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Paul Wood

Leon Paul Wood (1917-1965)

Enlightened Christian Mystic

Richard Rose on Paul Wood

from: Relative and Absolute Ohio State University, 1978

... The most profound experience I've encountered in another human being was a man who never taught. His name was Paul Wood. He was a Christian, a Protestant, from Texas, and a pilot or bombardier in World War II, and he knew nothing about esoteric philosophy or anything of that sort. But he had read the Bible, and had been taught the Bible. He was dropping bombs on Japan, killing people, and it occurred to him that according to the Bible, God observes the fall of the sparrow; and if God observes the fall of every sparrow, what was going on in God's mind when the bombs were falling? So he became upset, and he became so upset that they got him out of the army;^* they retired him or sent him home.

* During WWII the Air Force was still part of the US Army.

But he couldn't let go – because he had encountered a problem he couldn't solve. The chaplain over there was blessing the bombs as they sent them out, and at the same time he's saying that God's watching everything that happens. So there was a gap that had not been solved by that religion. So he continued to worry with the problem in his head. Of course when he came back from the army his wife said, "You'd better get yourself a job." And every job he got, he lost, because he'd be daydreaming about this, worrying about it – and drinking I think, because when I saw him he looked like he'd been through a barrel of the stuff.

But he kept praying. He said he went to the Bible and encountered this verse, that if you're troubled or you want to know the answer, you should pray to the Lord thusly, and what followed was the Lord's Prayer. And since that was the only religion he knew, the only book he knew, the only formula he knew – he applied it. He lived the Lord's Prayer. He meditated on it, memorized it, analyzed it. In fact he devised a little system for cutting it apart and taking it item by item, and seeing where the truth was and what he wasn't supposed to take too seriously.

Well, he said that one day his head snapped. He was working as a salesman in an auto dealership, and one day he was sitting at the desk and he thought he couldn't take it any longer – and his head came apart. He remembered praying for God to kill him, because he didn't have the courage to commit suicide, and he didn't want to live with the trauma that was in his head. This was long before the time that people overdosed; he was strictly on booze. The next thing he remembered was waking up in the hospital. And in the week or ten days that he was in the hospital, that he was out, away from society – he saw the All of the creation. And when he came back, of course, he was beyond care.

Before that, he had difficulty holding a job; and now he didn't care if he had a job. His wife left him, his children rejected him. But strangely enough every place he went he found money, he found a job, he was secure. And he spent the rest of his life, at least until I lost track of him,^** trying to advise people to take the Lord's Prayer, to find the maximum answer.

** Unknown to Rose, Wood died just 2 years later.

Nobody listened to him. He was in Texas and he came up to Akron. I was in West Virginia at the time and a friend of mine called me; he said I'd like for you to meet him. And I went up and listened to him talk. He was a double for Jackie Gleason's buddy Crazy Guggenheim; this is what he looked like. Don't get the idea that all these people are supposed to look skinny and ascetic – a little bit of fat doesn't hurt if you get hit in the head.

But I was utterly amazed. I never opened my mouth when I listened to him talk. We had some scientists, would-be scientists, heads of departments from Firestone I think it was, and they were all sitting there with a cynical look on their face, asking him very cynical questions. And he told his little stories – all he knew was to tell you what happened – and he said, patiently, "You can judge for yourself. This is what it did for me and if you think it will do something for you, okay. And if it doesn't, I'm doing my part."

And Bob, the friend of mine, said to him, "Paul, don't talk about that stuff." He was talking about some miracles that happened around him. Bob said, "I've had a hard time convincing these scientists that you're on the level, that you're real. When you talk about these strange miracles that occur around you, I know they're not going to accept it." And Wood just smiled and kept on talking. And I turned to Bob and said, "He don't give a damn whether people believe him or not. That's not his motive; he's not here to sell anything."

Well, that was the one and only meeting I had with him. I heard from him for a time, and he went from there to other places. He would send out pieces of paper with the Lord's Prayer analyzed, and he'd tell you to meditate. But what he failed to see was that this was the way it happened for him. That somebody could get the same thing, dropping bombs on the Japanese, coming back and losing a wife, children, trauma, selling cars – you can't set that path for another man. Each man's experience is different. Each person has their own trauma, their own lesson which leads them, if they'll allow it to.

So you have to have a language. Well now, the language of the Lord's Prayer is in front of us all the time, and mostly to us it means nothing. ...

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