THE TRIQUETRA OF LIFE: Wisdom, Wealth, and Wellness

I was a kid listening to The Shadow, ​the most popular radio show in history (1930-1954), my favorite evening pastime. That he could make himself invisible was fascinating. I had no TV to hobble my imagination of projected scenes in living color. The Invisible Man by H.G.Well (1897), produced in a 1933 film version, had become a huge financial success with several screenplay spinoffs. Comic book characters with the ability to become invisible made for a lengthy list, proving to be an intriguingly popular concept.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Fictional_characters_who_can_turn_invisible

The Bible tells of five people disappearing before or after death: Enoch, Moses, Elias,  Mary, and Jesus of Nazareth.​ Is vanishing into thin air possible? To the modern reasoning mind, those are fantasies to conjure blind belief. Thomas Jefferson deleted all the bible miracles from his own copy, deeming them fairy tales for the simple-minded.

Then in my forties, I came across a Reader’s Digest book, Mysteries of the Unexplained. It challenged my materialistic concepts of the universe, referencing many hundreds of validated reports suggesting things miraculous, mysterious​,and enigmatic. One of its many sections dealt with UFOs, another with Poltergeists, and the list below has episodes describing common everyday people who vanish in plain view of deposed witnesses. Judge for yourselves from my abridged excerpts of witnessed disappearances:

“In the middle of an evening in 1809, as his coachmen were preparing to leave, Bathurst went out into the otherwise deserted street, walked around his horses . . . And was gone. His valet, who had been at the rear of the coach with baggage, cast a look down each side of the coach and saw only the hostler, harnessing the horses. The soldiers stationed at each end of the street had seen no one pass.” Enigmas and Mysteries pg. 37

“The monotonous routine of the inmates of the Prussian prison was surprisingly disrupted in 1815. A prisoner was walking in chains in the walled exercise yard with other prisoners marching ahead of and behind him. Suddenly, Diderici began to fade. Within seconds he was invisible – then his manacles and ankle irons clinked to the ground. Nothing more was ever seen of him” Among the Missing, pg. 331

“One day in 1880, a farmer set out across a field to bring his horses in from the pasture. His wife and child watched from the porch and on the far side of the field two neighbors riding by waved to him. Before their very eyes, Williamson vanished.” Into thin Air.

“In 1873 an English shoemaker James Worson accepted his friends’ bet that he could not run from their hometown to Coventry, and back, a distance of 16 miles. He set out at a jog, with his three friends following in a cart. After several miles, still moving easily, the shoemaker seemed to stumble, then pitch forward—and disappear. The three men searched in panic, knowing there was no rational explanation for what they had seen. Into thin Air, pg.31.”

It finally dawned on me​ that the Bible describes something similar (Matt 24:40). ​”Two men will be working together in the field, one will be taken, and the other left.” Did Jesus mean that people would physically vanish, or that there would be merely a philosophical parting of the ways? Many think it suggests the Rapture as in the film Left Behind.

Jesus of Nazareth​ appears​ twice in a locked room with his frightened disciples​, talks and eats with them before vanishing into thin air (John 20:19–26).​Then He suddenly appears to two disciples on the road to Emmaus. He has a meal with them, breaking bread, and then disappearing before their eyes (Luke 24:13-35). 

I suspect Will Shakespeare encountered the Holy Ghost and dramatized his experience in metaphor. After Prince Hamlet met his father’s ghost, the playwright had Hamlet say to his startled, unbelieving friend, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy” (Hamlet: Act 1, Sc 5).