During the summer of my junior year, between my sophomore and junior year of college, the summer job that I had that year was very close to where I was living, which meant that I could go home for lunch. One particular day I did go home for lunch and after eating lay down for a nap. And when I was in a semi-sleep state, sort of a twilight zone, I saw an image of a long, black chain, very heavy metal, and instantly that chain had meaning to me because I saw myself as a link in that chain, and that my ministry, if it was to be an effective ministry, would be that I would be a strong link wherever I might be.

And then years later, when I became the minister of the Marble Collegiate Church, I understood the reason for that particular image. It was a vision. I followed Norman Vincent Peale, and I had the very difficult and challenging job of maintaining a strong link in the ministry of that church between Dr. Peale and whoever it is that follows me. I wonder why? How did it happen that there was that intervention; that a spirit of mine, a God greater than anything that I had ever known, would intercede and give me that very specific message? It's a mystery.

And then a couple of years later, also in the summer, and also at an afternoon nap, I was in another twilight zone. At that time my life was very sad because I was very, very fond of a young woman who wasn't as fond of me, and I knew the relationship wasn't going to work. And so as I was drifting off to sleep, I was thinking about her and the failure of the relationship, when something happened. I saw another picture, a vision. I saw myself walking down a country road, holding somebody's hand. All I saw was the hand holding my hand very firmly and an elbow, and that was it. And I had an understanding of whose hand that was, that really I was holding God's hand, and the message again was very clear to me, and the message was, "I will never leave you. You will never be alone."

That was forty years ago and in those forty years, I have been through the spectrum of the human experience, life-threatening illnesses, broken relationships, enormous amounts of pain, long extended periods of lack of faith, dark nights of the soul, and yet never, ever have I felt that I was alone. I felt that the presence of God was always with me. Another mystical experience, and I wonder how do those things happen? What is it about a God that intercedes and intervenes at times when one doesn't ask, one doesn't expect, because none of these experiences were asked for or expected. There's something else going on.

It was the winter of 1980, and we had as a speaker for one of the programs at the Marble Collegiate Church a fascinating woman who was quite elderly at the time. Her name was Olga Worral. Some of you might be familiar with that name. She was a faith healer, extraordinary lady who had great psychic abilities, but well grounded in the faith. For many years she had a healing service on Friday mornings at a church in Baltimore, Maryland. Well, before the speech, she said that she was rather tired and as she was elderly and she didn't really want to greet people following, could she come off the platform immediately into a side room until the crowd had left the building. We went into a room adjacent to the sanctuary. We were doing small talk, nothing really important, just spending the time, when she said, "Would you excuse me for a minute from this conversation? I've got to tell you something." Then she said, "Did you have a brother who just died?"

And I said, "Yes."

And she said, "Have your parents gone on to the other side as well?"

And I said, "Yes."

Now this is a woman I had never met before. I knew nothing about her except for what I read and she did not know me. And I said, "Why are you saying that?"

She said, "Because as we talk, I see three people behind you."

And she described my brother and my mother and my father. It was an awesome thing. And she said, "I want to tell you that they're very happy for you." She finished that part of the conversation and began to talk about other things again.

What I realized in that instant, where she saw something which was behind me but also a part of me, realized that there is a very thin veil, very thin, between our mortal experience, the material/physical world in which we live, and that spiritual dimension, the world of the angels, the dimension where God exists.

Then a couple of years ago something very significant happened to me, a change in my thinking, a change in my philosophy, something that turned everything around for me. I was reading Stephen Covey's book, Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. And on one of the pages, I underlined and then I circled a sentence, a quotation, and I thought, "This is interesting." It was almost a lost piece. I went back to it, and I went back to it, and I went back to it. And, finally I absorbed it; I took it in, and it changed everything. And it helped connect all of the experiences I have just described. It was a statement by Teilhard de Chardin, and as you know, he was a scientist and a mystic, Frenchman. He died in the middle of this century. And Chardin said these words, "We are not human beings having a spiritual experience, but we are spiritual beings having a human experience," and once that idea penetrated into my consciousness, I realized that life was really quite different from what I had thought it to be. But I am not a human being having a spiritual journey, but I really am first and foremost, as are all other people, spiritual beings, who for whatever reason are given the experience of human existence.

So, can you understand why things changed for me? I began to see people as souls, not as psychological entities, not as personalities, but as souls from God, here for a purpose. I began to understand why it is that when a person is getting along in harmony with somebody else, and harmony feels so good, and there is happiness, that harmony and peace and forgiveness is our natural state. I began to understand why when one has faith, and when I have faith, I feel strengthened, and I am able to do things much greater than any other time. The reason for that, that faith is really my natural state, and in those moments when I get very quiet and I'm in prayer, and I have a very deep, a profound, sense of peace, and have some sense of what St. Paul said, "that peace which passes all understanding," I understand it now. It really is the natural state of the human being. It is our natural habitat.

There is one other story which pulls it all together, and for me anyway, puts it in perspective. It is that wonderful story of a little girl whose mother just had a baby and it was a baby brother. When the baby brother came home, she was all excited, and she wanted to spend some time alone with her baby brother. She asked, and she begged, and she pleaded, and she cajoled her parents, "Would you please let me spend time with my baby brother, but I have to see him alone?" The parents were fearful, thinking that there was sibling rivalry and she might hurt the child, and finally they gave in to her. And she went into the baby's bedroom, closed the door - but the parents opened it just a bit so that they could look inside, and this is what they heard. The little girl leaned over the crib and said, "Tell me what it's like to feel God? I'm beginning to forget."

Does it not make sense what de Chardin said, that first and foremost we are not human beings having a spiritual experience, but we are spiritual beings having a human experience.

Thank you.

Lydia Talbot: Dr. Caliandro, I think our viewers are still penetrated and sustained by your inspirational message of your own personal, spiritual journey. When you were nineteen years old, preaching that first time from a country pulpit, had you ever dreamed that you would be now at the pinnacle of your career at the Marble Collegiate Church?

Arthur Caliandro: I had no idea. I was the most naive, blocked-out young person that anybody could imagine. I was just there. I wanted to do well, and hoped that I would do well. I had no idea what was involved in the process basically of one's own personal journey, and the pain of journey in dealing with pain, to get to where I am now, and I'm not sure where that is.

Talbot:  Dealing with pain, you told me earlier that you'd worked most things out theologically except the sting of sudden death and that in connection with the loss of your brother. What is that for you now years later?

Caliandro:  Well, first of all, I knew a lot more earlier than I do now, but my younger brother was 43 when he died very suddenly of a heart attack. With every other death that I had faced, even sudden deaths of friend and, of course, people in the parish, I was able to justify or rationalize or understand it in some way, but his I have never been able to fully deal with. It doesn't make sense. He died in a community. It was the Fourth of July on this little island in Maine, and they had had a mini-marathon, and he did his regular jog. He did everything right; he ate right; he jogged; he was proper. And yet at the end of the race, I teased him for being last, and five seconds later he was gone, and his children were there and a hundred other people were there, and I just cannot put the pieces together.

Talbot:  There's a passage from Corinthians that has meaning for you in that context.

Caliandro:  The one thing that has helped me through this and other events in my life which I can't understand, where St. Paul said, "Now we see through a glass dimly, but then we shall see face to face even as we are seen." And my understanding of that is that we don't understand it now, but some day, on the other side, we'll understand.

Talbot:  And that connects so perfectly with Chardin's advice in his writings that has given you meaning - that we are really spiritual beings.

Caliandro:  We really are, you know that?

Talbot:  Living with human experience.

Caliandro:  Lydia, I will often ask agnostics or atheists as I meet them socially if they have had any kind of spiritual experience, anything mystical, close to what I had just described. And very few say, "No, I've never had one." Most have had something happen that they can't understand, and I know and you know that there is a spiritual dimension to it, and they're afraid to deal with it, many things, many reasons why they don't, but every human being has this.

Talbot:  You speak of the visual images and the mystical moments throughout your journey. Tell us what advice was given to you by a former preacher of the Fourth Presbyterian Church in Chicago, Dr. Elam Davies, that made a difference.

Caliandro:  He was wonderful. I was four or five years into my work at Marble Church and trying to build a congregation. Dr. Peale was a great speaker. He wasn't a community builder - he was an extraordinary communicator - and my task, my mandate at that church was to build community, and I had no idea how, and one of the things I did was to go across the country to some large churches and ask the ministers how to do what I wanted7 to do. And after asking Elam Davies a number of questions he said, "Young man, can I give you some advice?" He said, "I think I can help you." Just a gracious, gracious man, and he said two things to me. He said, "Number one, do not try to imitate or be like the great one." He said, "I've seen the followers of the great ones and most of them fail. You cannot try to imitate." He said, "Just be who you are, be yourself, and be comfortable with that." And the other thing he said is to build program, build community, and if you build community, then people will be coming to church to meet their needs of community, to love and to be loved.

Well, I listened to what he said, and he was right on target, because immediately I went back and I began to work very specifically and intentionally on building community.

Talbot:  What a challenge in New York City and in a congregation that is a microcosm of the city.

Caliandro:  Of the world. It's a wonderful church. But you know something, in New York and I'm sure the same is in Chicago, there isn't much in the community, in the media, in the press, or even in the social fabric of the community which encourages spirituality or church. We have more things happening on Sundays in the middle of New York City which interfere with a person's transit to worship. We have parades, and walkathons, and bikeathons, and so forth. But there's nothing that supports this, so that anybody who leaves the apartment or home to go to church is going there because they need it and they want it. And so it's a very open and ripe congregation. They're eager and that makes it exciting.

Talbot:  And you had an opportunity to thank Dr. Davies years later?

Caliandro:  Oh, yes. He was interim minister of Fifth Avenue Presbyterian and I had lunch with him one day and was able to thank him. Very gracious man.