A Cedar Friend

One night during the midsummer toward the end of July, 1963, just several weeks before Dr. Martin Luther King delivered his ""I Have a Dream"" speech from the Lincoln Memorial and about four months before President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, a young American high school graduate awoke from his slumber to see a waking vision of his girlfriend sitting at the foot of a cross cuddling a baby boy. Two weeks later he was astounded by a very unexpected vision of an enthralling, beautiful, celestial, golden woman who appeared to him high in the night sky. Seven years later, after he happened upon a copy of Hermann Hesse's novel Demian in a hotel room in Saigon and read of Frau Eva, he felt her definite presence once more.
His search for the heavenly woman led him to Munich, Germany, where he read Novalis and the German Romantic writers. As his study of the ""ideal woman,"" or Sophia, unfolded, he landed on the doorstep of a Jewish-American and Irish woman in London with whom he fell in love and later that of a Dutch writer and translator in Amsterdam who had become a Hindu guru. During his debate with her on the validity of Christianity just a few days after Yom Kippur, 1976, he saw an overwhelming series of visions of Jesus of Nazareth of Gallilee, first in a celestial throne room, then hovering about the streets of Amsterdam as he floated to the Queen's palace and the crucifix at Dam Square, and last of all as a universal cosmic man, or Adam, upon whose body the Last Judgment of the world had taken place.


Robert Rhea is a graduate of Davidson College, Union Theological Seminary, New York, The Jewish Theological Seminary of America, and studied in Germany and Austria at the University of Marburg, the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, and the Evangelisch-Theologische Fakultaet of the University of Vienna.
He studied in Marburg with Georg Werner Kuemmel and Werner Vrodtriede in Munich. At Union Theological Seminary he wrote a thesis entitled The Johannine Son of Man, for professors James L. Martyn and Raymond E. Brown, which was published in 1990 by Oscar Cullmann as volume 76 of his ATHANT series.