by Cathy Byrd
I also couldn’t get over the uncanny physical similarities between Christian and Lou Gehrig. In addition to their shared German heritage, Christian and Lou were both left-handed and had those prominent dimples, with the one on the left being noticeably deeper than the one on the right. I didn’t see this as something significant until Carol Bowman pointed out the physical resemblance between Lou Gehrig and Christian and told me it is quite common for physical traits to carry over from one lifetime to the next.
On the last day of school before Thanksgiving break, I met up with Sarah and Wendy at our favorite breakfast spot to celebrate Sarah’s birthday. Against my better judgment, I brought up Christian’s past-life stories again. I excitedly shared with them how Christian had correctly identified Lou Gehrig’s parents in the photo. The more passionate I was in my plea to win them over, the more distant they both became. They seemed to be united in solidarity, and Sarah even spoke for them both when she curtly said, “You really need to get over this, Cathy.”
Her words stung, and I made a conscious decision in that moment to keep my future conversations with Sarah and Wendy limited to lighter subjects.
CHAPTER SEVEN
POSSESSED OR CRAZY
“See that you don’t look down on one of these little
ones, because I tell you that in heaven their angels
continually view the face of my Father in heaven.”
MATTHEW 18:10
For the first time in my life, I didn’t know what to believe in. I felt as if I was holding on for dear life to a wildly swinging pendulum. My Christian faith dictated that I disregard the reincarnation explanation, and yet my gut was telling me it was somehow feasible. Something beyond my understanding was certainly at play. I was petrified to talk to our church pastor about what was going on, so I instead opted to confide in my good friend Pastor Wyatt to see if he could help me find my way.
Michael and I had originally met Wyatt before we were married, when he joined our Rotary Club. The three of us got to know each other on a deeper level when Wyatt conducted our premarital counseling. We were all bonded for life after he officiated our wedding ceremony on the beach in Malibu. Shortly after our wedding, Wyatt moved to Montana with his wife and daughter to become the head pastor at a Lutheran church. Our communication with Pastor Wyatt dwindled to an annual Christmas card swap, exchanges on Facebook, and an occasional e-mail here and there. Even though Pastor Wyatt’s beliefs were far more conservative than my own, neither of us shied away from a good debate on topics of spirituality, and we often agreed to disagree.
My most recent sparring match with Pastor Wyatt centered on his Facebook post about plans to bless a home that was reportedly inhabited by what he referred to as an “evil spirit.” When I suggested that the supernatural visitation he described might just be a lingering soul that hadn’t found its way to Heaven yet, Pastor Wyatt made it very clear that he believed there was no such thing as a friendly ghost. Our Facebook exchange on the topic came to an end when I commented that I had never encountered a person who struck me as purely “evil” and certainly did not share his view that there was such a thing as an “evil spirit.” I was saddened by his perspective but valued our friendship nonetheless.
I carefully composed a four-page letter outlining all the recent incidents that had led me to believe my son may have been a baseball player in a previous lifetime and sent it to Pastor Wyatt via e-mail to get his take on our situation. Right after I clicked the Send button, all my fears flooded in. I thought back to all of the horrific comments I had read on the Internet thread below the story about James Leininger, the young boy who had described a past life as a fighter pilot in World War II. The consensus among conservative Christians on the thread was that the child was in desperate need of an exorcism. I knew in my heart this wasn’t true, yet I couldn’t seem to get the image of Linda Blair’s head-spinning scene from The Exorcist out of my mind.
My heart skipped a beat when Pastor Wyatt’s response appeared in my in-box a few hours later. There it was in black and white, my worst nightmare realized. Wyatt didn’t come right out and say that he thought Christian was either possessed or crazy, but my mind raced to that conclusion under the weight of his words. I felt sick to my stomach after reading the first line, a biblical passage: (Hebrews 9:27) “And just as it is appointed for man to die once, and after that comes judgment.”
In my mind this was Pastor Wyatt’s attempt to talk me off the cliff and rescue me from my own demise before it was too late. However, this biblical scripture didn’t strike me as empirical evidence against the case of reincarnation. The Bible says “it is appointed for man to die once,” but does this preclude a soul from experiencing more than one lifetime? In the same e-mail, Pastor Wyatt offered to pray for our family and lovingly warned me of the backlash that might come our way if we were to share our son’s story with people of faith. The implication seemed to be that people might think our son was possessed by the spirit of a dead person. In closing Wyatt asked, “Wasn’t it Art Linkletter who was known for saying, ‘Kids say the darndest things’?” I responded to his e-mail by thanking him for his input and prayers, but underneath my pleasantries, I was feeling more conflicted than ever.
I once heard someone say, “You need to get lost in order to find yourself.” At 44 years of age, I never imagined myself being this lost. I didn’t think I had the energy or the inclination to embark on the journey of finding myself, but this is when the journey found me. Pastor Wyatt’s e-mail inspired me to dig deeper into the religious roots of reincarnation. I was particularly interested in finding out why the concept of living more than one lifetime was incompatible with Christianity. My research revealed that nowhere in the Bible is reincarnation addressed, let alone banned. Much to my surprise, I could not find a single scripture in the Bible that repudiates reincarnation—or “rebirth,” as it was called in ancient religious teachings.
I was astonished to discover that the concepts of “pre-existence” and “rebirth” were integral to nearly all religions, including Christianity, until A.D. 325 when the Roman emperor, Constantine the Great, decreed speaking about “rebirth” to be an act of heresy against the church. By A.D. 385, the union of church and state was complete, and speaking about reincarnation was no longer just a sin but also a crime punishable by death. The massacres of men, women, and children who promoted the concepts of reincarnation, “rebirth,” or “pre-existence” of the soul continued well into the 15th century. By the 16th century, these concepts had been all but wiped out in Christian teachings, with the exception of a few underground mystical groups. Could the guilt I felt about believing in reincarnation be rooted in this bloody religious persecution that had taken place centuries ago? I slowly began to forgive myself for stepping outside of my Christian beliefs in my search for answers. This unleashed a new sense of freedom to explore the unknown.
This is when I delved into the work of Dr. Ian Stevenson, a medical doctor and psychiatrist who had dedicated his 40-year career as the head of the Division of Perceptual Studies at the University of Virginia’s School of Medicine to investigating the past-life memories and near-death experiences of children. Dr. Stevenson’s studies on reincarnation focused on very young children because he felt their limited life experiences made it possible to isolate memories that could only be explained by a past life. In each case he went to great lengths to identify everything a child had been exposed to in order to rule out the possibility that the information had been learned in the current lifetime. Dr. Stevenson’s 2,500 documented cases of children who remembered past lives provided hard, scientific evidence that I could sink my teeth into. I liked the fact that he himself was a skeptic and had gone to great lengths to disprove the cases he had investigated.
Dr. Stevenson’s discoveries as a parapsychologist had led some to compare him to Darwin and Galileo, both of whom had been scorned and ridiculed by their contemporaries due to their unconventional ideas. Many of Ian Stevenson’s colleagues at th
e University of Virginia had been opposed to the head of their mental health program pursuing paranormal investigations. Yet this had not stopped him in his quest to answer the age-old question: “What survives bodily death?” Stevenson had traveled all over the world to meet families, hear their stories, and determine if the children’s memories were valid.
In the end, he had actually convinced himself and others that these recollections, out of the mouths of babes, were the key to scientifically proving the eternity of the soul. According to Stevenson, only a small percentage of children retain any memories of their previous lifetimes. Research by Ian Stevenson’s contemporaries David Barker and Satwant Pasricha found that even in India, where nearly everyone believes in reincarnation and it’s not considered something out of the ordinary, only about 1 in every 450 recall past lives.
Each of Dr. Stevenson’s case studies had followed the same protocol. They had begun with a young child, usually between the ages of two and four, talking about a past life and revealing information about people and places that nobody in the family had ever heard of before. In the majority of cases the recollections had been accompanied by odd behaviors that supported the child’s claims. The children he had studied usually persisted in talking about their memories for months or years, even in cases where the child’s family had attempted to suppress the memories.
In each case Dr. Stevenson used rigid scientific methods to interview the child while the memories were still fresh. He also extensively questioned the family members to make sure the child could not have learned the reported facts from experiences in his or her current lifetime. Many of the children in Dr. Stevenson’s studies had talked about being “big,” had recalled vivid events from another lifetime, and had displayed skills beyond their years that were not taught or learned. Some children had even spoken in languages that they had never been exposed to. Dr. Stevenson’s criteria for assessing children’s past-life memories sounded remarkably similar to the behaviors and statements that our son had been demonstrating.
I felt a little uneasy when I read Dr. Stevenson’s theory that a child may inherit birthmarks or birth defects in their current life as a result of ailments or injuries from their previous life. I read that Dr. Stevenson attributed his personal interest in this phenomenon to his own experience of having bronchial tube defects from early childhood. This struck a chord with me because the person who Christian was claiming to be had died young from a deadly disease. Christian did not have any distinctive birthmarks or birth defects, but he did suffer from asthma attacks, which had required visits to the emergency room an average of three to four times per year since he was six months old. In my experience as a mother, there was nothing more grueling than sleepless nights watching our son struggle to breathe. I couldn’t help but wonder if there could be some truth to Dr. Stevenson’s seemingly far-fetched theory.
I could no longer deny our son’s claims of being a baseball player in a past life simply because the concept of reincarnation did not fit with my Christian beliefs. I became less concerned about being criticized by others and more committed to searching for the truth.
This is when I came across a beautiful teaching in the Babylonian Talmud that seemed to make perfect sense. According to this medieval Jewish text, the angel Lailah lives in the womb and watches over the embryo until it is time to be born. The angel teaches the unborn child everything there is to know about the mysteries of life and his or her own soul. When the time comes for the child to be born, the angel Lailah puts her finger in front of her own mouth as if to say “shhh,” and then presses the upper lip of the child so all the memories are forgotten. According to the myth, the light touch on the child’s lip leaves a small indentation above the lip called a philtrum, which is something we all have. I started to think that perhaps the angel Lailah just hadn’t pressed quite hard enough on some children’s lips, and this is why they had come into their current life bearing soul memories.
I breathed a sigh of relief when I came across the Watkins’ list of the “100 Most Spiritually Influential Living People” for 2011. The list was filled with highly respected gurus who preach the eternity of the soul and the possibility of living more than one lifetime. Pope Benedict XVI didn’t even make the top 30, yet number 2 on the list, the Dalai Lama, is widely believed to be the reincarnated soul of the Buddha of compassion and 14 other Tibetan monks. He had even won a Nobel Peace Prize for his nonviolent opposition to China’s occupation of Tibet, which isn’t half bad. That night in bed I asked my half-asleep husband, “Do you think anybody ever accused the Dalai Lama of being possessed?”
As he tugged on the covers and rolled deeper into his cocoon, he mumbled under his breath, “Forget about it.”
I wasn’t able to forget about it, but I did my best to refrain from bringing up the subject with Michael. The approaching holidays provided a much-needed distraction for us both. For Christmas that December, all Christian asked for from Santa were “big, squishy bases” and a machine to make chalk baselines. His wishes came true.
One of the highlights of 2011 was our unexpected delight in watching Charlotte and Christian ride their bikes without training wheels for the first time—not because they had mastered the skill, but due to the sheer joy on their faces when they realized they were balancing on their own. It reminded us that to keep your balance, you must keep moving forward and keep your head up, especially when you feel wobbly. This lesson came in handy for our entire family at this particular time in our lives.
CHAPTER EIGHT
SPRING FEVER
“That’s the true harbinger of spring, not
crocuses or swallows returning to Capistrano,
but the sound of a bat on a ball.”
BILL VEECK
The following spring our family was introduced to the subculture of Little League baseball. At the ripe age of three and a half, Christian had been waiting more than half of his life for this moment. He was still a few months shy of the minimum age to play Little League T-ball, but I talked our league president into making an exception for our baseball-obsessed son. The grassy fields with their dusty mounds became our new home away from home. Because Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers was quite popular at the time, Michael and I often joked that our three-year-old son was already well on his way to achieving Gladwell’s recommended 10,000 hours of practice to master any skill.
The amount of time Christian spent every day hitting, catching, and throwing baseballs was staggering. His little body was in perpetual motion and refused to slow down, even when he was asleep. In the midst of deep sleep, Christian sometimes sat up in bed and said things like, “Fly ball over here!” without waking up. The start of the Little League baseball season provided a welcome outlet for his love of the game, and I secretly hoped the experience of being on a team would distract him from thinking about the Yankees and Lou Gehrig.
Ironically, while Christian was partaking in his first T-ball practice, a video of his batting practice on Adam Sandler’s movie set was featured on the MLB Network show Intentional Talk. The ex-jock talk-show hosts playfully reported that a three-year-old was being scouted for Red Sox camp. Their tongue-in-cheek report included a review of Christian’s stats and an announcement of his baseball-playing cameo role in the soon-to-be-released Adam Sander comedy That’s My Boy.
The news story on the MLB Network came as a bit of a surprise, but the bigger shock had come a few days earlier when I’d received a call from my half-sister, Laura, while running in the hills near our home. After I answered the call, the first words out of Laura’s mouth were, “Christian is in the news!” I thought she was referring to the article that had run in the Thousand Oaks Acorn newspaper about Christian’s role in the Adam Sandler movie, until it occurred to me that Laura lives in Nashville and I hadn’t told her about the article yet. It was surreal to hear that a photo of Christian and Adam Sandler was on the scrolling news stories of the day on the Yahoo home page. This was my first hint that we were about to boar
d a runaway media train that was beyond our control. It seemed our only option at this point was to ride it out and hope the damage would be minimal. I ran back home at record pace, eager to figure out how in the world this had happened.
As it turned out, a local sports writer and radio talk-show host named Ben Maller had read the article about Christian in our local paper that morning and had used the information to write a story for Yahoo Sports. The headline of Ben’s article on the Yahoo home page read: “YouTube Gets 3-Year-Old A Baseball Movie Role.” The story included a link to our YouTube video of Christian filming the movie with Adam Sandler. Over the course of two days, the video received more than 800,000 views. By doing a little digging, I found it was not by sheer coincidence that the YouTube video went viral. Yahoo and YouTube were strategic partners at the time, and what we had just experienced was good, old-fashioned cross promotion. Just as I had learned way more than I’d ever intended to know about baseball, I was also learning way more than I had ever wanted to know about YouTube. The parental duty of screening the hundreds of viewer comments, so I could delete any containing profanity, was added to my list of things to do.
In the spring of 2012, Christian’s passion for baseball spread like wildfire in our family. Even Michael, who’d had little patience for the baseball scenes in Moneyball one year earlier, found himself addicted to those bottom of the ninth, two outs, two strikes, and the guy hits a game-winning home run moments. Christian began watching Dodger games on television, and his infatuation with the larger-than-life Major League Baseball players inspired us to become Dodger season-ticket holders. This meant long drives to Dodger Stadium on a weekly basis for beautiful sunsets, fresh air, catching foul balls at batting practice, Friday night fireworks, and more bobbleheads than we could comfortably fit in our home.