Jerry L Martin, Ph.D., D.H.L. is former Chair, Department of Philosophy, University of Colorado at Boulder and Acting Chairman, National Endowment for the Humanities. He is currently a contributor to the Good Men Project and coordinator of the Theology Without Walls Project at the American Academy of Religion.
“Yes, I always think of You ‘pushing’ me, rather than my being ‘drawn’ to You. I respond to orders rather than seeking union.”
That is good. The shallow seeking of union with Me is a delusion. The goal is to be “in tune” with Me. The work will flow from that. This is not just a matter of doing your duty. It is coming into alignment with Me—like two singers doing a harmony.
Some elements of polytheism are merely superstitious, but other aspects are genuinely responsive to the many ways in which I present myself. It may seem odd to your modern mind to think of fire as a god, but why do you think I made fire mysterious and fascinating? It is a physical metaphor in itself—it is created out of nothing and disappears into nothing, grows and dies, gives life and warmth as well as pain and destruction, and it looks both hypnotically attractive and frightening.
As you know, I am very powerful. I do manifest Myself in storms and thunder, in the ocean and great waves—in the power that drives the universe and that manifests itself in each particular event. The large cosmic forces are divine and so are their concrete manifestations in specific incidents. That does not mean that every rainstorm is a specific communication or is there to advance or retard some particular action, but it does mean that every rainstorm expresses an aspect of Me.
Early peoples saw My presence everywhere, saw the spiritual indwelling of things, their powers and potencies and the divine element in all that. But there was always an awareness, however dim, that there was a single spiritual reality behind them all.
“Lord, are we all part of You?”
You are both other and same (as Me). I need you to be other so that I may encounter another self. I am a Person and, like other persons, define Myself by responding to other persons, and being responded to (by them).
But I also need union, not distance—just as other persons do. You and Abigail are both other and same. You need to be different people—love is a bridge between differences. You also merge spirits at certain moments, though not totally. That is also a kind of completion or fulfillment. Life, including My life, is the dialectic, as you might call it, of same and other, confrontation and union.
We are both other than God and yet the same as God? But same and other are opposites. This did not go down easy for a former logic professor, but I went on. “Lord, are those moments of union with God the goal or are they just nice accompaniments?”
Neither. You shouldn’t strive for moments of union per se, for peak experiences. That is self-indulgence, and a mistake of some who seek mystical experience. It is like orgasms—you should not seek them for their own sake. That is an abuse, a kind of idolatry. They happen naturally as the outcome and expression of love. But the experience of union is not just the accidental accompaniment of loving God. It is the essential expression.
Then, late at night, I felt the boundary between me and the world becoming thinner and less distinct. Slowly, subject and object were blending, becoming intimately bound, not standing apart from one another. I was noting this intellectually, but it was not an intellectual experience. It was an ontological experience, an experience of my whole being. Finally, for a few moments, it approached total one-ness, the complete loss of awareness of self. At that point, I pulled back.
“Lord, what is the meaning of this kind of experience?”
There are many levels and kinds of experience with Me—including music. Do not make too much of it. It is good, just let it happen. It does not mean that you are about to become a mystic or anything unworldly. It is not unlike—it is on a continuum with—a wide range of spiritual experiences, in and out of religious practice and sensibility, that people have all the time. But it is definitely good. It will give you energy and peace and insight, so let it in.
Many times one “loses oneself” in an experience, but those moments are less threatening than merging with God. I pulled back, but felt a nagging sense I was not supposed to. “Lord, I feel you want me to do more of the mystical stuff, ‘entering’ You and so forth.”
Yes, and you can remove the scare quotes. There is nothing strange about it. That is how the universe is. The parts can communicate with the whole. It is no more mystical or mysterious than your ability to move your arm.
Actually, since Descartes introduced a sharp mind-body distinction, how the mind moves the body has been a philosophical mystery. But, in actual life, it is not. The parts can communicate with the whole and vice versa. I had never thought of the universe that way.
When I asked, I was given a complex answer.
Yes and No. I come to you—but not to raindrops—as a Person, and therefore I am a Person. One cannot be a Person in some modes without being a Person.
But I am also much more than a Person. Just because I seem so familiar to you—we talk just as persons do—should not mislead you into thinking I am “just a guy.” It is true that I have many of the attributes of a person—desires and a history, for example. But again do not assume that desire and history mean just the same for Me as they do for human beings.
When I was told to “tell God’s story,” I was cautioned against claiming divine authority.
I give you information, insight, but I am not bequeathing any authority. Pass it on in that spirit.
“But, in fact, having this line of communication with You does make me feel superior, Lord.”
You are not superior. You have drenched yourself in sin for fifty years. Do not feel superior to anyone. Your only superiority is your willingness to obey, and that I have given to you. I opened your heart to love and to Me. You did things to prepare, but I have opened the hearts of some who did not. It is neither deserved nor a gift—it is a fact about Me. I am expressing Myself through you—neither more deserving nor more blessed than the paint used in the Mona Lisa.
Well, okay, no matter who the artist is, paint is just paint. But I couldn’t help thinking that, if you’re paint, what could be better than to make it into the Mona Lisa?
Still, I did not feel like a prophet or seer. As I started reading about different religions, I found an endless cast of characters—priests, saints, mystics, apostles, evangelists, gurus, shamans. None seemed to fit me. “Lord, what is my role supposed to be?”
Just to be a serious reporter of what you are told when you pray.
In spite of the voice, I wondered why, most of the time, God is irritatingly elusive. But I was told,
You see Me all the time.
I looked around and tried to see God, but nothing registered. Martin Buber talks about saying Thou to nature, and that was about as close as I could get. If God wants to be so coy, why does He bother to get our attention at all? How, I asked, could our response possibly matter to Him?
It is very important. It is at the heart of my being.
Human recognition is at the heart of God’s being? I found that intriguing, but it only heightened the paradox of an invisible God who wants to be seen.
What is important:
We were living in Memphis, Tennessee, where my dad was going to college on the G.I. Bill. We attended my grandmother’s Pentecostal church. I would listen to what grownups said and try to think whether they were true or not—especially when they contradicted themselves. If heaven was a place of eternal joy, why didn’t they rejoice when somebody died? They made way too much of dressing up for church, when what mattered—they said—was the state of your soul.
“Lord, I took things people said seriously and placed the highest value on truth and on being right with God.”
God: An Autobiography, As Told to a Philosopher – is the true story of a philosopher’s conversations with God. Dr. Jerry L. Martin, a lifelong agnostic. Dr. Martin served as head of the National Endowment for the Humanities and the University of Colorado philosophy department, is the founding chairman of the Theology Without Walls group at AAR, and editor of Theology Without Walls: The Transreligious Imperative. Dr. Martin’s work has prepared him to become a serious reporter of God’s narrative, experiences, evolution, and autobiography. In addition to scholarly publications, Dr. Martin has testified before Congress on educational policy. He has appeared on “World News Tonight,” and other television news programs.
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Listen to this on God: An Autobiography, The Podcast– the dramatic adaptation and continuing discussion of the book God: An Autobiography, As Told To A Philosopher by Jerry L. Martin.
He was a lifelong agnostic, but one day he had an occasion to pray. To his vast surprise, God answered- in words. Being a philosopher, he had a lot of questions, and God had a lot to tell him
This is where, in my view, the book really gets interesting.
In fact, I found it hard to re-read the chapters coming up.
A swirl of feelings fogged the page. I relived the events, relived what I had been told, relived what I was asked to do, what absurd mantle was being placed on my shoulders.
The disturbance is not just retrospective. I am now about to share these things publicly for the first time. I think now, as I did then: Surely not, Lord. You can’t mean that! What will people say? What will they think?
I will be given a much bigger assignment than I ever imagined, much bigger than I could possibly welcome. You may think, as I did, surely not!
If so, just stay calm and set your concerns aside for the moment. The first step to understanding something new or unusual is to “suspend disbelief” at the beginning. You have to take it in, as best you can, on its own terms. You need to try to see how it might make sense, how it might fit in as an extension or modification of your current beliefs. Critical evaluation can be put off. There will be plenty of time for that later.
On the other hand, you may be more open than a life-long agnostic and temperamental skeptic like me. Either way, I will be happy to have you as my companion on this journey. None of us should have to travel alone.
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God: An Autobiography, As Told to a Philosopher – is the true story of a philosopher’s conversations with God. Dr. Jerry L. Martin, a lifelong agnostic. Dr. Martin served as head of the National Endowment for the Humanities and the University of Colorado philosophy department, is the founding chairman of the Theology Without Walls group at AAR, and editor of Theology Without Walls: The Transreligious Imperative. Dr. Martin’s work has prepared him to become a serious reporter of God’s narrative, experiences, evolution, autobiography and sparks of wisdom. In addition to scholarly publications, Dr. Martin has testified before Congress on educational policy, appeared on “World News Tonight,” and other television news programs
The female voice of God:
One day, a New Age friend gave me a mantra that was supposed to “center” one’s self. I thought I would give it a try. I don’t remember the mantra now, but it was addressed to the “Lord,” and I asked, “Is the Lord in the mantra You?”
Your early prayers—which were addressed to “Lord” and you thought perhaps Lord Krishna or Who-knows-who—were about right. When you address “the Lord,” you do not have to specify or have in mind a particular spiritual entity. The Lord who is right for you at that time will respond. The Lord that was right for your early prayers was Me, and so I answered.
I had a very basic question. The God who speaks to me is personal and, in human experience, persons are either male or female. The voice I heard was definitely a masculine voice but sometimes, in some indefinable way, I felt there was a feminine side to God. To my surprise, the answer came in a female voice.
Many sides? Some masculine, some feminine, some something else? The sound you hear is categories shattering.
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Listen to this on God: An Autobiography, The Podcast– the dramatic adaptation and continuing discussion of the book God: An Autobiography, As Told To A Philosopher by Jerry L. Martin.
Thinking about infinity:
The radical thinking God asked for has really been beyond my intellectual reach.
It is certainly a daunting concept. Every philosopher is aware of such puzzles as Zeno’s paradoxes and Immanuel Kant’s antinomies.
The Greek philosopher Zeno argued that, if the tortoise has a head start, Achilles can never overtake him. Once he catches up with the tortoise’s previous position, the tortoise will have moved forward.
Since there are an infinite number of points between the tortoise and the goal post, and an infinite number of points can never be transversed in finite time, Achilles can never catch the tortoise. Of course, in real life, he could. That’s why it is a paradox.
For example, either the world had a beginning or it did not (these alternatives are the antinomies or contradictories). If it did, one wonders what happened before that? And if it did not, there would have to be an infinite number of moments in the past, and is that really conceivable?
One reported that mathematicians had now proved you can have an infinite space within a sphere—within a ball, in effect. He said it made no sense to him but, since mathematicians had proved it, he had to accept it.
While I was balking at giving up my categories for understanding the nature of God, I saw what scientists have to believe when they do quantum mechanics. They have to believe that some subatomic particles do not actually have a location prior to being observed.
They have to believe that a certain change in one particle is always followed by the opposite change in another particle even though there is no contact between them and no way for the second particle to “know” which way the first particle changed.
If tough-minded physicists could be that flexible, surely I could too.
One of the basic paradoxes in the philosophical tradition concerns whether it makes sense to have an actual or completed infinity. No matter how large the number, you can always add “plus one.” So it seems that the number series simply goes on forever and can never be completed. If so, infinity is more a process term than the description of an actuality. It expresses the possibility of a larger number, not the actuality of an infinite quantity. But that seems to mean that no thing or being could actually be infinite. The number series can always go on, but each number is the end point of a finite series of numbers.
I wondered if that was adequate. I tried to think of a completed infinite. In our home, we have two mirrors that face each other. Each one mirrors the other, and mirrors the other mirroring the other, and so on, with the result that one sees an infinite series of mirrorings in each mirror. And they all exist fully and in the present, not just as a series running into the future.
But, no, the mirror images get smaller and smaller but at some point they are presumably too small to be mirrored, so there are a finite number of reflected images after all.
Moreover, although the images seem to us to all exist at the present moment, in fact light takes time to go back and forth, and that means there is really a series of images. Even if the series could go on forever, it would never be completed.
Perhaps I was on the wrong track.
Do they mean some kind of actual or completed infinite? Or is it another way to say that nothing is missing. That is a less puzzling idea. In a perfect painting, nothing is missing. There is nothing to be added. Perhaps that is a thought in the right direction.
It is not clear what “boundless” means. Literally, it would mean “without bounds or limits.” But the next two answers may be relevant here. I had asked about omniscience, in effect, infinite knowledge, and was told, “I know everything that is important.” And I had asked about omnipotence—infinite power—and was told, “I can do everything I want (care) to do.” That sounds more like the perfect painting.
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Listen to this on God: An Autobiography, The Podcast– the dramatic adaptation and continuing discussion of the book God: An Autobiography, As Told To A Philosopher by Jerry L. Martin.