The Luckiest Man Alive?

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The last day of my visit, Keeney and I drove out to an old Spanish mission—a tourist site I had wanted to see but perhaps also a barely conscious first step in following his advice to explore my Catholic roots. Stepping into the church, I heard no choirs of angels and felt no bolts of electricity. Light shining through a high window, however, did illuminate a statue of St. Martin de Porres in a rather dramatic way.

When we got back to his office, Keeney asked if I was ready to dance. We’d been dancing a lot already, or at least shaking our booties to jazz, gospel, and Dr. John records in breaks from the interviews. But this time, he put on a tape he’d made of primal drumming. I began stomping around the room and soon noticed a tingle of energy trickling up my spine. I kept dancing, dropping down to the floor sometimes and other times draping my arms around Keeney, who was moving much as he did on the day I met him in the Utne office. Dancing still more, I broke into a series of whoops and hollers. It wasn’t a trance or altered state, just a great feeling, like a psychic bath removing layers of anxiety from my body. Then, suddenly, my mind flashed on a vivid image of woods and prairie as if I was viewing them from the sky. When Keeney finally shut off the music, I slumped sweatily into the nearest chair and my mind filled with all sorts of memories connected to flying—deep wishes, for as long as I can remember, to be aloft like a bird. I had always wanted, literally, to fly to the moon.

Returning home to Minneapolis, I found myself swept up in a series of serendipities that pointed me in interesting directions. I began to look at my dreams in new ways and to dance around my living room to music from CDs included in the Profiles of Healing books. As the months passed, my life took no dramatic turns, but I found myself experiencing some things a bit differently. I left more to chance and sometimes saw meaning in what I formerly would have dismissed as mere happenstance. In moments of stress, I can shut my eyes and draw strength from seeing a green landscape beneath me as I soar. Yet I still sometimes wonder, was it real? Did energy rise up through my body and give me the feeling of flying like an eagle?

Before sitting down to write this article, I decided to refresh my thoughts about that day by reading up on St. Martin de Porres. Born in 16th-century Peru to a black Panamanian mother and a white Spanish father, he became acclaimed for healing people simply by shaking hands. Martin is the patron saint of hairdressers, public health workers, and persons of mixed race. “It was widely known,” stated a Catholic reference book I consulted, “that he could fly.”

Jay Walljasper is editor of Utne magazine.

Profiles of Healing

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