When Heaven Touches Earth by James Van Praagh

Author:James Van Praagh [Praagh, James Van]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781938289569
Publisher: Hierophant Publishing
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

17

A Divinely Orchestrated “Accident”

Karen Hasselo

It was the spring of 1971. From outside appearances, my life looked as perfect as our beautifully manicured lawn. I was a junior high school student studying geometry and biology. I excelled at playing the clarinet in the concert band. I lived in a safe, affluent neighborhood. However, inside my home, filled with Persian rugs and exquisite antiques, all four of my family members were utterly estranged from one another.

Both of my parents were intellectually gifted and highly ethical people. Nevertheless, from the beginning of their relationship, they were emotionally and temperamentally mismatched. By 1971, they rarely wasted their energy on verbal combat. Instead, their war had morphed into a silent one. My parents had been emotionally absent for much of my life, stemming from their own fractured childhoods. Their absence was compounded by my father's escalating self-medication with alcohol. Because I viewed myself as a burden to the very people who were tasked with nurturing me, I looked for strategies to sublimate my pain.

I sought emotional first aid by avoiding my home life and immersing myself in extracurricular pursuits. In the year prior, my parents had blessed me with a large dappled gray thoroughbred Welsh pony. I found solace in my relationship with the horses at the stable and was intently focused on mastering the art of riding, irrespective of the fact that my instructor emotionally brutalized her students. My mother spent untold hours at the stable as an employee. However, she chose to look the other way when I was subjected to my instructor's rage attacks. Based upon my prior experiences with a number of adults, I had developed a cynical view of life and a self-protective distrust for authority figures.

In the aftermath of a breakup, the in-group at school had recently ostracized me. At the tender age of fourteen, I had already become disillusioned with the amount of effort required to earn a modicum of emotional support from adults as well as my peers. It was becoming increasingly difficult to muster the internal resources required to fulfill the role of overachiever, perfectionist, junior high school social climber, and workaholic. I did not know any other way to navigate my life except as a functional depressive.

During my quiet, introspective moments, I asked God many of life's bigger questions without receiving what I considered to be any definitive answers. I prayed for relief—some kind of sign that would validate that there was more to my life than merely jumping through everyone else's hoops. I didn't feel any deep sense of belonging with the significant people in my life, nor could I see any logical arrangement for how the pieces of the universe functioned together. Life appeared to be haphazard and arbitrary. I felt very alone with my struggle. I responded to my existential crisis by staying busy with my overloaded schedule, continuing to wear my social mask, and, to the greatest extent possible, preventing my despair from leaking out in unintended ways.

I spent most of my Saturdays at the barn.

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