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.
Karma is the Hindu idea that actions, both good and bad, have consequences for a person’s character and fate.
Human beings must learn a lesson. They are not in this life to sit in the lap of luxury. It is a challenge, a test. They can only grow through suffering. I too can only grow through suffering. The main suffering is through the consequences of their own actions. That is the most intense suffering, the kind of suffering that leads to suicide.
“Lord, Pherecydes also says the world was composed of opposites.”
There can be no love without difference, no harmony or balance without opposing items or forces, no magnetism without the magnet and its object, and so on.
Mystic merging is not quite right. You (people) need to live out your lives in relation to, in concert with Me, but it would serve no purpose, karmic or otherwise, for you to get lost in Me, like a drop of water in the sea.
I knew that I wanted to love Abigail, not to merge into her, or to have her merge into me. There is not just unity, but creative tension as well.
“Lord, what was there before? What motivates the act of creation?”
I received the following words and images which I recorded in my notes.
“A feeling of loneliness, of searching, reaching—not yet a Person. Expanding into the great emptiness of Nothing, which is ‘infinitely empty’ far beyond (far more empty than) empty spaces. ‘Who am I? What am I? Am I an I? What is an I?’ A chaotic feeling of the infinite rushing at the edges.”
“Lord, why did eternity ‘shatter’ in this way? Did the still, self-sufficient stuff explode?”
I received the sense: “Brittle, crystalline, too perfect, static, isolated, removed, alone, bored, incomplete. The eternal already had the potential to be a Person but could not do so without creating time.”
And I also got the feeling that God desperately wants to be understood.
I remembered Abraham Lincoln’s story about the man who was tarred and feathered and run out of town on a rail. “If it weren’t for the honor of the thing,” the man said, “I would rather have walked.” And I had seen the war movies, “You will have the honor of leading the assault.” Some honors aren’t worth it.
I did feel the honor. God was about to put His seal on this role for me, a role more suitable for a real Elijah. I felt a swell of pride, as I was being told this, and immediately the line went dead. Ego had broken the connection.
What I had been told about Creation still bothered me and I was relieved when God started talking about the process of evolution.
“Lord, do You have to will creatures to evolve into homo sapiens or does it just happen by natural processes?”
That’s not a well-conceived question. It rests on a false dichotomy. Remember that nature is itself teleological, except it is much more complicated than that apparently simple statement. I provide—I am—the telos or purpose, and I follow the telos as well. However, I draw man forward to greater development in the very process of interacting with men (people). At the time of early man, I am not yet sure what is missing. I am not fully developed Myself yet, since I have not encountered beings who can call forth My full latent nature. For the moment, call it a dialectical evolution responding to My need for development.
Here and elsewhere, “man” has the older sense inclusive of both women and men.
There was a historical period known as the High Middle Ages — a fitting term for the stage of life at which Abigail and I found one another. I hoped we would have at least ten good years together before the hazards of life caught up with us. As of January 20, it has been twenty-two years. Recently, she reported – not just to me but to her acupuncturist and her favorite horse – that she was “happy.” For her, it was an embarrassing confession. Scholars and intellectuals NEVER say they are happy. They are too smart and sophisticated for that. And too deep. Weighty thinkers are supposed to be full of existential dread and infinite angst. She reports that, because her European mother was “happy” as a child, she was thought to be not too bright. Charles de Gaulle was once asked by a reporter, “Are you happy?” “Are you nuts?” the French leader responded. (It sounded better in French.) But my profound, brilliant, cosmopolitan wife reports herself as “happy.” I was pleased for her, of course, but even more for what it seemed to say about me. Although I am a rather lumpish husband, notorious for having been a poor date, who takes her nowhere and does nothing, and yet – thank God! – she is “happy.” My Dad advised me way back when, “Make her happy and you’ll be happy.” Thank you, Dad.
“So I should read the scriptures of the major religions?”
Yes, I want you to read the early spiritual history of mankind. I will lead you to which readings. I would like you to pray as you read them and take notes as directed.
I grew up at a time when “man” and “mankind” referred to both men and women, and God spoke to me in my own vernacular.
“Lord, You said I was to tell Your story ‘from the inside out.’ But reading the scriptures is ‘from the outside in.’”
Yes, tell My story as I tell it to you. The only purpose for reading is to give you reference points for understanding My story.
My friend, Alasdair MacIntyre, died this year. I call him my friend, although our paths crossed only intermittently. I first met him, when he was speaking in Boulder. “I may be a member of the Moral Majority,” he told me. Well, I was too, in a similarly modulated way. Later, when After Virtue appeared on the cover of TIME magazine, I asked him whether he had been prepared for the celebrity. “Not at all,” he said, “not in the least.” But he took it in stride and it served him and his world audience well.
Alasdair owed me nothing. We had never been colleagues or in any other special relationship. Nevertheless, he offered a generous endorsement whenever I asked for it. A few years ago, as he was growing older, lest I leave something important unsaid, I send him a note thanking him for his many kindnesses.
He wrote back that he owed the greater debt to me. For what? For having shared my God experience with him. Though defending one set of philosophical battlements after another over the years, he came, before the end, to have an open soul. God bless him!
The procedure went smoothly and I was able to watch the monitor as the surgeon snaked a catheter up from my groin to a major coronary artery. The blocked place was easy to spot, and he inserted a stent to keep it open.
Opening an artery is a very serious matter. If it starts bleeding, it can be life-threatening. The patient has to lie flat on his back and absolutely still for twenty-four hours. Nurses at my first hospital had been wonderful, but here I was attended by a woman who was Nurse Ratched without the charm. She seemed to resent the fact that patients needed her help. Finding it difficult to manage the bedpan flat on my back, I asked for her help. She acted as if it were a dirty-minded request and responded by threatening me, “If you can’t manage the bedpan, we will catheterize you.” Finally, I did manage, and the twenty-four hours were up.
Another patient had told me that closing up the artery can be painful as well as dangerous.
“Who is to perform this delicate operation?”
Nurse Ratched gave me the grim news: young Mr. Sizzorhands, the very technician whose previous efforts to hurt me had been foiled, would now have a really good shot at it. I told her I wanted someone else to do it. She made it a battle of wills. “He is the only technician available.”
“I am not going to let that guy lay another hand on me.”
We went back and forth. Finally I said, “Let me speak to the doctor.”
She said she would see what she could do and, after a time, she returned with a young Asian-American attendant. He had the hands of an angel. I didn’t feel a thing.