Magic and God

I developed an interest in magic at a very young age. In the photo I am performing an act for my family at age 12. This was not my first such show. I had the Howdy Doody Magic Kit several years before this. I also did magic with chemicals about this same time. In fact I could produce some very Biblical effects such as changing water into wine and the wine into milk.

Over the years I learned a number of tricks as well as how most magicians pulled off their stage effects. Speaking of magicians one of my favorites, or I should say two, are Penn and Teller. These guys do some amazing stuff.

Teller, despite his name, never talks in public. Penn Jillette does all the blatter for the act. They have been performing together for the last 38 years, which is longer than a lot of people stay married these days.

Penn is the big one. He is six foot seven inches tall and has put on a few pounds over the years. Teller is the little guy, but very athletic, agile (especially for a 65-year old man) and adept at slight of hand.

I haven't brought these guys up to talk about Teller or magic. I want to talk about a difference in religious outlook between Penn Jillette and myself, and why I bring this up is because we share a childhood experience so similar it is almost magic in itself.

Penn Jillette, who is a very intelligent and fair minded man, a reasonable Liberal and someone who can discuss issues without rancor or ridicule is also an Atheist and a vocal one. He wrote a book promoting his Atheistic views called, God, No!. We'll come back to that book in a bit. But first, Penn Jillette has explained how he became an Atheist this way.

As a boy, he tells us, his parents forced him to go to church, which he didn't like. He made a deal with his parents. He would join the church youth group if they did not force him to go to church. In youth group he began to argue with the others about the Scriptures. The minister originally encouraged him, suggesting he read the Bible, advise Penn took so he was better equipped to make his arguments. He did this until the minister suggested to his parents he should no longer come to the group. Penn asserts it was reading the Bible that turned him Atheist and insists anyone who read the Bible from cover to cover would also become an Atheist.

Now as a boy my parents forced me to go to church. I didn't like going. When I got a driver's license I made a deal with my folks. I would go to Sunday School, but not church. They agreed. I later switched from this to MYF (Methodist Youth Fellowship). I even was elected President of the youth group. As such I started a series of discussions in which I claimed I would play Devil's Advocate just for the sake of argument. However, I wasn't playing. I was trying to attack Scripture. I wasn't asked to leave youth group. I was actually praised for making meetings so interesting that attendance grew. Like Penn Jillette I did eventually become an Atheist and a vocal one. But unlike Penn Jillette I am now a Born Again Christian. I have also read the Bible cover to cover, several times, and doing so has not turned me back to being an Atheist. I obviously did not see the content of Scripture that same way Penn says he saw it.

I do want to mention Penn Jillette's intro to his book, God, No!.

First let me say if you are going to do anything as extreme as kill your child because God told you to do it, you better be really, really, really sure it was God. And I'm going to tell you right here that if some voice told you this it wasn't God.

I have three children. They should not be here. My wife was told, assured, exhorted to even forget the idea, because she could never possibly have a child. She had all ready lost seven. But by the mercy of God she had three. I also want to point out that her having these children was not what turned me from Atheist to Christian. No, the first of these children came over a year after I turned to Christ. These miracles didn't lead me to believe in God, they simple confirmed it.

God is not going to ask me to kill any of my children.

Now I believe such a thing happened once to a man named Abraham. I admit, I have not memorized the Bible, so perhaps there is another such case I somehow forgot, but I think there was only Abraham. Abraham was told by God to take his son, the one promised by God to Abraham and his wife Sarah, his seed and her egg, and sacrifice the lad.

There are foreshadowings here pointing to the coming of Christ, God's only begotten son, who would be sacrificed for men, but unlike Christ, Isaac did not die. God told Abraham to stop as he prepared his son for death. In the film, "The Bible" on the History Channel, when God tells Abraham to take Isaac and sacrifice the boy, Abraham asks, "Why Lord, haven't I proved my faith enough."

Well, no, he hadn't. Abraham was promised a son by God, but instead of having faith this would happen, he took Sarah's advice and had a child by her maidservant, a boy named Ishmael. Ishmael would prove a thorn in Israel's side until this very day. So Abraham had not proven his faith at all by that act. His willingness to sacrifice Isaac did.

So you might ask, why wouldn't God ask the same of me. Well, for one thing God never told me to move from one place to another. God did not physically come visit my home, sit down to dinner and promise my wife she would have children. I never stood with God and argued with him about what he was going to do to some city (Reference Genesis 18). If you read the Bible cover to cover you will find God dealt with human kind in different ways at different times.

There is another reason. God talked with Abraham before the Law was given to Moses. That came a few hundred years later. The essence of the Law is the Ten Commandments. Although with the Resurrection of Christ many of the Mosaic Laws became moot, the Ten Commandments remains as valid now as then. One of the Ten Commandments is "Thou Shall Not Murder".

You see, my problem is not that love and morality are more important to me than my faith, because I am a human and to tell the truth my love and morality are not always what they should be. This is one of the reasons I needed forgiveness and salvation in the first place. No, it is that my faith in the mercy and justice of God is so strong that I know he would never ask one to break his own commandments. Thus I know God would never tell me to murder my children any more than he would tell me to seduce my neighbor's wife.

Now Penn Jillette says that reading the Bible cover to cover would make anyone an Atheist. He has said:

"I think because what we get told about the Bible is a lot of picking and choosing, when you see, you know, Lot's daughter gang raped and beaten, and the Lord being okay with that; when you actually read about Abraham being willing to kill his son, when you actually read that; when you read the insanity of the talking snake; when you read the hostility towards homosexuals, towards women, the celebration of slavery; when you read in context, that "thou shalt not kill" means only in your own tribe—I mean, there's no hint that it means humanity in general; that there's no sense of a shared humanity, it's all tribal; when you see a God that is jealous and insecure; when you see that there's contradictions that show that it was clearly written hundreds of years after the supposed fact and full of contradictions.  I think that anybody... you know, it's like reading The Constitution of the United States of America. It's been... it's in English. You know, you don't need someone to hold your hand. Just pick it up and read it. Just read what the First Amendment says and then read what the Bible says. Going back to the source material is always the best."

What I see is Penn picking and choosing from the Bible. When you do take the Bible in context from beginning to end you see these things, slavery, prejudice, hostility, war are the things of men not following the directions of God. God works within the framework of the real world, pointing us to what is better and right. Take for instance the statement, "When you see, you know, Lot's daughter gang raped and beaten, and the Lord being okay with that."  Really? Really? First of all, the offering of Lot's daughters (See genesis 19) to the mob came from Lot. This was a man's solution to the problem and the kind of wrong-headed thing we do when we take things into our own hands (just like Abraham and Hager producing Ishmael). The facts are that Lot's daughters were not gang raped and beaten. They were rescued, along with Lot and his family from that situation by the grace of God. God was not approving of such behavior. God destroyed Sodom for such behaviors.

I believe in God and Penn Jillette does not. I do not dislike Penn because of this. He has a God-given right to believe what he believes as do I. He says when he became an Atheist there were about 9% of Americans sharing his belief and now there are 20% and he calls Atheism "the fastest growing religion in America".  So we have twenty-percent who believe there is no God. So fine, for then if we take Penn's quote above they are left with no God, just rape and beatings and hostility and slavery and war and crime and all the other miseries that mankind inflicts upon itself and without hope. 

I have something even better than hope. I have faith.

From Hippy to Hedonist to Heaven Bound

This was our apartment kitchen when we moved into University City in Philly. This is after we cleaned it up and my wife painted the cabinets.
It was a one room, first floor apartment with a small kitchen, a bath and a kind of dressing room closet.

It was between 41st and 42nd Street in West Philly up the street from Clark Park. (If you read any of my Philly Stories (Six Stories of the Sixties) you can easily guess that "Claire Square" is a stand-in for Clark Park. The statue in the center of the real Clark Park is of Charles Dickens, who once spoke there on his visit to America. (Friends of Clark Park)

We lived not far off the University of Pennsylvania campus and my wife would walk to her job as a private secretary to the Chairman and co-Chairman of the Chemistry Department where she would type books and papers full of odd symbols and formulas. I think it must have been very difficult to type things when you couldn't understand what you read. She had a very similar situation when she later worked for the Franklin Institute.

By this time we had left any pretense of interest in religeon behind. I had become an Athiest, despite the fact that one of the articles I had published in "The Communicator" was an argument against the "God is Dead" movement that was prevelent at the time. (God Resurrected 1966) I considered myself a mercenary writer, a typewriter for hire so to speak. Since "The Communicator" was a paper for college students my pieces always took a contrary view from the convential wisdom of the student trends of the times. Thus I wrote a pro-Vietnam War piece, a pro-God piece (sort of) and an anti-Drug piece. I liked to stir the pot and rile things up. It didn't matter what my personal views were, I always took the least popular side. (I also wrote under the pen name of "Loop" because as a non-student I wasn't supposed to write for this publication.)

We had asimilated a Hippy lifestyle, as I explained previously, but it was to deteriorate to something else just as the Love and Peace Generation was already beginning to deteriorate in delusion after the Rolling Stones concert at Altamost and the Kent State Massacre. For us you might say Love and Peace became Sex and Drink. We became Hedonists, especially me.

"Dirty Pictures" had hooked me in junior high. My only case of criminal activity had been stealing men's magazines at the local newstand (where I picked up the papers for my paper route). I got caught stuffing three such rags in my shirt one day, was told by the owner exactly and precisely where he was going to stuff those magazines if he ever caught me stealing again, and I never stole anything anywhere anytime after that.

However, a few years later a used book and magazine stand opened at the Farmer's Market just east of town. There was a section hidden behind a curtain with a sign saying, "No one under 21 allowed". I would edge to the side of this barrier and peek in and there were all these nudie magazines. One day the proprietor, a man who looked like Ratso Rizzo in "Midnight Cowboy" sidled up to me as I peered through the crack in the curtain.

"Hey kid," he says and I jumped a foot. "Interesting, eh?"

I didn't know what to do. I just shook my head or perhaps I was just shaking.

"Look," he says, "I can see you ain't 21. (No, I was more like 14 or 15.) "But you look like a good kid, like somebody who wouldn't tell anyone if I sold them to you."

And so I began buying my pornographic fix from a sleazy stall at a Farmer's Market. The magazines behind the curtain were basically two kinds. There was "Sunshine and Health", a Naturlist Publication that promoted Nudism and had a lot of pictures of ordinary people in the buff playing volleyball. The other kind had titles such as "Artist and Models". These other magazines came mostly from Sweden and each page consisted of a nude woman in some pose. The blurb of text in the beginning claimed these were for the use of "serious artists" interested in "painting the human form". Yeah, right, I ran home and got my sketch pad at the ready.

Eventually this guy and his bookstall disappeared and my supply was cut off, so I was reduced to buying "Playboy" to hide in a secret crevice back in my bedroom. (Hmm, interesting now that I think of it. Although the Farmer Market guy had a sign banning anyone under twenty-one, the regular newsstands would sell "Playboy" and other men's magazines to you if you were 16 or older.  Of course, much of what the Farmer's Market guy sold was more raw than early "Playboys".)

It wasn't easy to get hardcore pornography in those days. There were no legal outlets (what the Farmer's Market guy sold was borderline pornography, not the real thing so to speak) and no Internet.

Somewhere between the Civil Rights Riots and the Anti-War Rallies, Peepshows opened in Philadelphia, the first volleys of the "sexual revolution". The first I remember and which I frequented a lot was above some stores on Walnut right across from Rittenhouse Square. There were Retail Stores in the basement of the building and you went up these steps between them to the Peepshow place. If you stood on those steps, the scene on the right is what you would be looking at.

Inside, the rooms were empty except for old time Nicheloldeon machines in the center. there were two such rooms. In one corner was a cage with a cashier who would exchange your dollar bills for quarters. You dropped a quarter in a slot, leaned forward to press your eyes against the viewer and a little movie would come on of a woman dancing about striping. She would remove a couple peices of clothing and the screen would go dark. You drop another quarter and the movie would restart where it left off. After four quarters had been dropped the dancer would remove her last vistage of covering and for a brief moment be nude, then the screen would darken again.

I heard this place or at least the first peepshows in Philly, true or not I do not know, were started by Ira Einhorn. He was the man who took credit for starting the first Earth Day and later became imfamous as "the Unicorn Killer".  Einhorn was a big deal counterculture guru in the sixties and early seventies, until he killed his mistress and kept the body in a trunk in his apartment. He later fled the country for France. (Senator Gaylord Nelson also claims to be the founder of Earth Day, but as far as I know never stored any bodies in his trunks. Being a politician he might have had some skeletons in his closet, however.)

My wife and I took an active part in that first Earth Day. ( Pollution Trail: Where is Man? ) It wasn't the first or last activism we took part in during those years. But by the 'Seventies we had become more interested in the "earthy" than the Earth.

On the dirty heels of the peepshows came the Adult Bookstores. Funny how when they stick "Adult" in front of something it usually means it is pretty immature and at least slightly depraved. There were Adult Bookstores, Adult Films, Adult beverages and Adult Language, hardly any of which represents very adult behavior.

I hate to think how much money I spent in Adult Bookstores. But there they were, popping up like pimples all over the face of Philly. Eventually, they seemed to concentrate, whether by choice or coercion, on Arch Street between Juniper and 13th Street just before the Old Reading Terminal, which became the Philadelphia Convention Center.  This was only a block away from the publisher I worked for on Cherry Street. How convenient.

There were a number of movie theaters in the city called Art Houses, another misnomer. They sounded like they showed European films by Fellini, Bergman, Tarkovsky or Pontecorvo, but no, they leaned toward directors such as Russ Meyer and Joseph Mawra, with films with title like "The Immoral Mr. Teas", "Olga's House of Shame" and an unending string of grainy black and whites of those Nudists playing volleyball.

My wife and I use to go to the Art Holiday and Art Walton together. We also went to the Globe Theater in Atlantic City, which did old time burlesque back before the casinos came and took over the town. It was kind of funny. At "Art" houses such as the Holiday and Walton, my wife was a rare woman in the audience; at the Globe it was almost all couples. I guess people figured they were out of town at a tourist trap and no one back home would know. The Globe seemed racy at the time, but you can see much worse on TV these days.

There were also two or three little theaters grouped together on East Market Street, I believe on the corner of 17th Street that showed stripper and nudie movies. By the late sixties they added live shows that went further than anything at the Globe. The women in these shows went to full nudity and then some.

If you are seeing something of a downward progression here, you are. Almost like a drug, pornography can demand stronger fixes. As a teen I was thrilled by a nude model in a static pose. By my late twenties I was seeking more and more stronger stimulates, more and more weird stuff. And my wife and I were becoming ever more daring in our own actions.

One day we were at a large mall and my wife went into a lingeree shop. She took some back to the dressing area and I waited, the ever stoic husband holding his wife's purse, as was another fellow nearby.  We nodded to each other, both sharing this kind of moment, when suddenly this medium tall blond woman came out of the dressing area wearing nothing but a fishnet body stocking. This was the other fellow's wife. About then my wife called to me to see what she had on and so I told her to just come out. She did and a kind of contest began between the women of stepping out in brief or transparent items. The other man and I exchanged telephone number. When my wife and I left the store, there was a large crowd of gawkers in front of the broad display windows who applauded as we left.

We began to get together with this other couple, either at their apartment or ours. We would stay over night, play sex games, take poliroid photos of each other. I want you to understand, my wife and I never got into "swinging" or "wife-swapping', we never had any interest in that, but doing it in front of others, yes, that wasn't a problem. As we had transitioned from the Hippy culture, I was back into office jobs. I changed jobs several times and each time I made more money. We were able to move to better apartments than that one in University City. The one we lived it at this time had a closed cuircuit TV channel. If someone rang your buzzer, you could change to channel two and see who it was before letting them in. You could also talk with the caller on an intercom. When they would come to our place, she would show up wearing only a coat, which she would fling open when we answered their ring. Obviously anyone in the building who happened to turn to channel two at the time would have seen her show, would have seen her everything.

As with such things, again their was a progression. However, there were some things about the guy I didn't particularly like, thing he would say that were more perverted than I felt I was and after a while we also began to suspect they wanted to take that step toward wife-swapping. That was when we dropped them.

But we had another couple we were good friends with, even better friends. They lived in the same apartment building and we began getting together with them regularily. There was no nudity, no sexual games involved, just some smutty talk sometimes. He was the very jealous type and prone to violence, so  that kind of stuff didn't fly. We would get together and play cards and drink.

Now, I am some kind of freak. I don't know why, but I could consume great quanities of alcohol and not get drunk. I have never really like alcohol very much actually. I didn't really begin drinking any until well into my twenties, but drinking was very much a social thing in the groups or with friends we had and so I drank. I could drink any of them under the table. My wife certainly didn't have my capacity. I almost killed her one night.

We were in the apartment, still in Philly at the time, and she asked me to make her a Manhattan. I didn't know anything about mixing drinks. I had a book. It said mix 1 part Vermouth to four parts Whiskey. I decided to make her a double, so I took a shot glass and put eight shots of whiskey and two shots of dry vermouth in the shaker. Added a couple dashes of bitters and shook it up.  My wife gulped it down, lost any idea where she was, felt sick and made it to the bathroom before collapsing. She fell striking her head on the toilet so hard she cracked the tank. Thankfully she didn't also crack open her noggin.

Usually it wasn't us passing out. It was out friend. Most nights we got together, he would eventually drift off to oblivion on beer, which is all he drank usually, but he drank a lot of it. Evenings would end with me carrying him to his bed. He wasn't a big man. He was perhaps an inch or two shorter than I, but very thin. But a dead drunk is nothing but dead weight.

He also had seventy-six tattoos and this was long before getting tattoo became the fad it is today. The song from the "Music Man" always came to mind, "Seventy-six tattoos led the big parade..."

Going out with our friends could be an adventure. It wasn't unusual for his wife to stash silverwear and salt and pepper shakers into her pocket when we left restaurants.  There were times I had to pull him out of bars before the fists flew and on at least one occasion grab him and push him into our car to escape arrest. This occured one drunken evening when he decided to join some kids playing street hockey. He always claimed he had played semi-pro hockey at one time. He butted into their game and one of the mothers called the police.

What purpose did life have? I was making enough money we could "enjoy" it. It was just us living in a series of apartments. We had no children encumbering us, no great obligations. I was an Atheist, so there was no higher power to worry about, I only answered to me and what I desired. I worked hard, I was still going to evening college, I was still writing, even selling some stories. This was as good as it gets, wasn't it? Nobody was getting hurt, were they?

Oh, sure, I didn't ever feel satisfied. I always seemed to find something irritating about my jobs. And my wife kept falling into these deep depressions, sometimes talking about suicide. She would cry for no reason (in my opinion) and often complain because she hadn't been able to have children. But she would get over it I was sure, and at last it seemed she had accepted the fact she never would be able to have children. After we lost the sixth one she had her tubes tied.

We no possibility of children, just the two of us, it seemed reasonable not to worry too much about the future.  When we reached 40, say, we could begin putting away for a rainy day. We were still young, so we could just go on trying to have fun for some more years. More parties, more travel, more nights out and ever more darker pornography. The pornography I was buying at this point was so dark I was even hiding it from my wife, although she had never objected to me reading the stuff.

Although, our closest friends were our drinking buddies, we did have other friends who were pretty main line suburbanites. I had made good friends with a fellow at my latest job, one I did enjoy and would hold for six years. He and I played tennis most of our lunch hours and we went golfing on the weekends. He had some parties at his place. There was some drinking, but not heavy and no one was putting on lampshades or doing anything foolish. These other friends were never aware of the sex and drink life we had engaged in so often for so long.

My wife and I were not involved with any other couple in sexual activities anymore, but that didn't mean we weren't misbehaving.  We were risk takers and we were probably fortunate we never got caught. I'm telling you nothing more, except the things we did would not be acceptable to you I'm certain.

So there I was and where do you think I was headed? There really didn't seem anything would change my mind about God. I was laying down a nice fast road to Hell, except I didn't believe in Hell. So that was no worry for me.

And then my wife got pregnant.

Yes, for the seventh time. Perhaps this was Lucky number.

It's a miracle, right, cause she had her tubes tied.

She lied.

She was determined to have a child of her own.

And now we were five months along and my wife was lying in a hospital room and the child was doomed.

Number seven, the number of completeness. Like a never-ending slow march to completeness. A wait in a death chamber accompanied by the constant beat of a drum.  Beat         Beat        Beat         Beat

I sat in that room every day for a week with the beat of a drum.    Beat      Beat       Beat         Beat

But it wasn't the beat of a drum, was it?

It was the beat of a heart that didn't know it should stop.

It was the throb of a life trying to be and wouldn't.

And somewhere in the deep dark night, watching my wife sleep, I heard   Beat       Beat      Believe    Believe

There is a God. There must be a God.  I can hear his breath in every beat.  Believe      Believe      Beat      Beat     Beat

But the baby had to be born. They could not delay longer for the sake of my wife the baby had to be born now.


Amy was born in July 1976 and Amy died in July 1976.

This is Good Friday a day itself marked by a death, the death of one as innocent, even more innocent than Amy. An unfair death that seemed to mark the end for so many. Those who saw him nailed to the cross ran and hid and wondered, "What now?"

When Amy died, my wife sunk in depression as close to death as possible while still alive.

What now?

But Easter is not the season of death. It is the season of Resurrection, the season of hope, a season of salvation for those who will only reach out and embrace it. Like the seed planted that must die to flower, so it was that year. Here at the end of all, at the number seven, at the completeness of things past I turned to belief I had denied and fought. I rose by dropping to my knees in the silence of my room.

He didn't say, "Go away you're filthy." He didn't say, "Go away and come back when you've changed."
Like Mister Rogers he said, "I love you just the way you are."

Out of death came life. Our friends left us, not because we ignored them or shunned them, but because we had changed and I suppose, to them, we weren't fun anymore. Our old ways ended, but what we didn't realize was so had the impossible.

We had went from Hippy to Hedonist to Heaven Bound.

And very real miracles lay ahead on this brand new road. He makes the impossible possible.

May you have a blessed Resurrection Sunday.




All photos by the author, except the photo of the Peepshow viewers, which is from Wikipedia.