I was raised by atheists, and when it comes to religion, I often joke that I’m a "lapsed Wiccan." However, I AM (officially, anyway) a Catholic, and I have high hopes for the new pope.
I never thought that Ratizinger was going to work out–he was too hidebound and rule-oriented. When he told the nuns to stop paying so much attention to the poor, that was the last straw for lots of us.
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Andy showed up at the grocery store, and now Joe has shown up as well.
We go to a local discussion group on Tuesday nights, and right now we’re reading and discussing the mythologist Joseph Campbell. The last time we were there, Whitley kept seeing a man in a 3-piece suit and fedora standing in the corner. He was curious because this outfit was very UNlike what the folks in the discussion group wear.
He gradually realized the figure was Campbell, who had "dropped in" from the dead.
He mentioned this to the group and discovered that ANOTHER person had seen the same mysterious figure.
I wonder who will "show up" next?read more
Whitley has always loved the humor of the late comedian Andy Kaufman, who once put a gun to his head and told his audience he would shoot himself if they didn’t laugh at his jokes (you can imagine the forced guffaws that resulted from this). He also once took his entire Carnegie Hall audience out for milk and cookies after his show.
When he was dying from lung cancer in 1984, and being pushed around in a wheelchair, a lot of people assumed it was just another Kaufman joke.
In "The Christmas Spirits," a book Whitley published this year, he tells the story of Dickens’ "Christmas Carol" in modern terms, by having the ghost of Christmas past show up in the protagonist’s life as a homeless man.
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You may think you’ve had some odd experiences (especially if you’ve had VISITOR experiences), but I think something that happened to me is right up there at the top.
I woke up to find several faces peering down at me, asking me questions like, "What’s your name?" "What date is it today?" "Who’s the President?," and I COULDN’T THINK OF THE ANSWERS!
I often can’t remember the date, but I DO know my name (and Obama’s too).
I was in an ambulance, being whisked to the hospital, after having had a seizure. It turned out this as set off by a certain type of prescription cough medicine I had taken for the hacking cough that was keeping me awake all night. read more