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A Kiss From God

I first met Larry in a Narcotics Anonymous meeting. He was in his mid fifties at the time. The second he opened his mouth and began to speak, I knew I had found a kindred spirit.

He never went into details about his childhood, but over a couple of years, through bits and pieces of information, I was able to get a clear if not complete picture of what it must have been like.

His father was a very wealthy tyrant. He ruled his household with an iron fist. If anyone got out of line, they could be sure a severe beating would be had in the not very distant future.

His mother was a very gentle soul, and took to the bottle very early in her marriage. Larry’s father used to abuse her both verbally and physically on a regular basis. When Larry, as a child, attempted to rescue his mother, his father’s wrath would immediately be redirected and unleashed upon him.

His mother committed suicide when Larry was twelve years old.

Larry took to hard drugs and alcohol about this time. Amazingly, even though he was a daily abuser of these substances, he excelled academically and went on to become a professor in the field of quantum physics at a major university in the United States.

He got married and had two children, but as time went on, his drug and alcohol usage increased. His wife, unable to put up with him anymore, threw him out of the house.

He lost his job at the university, and lived on the streets for a few years.

One day, and he could not tell you what compelled him to do so, he found himself sitting in the back row of an Narcotics Anonymous meeting. Being a spiritual program of recovery, he heard God’s name mentioned quite frequently.

His father was a non practicing Roman Catholic, his mother had been Jewish. He remembered insisting on having a Bar Mitzvah on his thirteenth birthday, a year after his mother had taken her own life.

Anyway, the thought of God had not entered his mind in what he could not recall how many years. But sitting in that room that particular day, something happened.

He took to the spiritual road to recovery with great zeal. He ceased his drug and alcohol usage completely. He decided he wanted to live as simple a life as possible, and rather than going back to teaching at a university, he took to taking on all sorts of menial types of labor.

After about two years or so of being completely drug and alcohol free, the idea hit him. He set about to prove the existence of God mathematically. This was to be his lifelong project, and it very soon became the uppermost priority in his life.

After hitting a brick wall about a year into his mind boggling attempt, he decided to move to the Holy Land, believing that God might provide him with some divine inspiration if he were to be living upon holy soil.

I met hit within about a month or two after he moved. And although we did not socialize at all outside the rooms of Narcotics Anonymous, we both felt a great affinity towards each other over the next few years.

At this point in his life, Larry had made a complete peace with his past. He held absolutely no resentments against his father nor any other human being. He was content to support himself by working as a dishwasher, while spending all his free time working on what he saw as the foremost task of his life. He spoke on a regular basis to his ex-wife and his two children back in the States.

One day, in a N.A. meeting which I happened to be leading, Larry spoke up. He was radiant. He said that he had reached his goal of proving the existence of God via mathematical formulas. It was all in his head, and all he had to do was put pen to paper.

As chance would have it, I drove him home to his run down apartment building that day. It was the only time I ever spent with him outside the rooms of N.A. His joyfulness through the entire ride is truly indescribable.

After I dropped him off, he took a step or two away from the car, did an about face, and stuck his head through the open window of the front passenger door.

“You know, if I died today, I would die being the happiest man on the face of the earth”, he said to me smiling, and lingered at the open window for a little while before he walked away.

It was the following day that I received a phone call from a mutual friend, informing me of Larry’s sudden passing. He had a massive heart attack while asleep.

On his night table were found stacks upon stacks of papers containing mathematical formulas, not yet complete.

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