03 Aug BROTHERLY LOVE
Ben Shahn BROTHERS
Brotherly Love
As I’ve said before sometimes I don’t know if Spirit is playing with me in readings or not.
When you’re a medium you’ve got to be really careful about clearing your mind and separating yourself from what you’re seeing clairvoyantly. You don’t want your “stuff” messing up the reading.
Recently I was working with a man from northern Europe. I was shown by spirit a series of white boulders in a quarry or at the base of a mountain. I was then shown something like a pickax and I was given the feeling that I had shaped all of these boulders into similar sizes and meaningless meatball-like shapes from the local rock. It must’ve been a tremendous effort. It also felt a waste of time. Why spend all that human effort just to make a bunch of roughly spherical boulders out of rock. It occurred to me perhaps I was making them for Sisyphus. It did occur to me this was a Sisyphean task to shape all of these rocks let alone push them up a hill to have them roll back on me.
But the sitter seemed to recognize something about this imagery but did not say why and I was at a loss.
I then saw a scraggly looking man with a long beard and hair and shirt open and a sunken chest. His whole body was just skin and bones and he made a gesture as if he was carrying something extremely heavy, though nothing was in his arms. Why was he miming? Was he mocking?
I had the feeling the man was more symbolic than a literal figure from the sitters life and said as much, then sat in silence puzzled by what the meaning of all this work could possibly be.
I was overwhelmed by the futility of my own struggles, the labors suggested by this mute and poor withered man. I was also feeling some pressure from the sitter as I imagined his perspective of me twisting in the wind.
Honestly I’m not too bright. It was only then that it dawned on me that this bearded man bore a striking resemblance to someone I had seen before. What was it? Mediumship is full of moments like having a song on the tip of your tongue.I had in mind this thin man was a Saint like character, like St. Anthony out in the desert, but that did not quite fit. I knew this man not from legend or life… but from television…
I asked the sitter, who had good English “Have you ever heard of the television show Monty Python‘s flying Circus”
As I saw confusion register on his face and then recognition. I was suddenly shown by Spirit a favorite painting of mine, by the American artist Ben Shahn: it is titled: Brothers. As I saw This I was filled with the same profound feeling of love the first time I saw it.
Suddenly I got it. It was all a joke. Spirit had got me again with their jokes!
This man’s brother had come in Spirit to say hello. Perhaps as a comment on the hard spiritual work both myself and the man I was reading for were engaged in, and as a way of screwing with me in a way unique to brothers, and as a way of evidence for his actual brother, this man in spirit brought me the “It’s Man“ who used to open the surrealist and absurd TV show Monty Python‘s flying Circus. He was poking fun of our reading by comparing my efforts to this haggard man who used to overcome all sorts of physical obstacles only to show up to announce the word “It’s” and then usually be blown up or otherwise collapse just before he could announce the opening of the show. 
I didn’t grow up with a brother but work with a lot of men who have. It’s always struck me how they can do apparently cruel things to each other that have some special secret comic brand understandable only to them. As the medium in this situation, recognizing Spirit’s message and intent made me feel accepted in a way I never had; it was a high testosterone and funny and loving moment all at the same time. The sitter is not the only one healed through mediumship, the Medium and Spirit can be as well.
“And did you watch Monty Python’s flying Circus with your brother who has since passed to Spirit?”
A look of what I have come to know as total recognition and a big smile spread across the sitters face.…
“Your brother is here. He wants you to know you’re working too hard and that he loves you very much.“
What is implicit but un-said is that we should take life less seriously and enjoy the absurdities, because life is short.