificate) was sent back to New York with his father in hopes that the father would stay away. Fortunately, a kindly aunt and uncle in upstate New York took him in for his crucial adolescent years. We never really come to know quite how Sheehan came to be the wunderkind that he was, but there can be no doubting the epic scale of the intellect, emotional balance, physical talent, and sheer will that fueled his young adulthood.

I spent my entire high school experience devoted to one objective: proving to everyone—most importantly to myself—that I was “of value.” My mother, my sister, my brother, and even my father had, in effect, abandoned me and had never seen me play in a single athletic contest or act in a single play during my entire high school career. I was very upset about that at first. But ultimately, my unique situation forced me to learn how to become totally self-reliant and independent. I channeled all of my energy and all of my attention into demonstrating to everyone that I could be the best at anything I did. And I was.

He could not have picked a better place than Warrensburg Central High School, home of New York State’s famed Coach George Khoury, to strut all his stuff. Sheehan was a star athlete on Khoury’s championship teams in three different sports, even while also being a leader of student government and acting in student plays! All this was done for its own sake, no doubt, but also in service to his dominating ambition of becoming an astronaut. When we meet the author at the outset of his book, the hugely qualified Air Force Academy aspirant is about to get his first great political disillusionment. From here his life follows an improbable trajectory that eventually sees him all but installed at Harvard College in his junior year, where his academic chops prove to be such that Harvard Law School grants him another scholarship to enroll.

Daniel quickly became a legal star while at Harvard Law, where he co-founded the Harvard Civil Rights Law Review (with New York City’s talented political gadfly Mark Green), muscled together the famed Biafra Airlift, and litigated five cases, two of which turned out to be landmark moments in the law (Eisenstadt v. Baird, a critical precursor to Roe v. Wade, and In re: Pappas, which produced a foundational First Amendment decision protecting the confidentiality of journalist’s news sources). But this is a guy who played football, held a near 4.0 grade point average, acted in school plays, and took ROTC training (which produced his second great disillusionment) while he was an undergraduate at Boston’s premier working class university, Northeastern.

Very early on in the book we see that Sheehan has that rare combination of brains, chutzpah, and good timing required to challenge the unstated but nevertheless common alliances between the police, prosecutors, and judges. In fact, the non-independence of some members of the judiciary is a persistent background theme of the book. When, after forcing the recusal of two clearly biased judges in the epochal Karen Silkwood trial, he finally sees the trial handed over to a fair-minded judge, his response is “Holy shit! I thought. What do you know? What do you know? An honest judge!”
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There are truly funny moments in Sheehan’s book, whose good humor throughout is of a piece with his pluck. In a Constitutionally fraught First Amendment obscenity trial in state court on behalf of an Idaho Falls movie theatre owner, who had dared to show Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris in a Mormon-dominated community, Sheehan, working pro bono for the ACLU, finds himself up against an irascible judge clearly determined to seat a jury that would find for the local District Attorney. The young attorney’s expert questioning of the president of the town’s city council, who had put in a claim to professional expertise on the matter at hand—namely, the local “community standards” regarding obscenity—angers the judge who summarily throws him out of the court. What follows belongs on a movie screen, not in a book review.

What most comes across throughout the book, however, is Sheehan’s passionate love for the law, the American Constitution, and, most unexpectedly, his fervent faith in the spiritual underpinnings of our legal system. The cases provide all the drama you could want, but periodically throughout his book Sheehan takes breaks in the narrative to discourse on the “natural law” basis of our common law, the need for a higher vision of human politics, and other, well, edifying topics that clearly rule over his soul. Reading his book you get the sense that he would love to live two lives simultaneously—one as the crusading litigator he’s always been, the other as an inspiring philosopher-preacher raising us all up to a holy vision of the rights and responsibilities of democratic citizenship.

Readers will learn a great deal about what goes on behind the scenes in a high profile contest over our constitutional rights from his gripping account of the Pentagon Papers trial, a high-stakes battle between the Nixon administration and the legal team representing the New York Times regarding the Times’ publication of the Pentagon Papers, given to them by the famed whistle-blower Daniel Ellsberg. The issue at hand was the Times’ right to publish the documents without first undergoing government censorship. The core of Sheehan’s account here is concerned with the debate that went on within his legal team, by contrast with which the actual trials are a bit anti-climactic. He gives us a brilliant portrait of the hard work, political calculation, deep legal thinking, and intense internal debate that an event like that requires from the lawyers we entrust with the defense of our civil liberties.

Even so, the Pentagon Papers concerned a world-renowned newspaper that had both the funds and the platform to command the public eye. There was far less money around to serve the plight of the refugees from some truly sadistic Latin American dictatorships (regimes, it must be said, that were cruelly abetted by a deeply cynical Republican foreign policy establishment) who were all but guaranteed execution if they were returned to the countries they had fled, especially El Salvador. The American Sanctuary Movement was initiated by Catholic bishops, aided by clergy from other denominations, who were well-informed by their counterparts in Latin America about how deeply imperiled those who sought refuge in America truly were. When the newly elected President Ronald Reagan issued a secret executive order abrogating the 1980 Refugee Act, America’s amnesty law, Sheehan was brought in by the Catholic archbishop of South Texas, John Fitzpatrick, to defend two Catholic church workers who had been arrested while driving two political refugees to sanctuary in that state. In the ensuing trial, Sheehan is pitted against “a xenophobic, fear-mongering” newly appointed Republican U.S. attorney who, concealing Reagan’s unconstitutional order, accused the women of being well-intended dupes but nonetheless lawbreakers. Sheehan tells us:

If I analyzed a case carefully enough, there was always one big factual truth on our side. American juries don’t do well at remembering, or strictly applying, the law. What they are very good at, however, is searching out lies. The key is to figure out how to get the entire case to turn on which of the two sides is telling the jury the truth on one very big and important fact. American juries can tell that better than anyone would ever expect.
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After skillfully getting an immigration officer to confess the existence of the executive order, and thereby getting the edict before the jury, Sheehan then puts on the stand a direct witness to the atrocities committed by El Salvador’s government. The witness tearfully describes how he was the lone survivor amongst a group of innocent men, women, and children hiding in garage who were machined gunned to death by El Salvadoran army troops. The man’s riveting testimony causes the jury to weep and soon thereafter the judge offers the defense a directed verdict of not-guilty. It is here that we see how the young lawyer draws together the legal, the political and the moral. He turns down the offer so that he can continue the trial and thereby get more of this witness testimony into the public record, all the better to spread word of the atrocities through the American press.  This provides the occasion for his most impassioned moment before a jury:

In my closing argument, I implored the jury, “Look at the facts that have been presented to you. A sixteen-year-old girl named Maria, escaping from Herod’s men with her infant child in her arms, both of whom would be sent back to the slaughter if they were caught. And this older man, the man who was not the father of the child, but who took it upon himself to help them flee from Herod’s men. Does this story not sound familiar to you? We have all heard it before!”

Everybody on the jury, most of whom were Catholics, froze when I said this. The U.S. attorney jumped to his feet and started shouting. “I object! I object! Your Honor, this is an outrage!”

“You are absolutely right,” I shouted to the jury. “This is an outrage. The U.S. attorney and these two immigration officers—and this entire administration—should be ashamed of themselves! Our whole country should be ashamed of ourselves for allowing this to happen, in our name, to these two innocent people. These men,” I said, gesturing toward the prosecution table. “These ‘Herod’s men,’ should be ashamed of themselves for trying to draw you twelve good Americans on this jury into this dirty business against these two innocent victims, pursuant to which this administration would have you send them back to their certain deaths. Then the wrong that they have attempted to commit will become the wrong that you have committed. I do not believe that you will do this. Do not do this.”

The U.S. attorney jumped up. “I object! I object!”

But I pressed on. “Let these people go! These men,” I said, turning toward the assistant U.S. attorney, “are ‘Herod’s men.’ But you have a choice, a choice that none of us were alive to make two thousand years ago when our human family was confronted with this exact same choice before. You and I are privileged to have been given the opportunity to make this choice, this choice that we have all, as Americans, been asked to make in this case. Will you let these people go? The choice is up to you, my fellow Americans. The choice is up to you.”

The jury was in tears. Judge Vela was in tears. I was in tears. Archbishop Fitzpatrick was in shock.

But the moments of greatest tension in the book come when Sheehan is undertaking his investigations. After he, his equally extraordinary wife and collaborator, Sara Nelson, and a team of Jesuits and spiritual activists formed the Christic Institute (which, he tells us with a mixture of pride and bemusement, was “considered by the Washington religious community to be the most political religious organization in Washington and we were at the same time considered by the Washington political community to be the most religious political organization in Washington”), Sheehan became an icon within America’s progressive community. Front rank rock stars like Jackson Browne, Kris Kristofferson, Bonnie Raitt, David Crosby, and Graham Nash raised funds for them through benefit concerts.
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Sheehan also angered some movement leftists because he willingly worked with anyone who could help him research and thereby win his cases. Since these included active members of the CIA and activists in right-wing organizations, not to mention his own extraordinary chief investigator, William Taylor, a Marine Corps veteran of three combat tours who had been a criminal investigator while in the Corps, the Christic Institute took a few barbs from its left flank while at the same time undergoing a concerted attack from right-wing government operatives. This all came to a head in Sheehan’s protracted and ultimately unsuccessful prosecution of the Iran-Contra case. That epic journey is, fittingly, the final case in the book and it clearly exacted its toll on Sheehan and all his collaborators.
If most of Sheehan’s legal career has had him war against the political evils perpetrated by Republican administrations, it seems that the complicity of Democrats draws the greater ire. The final portions of the book suddenly shift from the bracing narratives of his investigations and trials to his summary analyses of the incoherence (or, perhaps more accurately, non-existence) of the political philosophies animating both parties and thus the profound disconnection of our governance altogether from any of the root considerations of law and morality required to give our legal system its legitimacy. Worthy as these reflections are, they are a bit dry and I suspect intended to be an historical and philosophical primer for activists who want to right our now badly listing ship of state.
Although The People’s Advocate advertises itself as Daniel Sheehan’s “life and legal history”, we really do not get much of the former. We never hear about a movie he liked or a record album he loved, nor what it was like to be a father to two children whose parents’ own working lives were all but consumed by some of the most perilous and important legal battles of our time. For all his interest in the spiritual nature of reality, he tells us very little about his own inner life or the very human trials that must have beset him and his family through all these years.

Even so, his good character comes through on every page. There is never a venal moment in the entire book, even after he is betrayed and abandoned by leading Democrats whose political cowardice cost both Sheehan and his country dearly. But that’s part of the total picture painted by the book that makes it such a profound and compelling education.

The civil liberties battles fought by Daniel Sheehan were but a prologue to the massive tests facing the American people today. As a lawyer at the center of many of the most fiercely contested trials of the nineteen sixties, seventies, and eighties, Sheehan was a central player in the conflicts that set the stage for our post-9/11 era.

It’s a whale of a story that should not only force us to rewrite our history books but also start paying close attention to the massive encroachments on our civil rights and political freedoms coming from our elected officials.  The People’s Advocate is an essential document for our times and should be read by every American who wants to understand the trials of conscience, character, and will we avoid only at great peril.

Dan Hamburg is a former Congressman representing California’s 1st congressional district and was the California Green Party’s first gubernatorial candidate. He is currently serving Mendocino County as the First District Supervisor.

]]> tag:dharmacafe.com,2009:peacelaw/9.21 2009-09-01T23:44:12Z 2016-02-22T23:50:13Z Bill Stranger comments@christinesuzuki.com A key figure in the small group of British expatriate literary Vedantans who settled in Los Angeles after World War II, Gerald Heard’s psycho-histories of civilization outclassed those of Toynbee and Spengler. In this brief excerpt from his book “The Human Venture,” he issues a prescient warning about the liabilities of all empires.

The Source of Civilization, “The Fissure of Humanity”

Gerald Heard

The periodic collapse of empires is perhaps the most striking fact throughout history. There is hardly an historian who has not realized that here is a fact which of all the phenomena he studies is not only the most striking but the most mysterious. Many have felt that if the periodic collapse of authority at the height of its power could be understood we should have an explanation off the forces which make civilization and even perhaps a philosophy of history. Hence biological, physiological and genetic theories of history have been frequent. Some are based on assumptions as to human instincts, which instincts have not been established. Others depend on even less well-founded assumptions bout purity of race and race endowments. Still others depend on assumptions about stock-exhaustion, that societies grow old as the human individual grows old. Most of them are based on a discarded biology—that man survives because all life survives through incessant struggle and when—the theory of course goes back behind Gibbon to the heroic saga made to justify aggressive violence—‘martial virtue’, the love of violence, declines, man degenerates and his kingdom passes. It is, of course, difficult to explain why then violence should fail at the moment of its success. The militarist argument, as has often been shown, really runs, that the only way to preserve martial virtues is always to be fighting and always losing.

Impartial opinion might decide that there is something inherently unstable in violence, and its resultant huge empires. They and it can no more be permanent than man can live in a continuous fit of passion or an explosion be made a structure. We do not, however, have to depend only on the certain evidence that empires of violence are as brief in time as they are extensive in area and that therefore they may be based on something which of its very nature is really not a constructive but a degenerative process. There is evidence that empires are the inevitable end-process, the dissolutive crisis of a maladjusted and malignant condition in the body-politic.

Empires are essentially sterile: they do not invent, they exploit: they cannot produce but must squander. They release and waste the accumulated energy and understanding of a completely other form of society, true civilization. How fertile that original way of life is we may judge by the time it takes to bring about complete collapse and degeneration, to exterminate the will to co-operate and the creative forces it commands. Dr. [Gordon] Childe draws attention to the highly significant fact that though what may be called the first imperial phase of the Mesopotamia culture lasts 2000 years (until at last by increasing extravagance of violence the whole native social resources are exploited and reduced and the country no longer produces empires to plague its neighbors but they produce empires to plague it), throughout that long period there is no progress in culture except in two particulars, the use of Iron (essentially a militarist specialization) and perhaps the full development of an alphabet.

For all the rest of its resources, which it fatally squandered, the militarist society, having increasingly to depend on violence, drew on the original productivity, invention and discovery of the primal civilization. It itself was incapable of replacing in any real manner its gigantic wastage. Like a raging star it radiated away all the energy stored in it until even its material form collapsed and only the sterile desert and a few slag heaps marked the site of the degenerative catastrophe.

The degenerative process, as we have seen, can be a slow one but it is one from which there is no recovery. Conditions become steadily worse for the ordinary man. His inventive power is at a standstill, paralysed. His relationships with his fellows grow unremittingly more acute—we see this by the steady growth of codes with steadily increasing penalties, with torture added to death and (as in the famous code of the conqueror Hammurabi who hopes by defining violence and the surety of punishment to stay ‘the degeneration of manners’) the deadly Lex Talionis ‘an eye for an eye’—the principle of the fully exacted debt though its exaction be socially ruinous, of no benefit to the original loser and forgiveness and remission are common sense.

Relations with the outer world are equally degenerative, for empire can have no frontiers. The whole world must submit or be conquered. The whole world must submit or be conquered. Hence war becomes endemic, the ‘Natural State’ until Nature will stand it no longer, and rather than this travesty of civilization, prefers savagery. It will return whence it came to that primal condition before there were these inventions which give men of violence power to plague to extinction all their fellows, powers which not even the most plagued (as we see whenever they seize power) can imagine how to employ without brining on the same ruin. The dilemma seems absolute: Savagery and comparative peace: civilization and certain destruction. There is no way of keeping society together without violence: the more civilization, the more violence, until the inevitable anarchy and desolation. (pp. 166-169)

]]> tag:dharmacafe.com,2007:peacelaw/9.542 2007-09-18T19:37:00Z 2007-10-06T22:50:21Z Bill Stranger comments@christinesuzuki.com

“O man, remember!”
Upanishads

Do We Dare To Play?

This article presents an absurd idea—peace is child’s play. I join with the world’s children in tugging at your hearts, minds, and bodies in the hope that you will listen. I write to initiate us into that which by its very nature surpasses us.  I present a profound and until now unheeded cry for a paradigmatic shift from a contest world of won to a playful world of one. This is a simple but very difficult message to hear much less to live. It involves recasting some of our basic ideas about play, children, and peace. My purpose is to provide both a point of departure and a direction of spirit for those who would join the children and come out to play.

This “coming out to play” may seem simple, but it is not easy. Simplicity is sometimes unbearable in the force of its truth. Make no mistake to come out and play with the world requires courage. The issue is not whether nations and peoples are ready, but whether you and I have the wisdom and courage to invest ourselves with children as a covenant of faith in the future. I cannot do this for you, only with you, for to do otherwise turns the visceral into the vicarious. Over the past thirty-five years I have encountered thousands of children who were ready to play in the face of their fears. I am asking the same of you, the reader. We each seek the experience of being alive before we die. The difficulty is that for us to find it, we must not be afraid of life. We must not abandon living just to stay alive. I’m not asking you for the courage to face death, that is not enough; you and I must reach more deeply for the courage to face life. Fortunately we have many courageous guides.

Bearers of Promise

One morning in the midst of a lecture to educators and social workers in Manila, The Philippines I heard the sounds of laughing and running children approaching the room. Eight children from a nearby squatter camp hurried into the room. The six young boys and girls and two teenage girls were brought to play with me as a demonstration for the adult professionals who observed our play from the safety of their chairs.

As the children entered the room I stopped talking and put mats down on the tile floor. The children gathered around the edge of the mats.  Their anxious smiles and excited bodies anticipated what was coming. The fact that we did not speak each other’s language wasn’t important.
I began to crawl toward the children. They squealed and ran around the mats. Some snuck around behind me, touched my back, and scampered away laughing as I lunged toward them. Before long their tentative touch evolved into jumping on my back and running into my arms. Soon all of the younger children and one of the teenagers were on the mat playing with me. One of the teenage girls smiled shyly, but stood back away from our playground. The older girl who was playing reached out to her hesitant friend with the invitation, “Come it’s OK. He’s human too.”

Some months later I walked out and sat in the playground of a school in Athlone, a township near Cape Town, South Africa. Curious and excited the young children ran up and surrounded me. From the back of the group the smallest boy squirmed through the others until he crawled into my lap. He seemed to be three or four years old. He reached out and wrapped his tiny arms around me as far as they would go and held me tightly. We didn’t talk. He just snuggled in close in the midst of the crowding, jostling, and laughing children. I encircled him with my arms so the excited rush of other children wouldn’t hurt him.  When the bell signaled the children to line up to go back into the school the little boy continued hugging me. After a few moments he got up, waved, and walked toward the school.

When I returned to the school a teacher who observed us through the windows asked if I knew anything about the little boy in my lap. I replied that I knew nothing about him. She said that he was brought to the school after he was found tied up in a black plastic bag and thrown away in a pile of trash. I turned away and looked through tears back out onto the playground.

These two children, like all children, are messengers. They are who Elie Wiesel calls “bearer[s] of promise.”¹ What is the promise they bear? Their promise is peace. Here are a child and a teenager who have lived with neglect and violence. Yet, I felt from them no anger, fear, or revenge. These children, however, did not hide. They refused to give in to their suffering. They had not lost their reason for loving. Their willingness to embrace difference and not retreat in fear takes great courage, they ask nothing more from me than the courage to return their love. How different they are from their warring seniors. They were able to transcend their victimization not by revenge but by the sheer force of their loving. To them peace is neither an idea nor an ideal, but a living relationship expressed in their original play. They are messengers bringing a promise of forgiveness and peace created in a different state of consciousness than that which violates their humanity. Their lessons are simple, but very demanding. They demonstrate, in a way plain enough for any adult to see, that love, kindness, and peace are our only acceptable actions.

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The Godsend Conspiracy

In their original play children conspire with Creation to see around the corners of life and to engage us in a model of peace accessible but hidden, suggested, but ignored. At such a moment one realizes that we can communicate in ways that are far more profound than through words. Whether we know it or not, and however far removed we imagine ourselves to be from wonder, we have deep down just such a feeling of belongng; held in trust at the source of our own childlikeness which enables us to share in the secret of being at its most wondrous.

Creation’s compact with childhood is described in Psalm 104, verse 2,3,4.

A child says:

This Godsend Conspiracy is a kind of contract in the human spirit between Creation and children for the purpose of reinstating the original meaning of childhood into the direction and growth of human life and thereby fulfills childhood’s promise of peace.  The Godsend Conspiracy is experienced as an ecological wisdom, sentient kindness, and original play, which animate all life.  In it’s grace we share the rapture of being alive, that ineffable experience where reality is the same in oneself as in everyone else, and where action emerges out of the present moment without reflection, where one sort of knows how one should relate spontaneously, without thinking, to every moment of life.

Katie is one such guide and mentor. Katie was a special needs playmate of mine in Southern California. One day when I arrived in the classroom Katie was wandering about, stopping momentarily to jump lightly up and down. She vigorously shook her hand in front of her face. She walked a few steps toward me and repeated her self-stimulating motions. She seemed disconnected from the other children and staff in the room. I said her name, got down on my hands and knees, and crawled towards her. She smiled, cocked her head, and sent me a delicate blue-eyed play-look which darted in like a hummingbird sucking nectar from a flower, hovered and darted away. Three year old Katie unselfconsciously opened her arms to embrace me as I crawled closer. We rolled over onto a blue and yellow mat. She sat on my tummy and bounced up and down. As I turned over she slid off and laughed We lie next to each other on our sides. Our faces were just a few inches away and our eyes gazed into each other. I quickly turned away with tears in my eyes. I thought to myself, I’ve just seen and touched a face of God. I couldn’t help but to look back at Katie. Like an arrow, a thought impaled my mind, I said to myself, “You know don’t you.”  She giggled a tiny bubble of laughter. It seemed as though she sent the arrow. “You know don’t you.” I repeated in my mind. Another bubble of laughter erupted from her. We rolled over and continued our play.

After we finished playing I walked her to her chair for a snack. Before I left she smiled at me and we hug. I feel like something very special had passed between us. Katie not only knew the questions that had been rummaging about in my mind like marbles in a tin can; she also knew how to share the answers with me.

Our moment is not available to scientific investigation, educational pedagogy, or psychological reasoning. Katie’s bubble of laughter is like a hot spring in my heart that bubbles out of my eyes as tears on the drive home.  On my drive home through the green fields of early Spring in Southern California Driving home I remember something Jung said about God. “’I cannot define for you what God is. I can only tell you that my work as a natural scientist has established empirically that the pattern which men call God exists in every man, and that this pattern has at its disposal the greatest transformative energies of life’”.&sup2

What happened?  I had seen a face of God. Should I say to her teacher that I just saw a face of God in Katie? No, that doesn’t seem possible.  What I decide to do is to write a letter to Katie’s parents and tell them of our experience. I sit down in my car and handwrite the note. I wait and give it to her mother as she arives to pick Katie up. The next day Katie’s Mother comes to pick up her daughter walks up to me and hugs me. With tears in her eyes she tells me that I am the first person, other than herself and her husband to really see

Katie.