Category: Explore Selections From The Book

“Pray and I Will Tell You”

May 14, 2026

I started making a list of great spiritual leaders to pray about.  I thought the question would be, for example, What was God communicating to Martin Luther?  But, when I asked, I got a different answer.

Suppose you brought a guy in – say, Luther – and cut him up (dissected him, looked at the elements that make him up).  What would you find?

“Not just the single solitary individual, I suppose, but someone immersed in a tradition, institutions, and a culture.”

I act over the centuries in reference to individuals, but also movements, cultures, and the like.

“But only individuals receive communications.”

Just listen for the moment.  I interact with mankind, with the universe, in many different ways.  Do not assume that the only interaction is the same form of the interaction I have with you.  With some it is conversational, but with others it is by inspiration, by My spirit moving through them, infusing institutions and life-forms, cultures, cultural forms, art, music, dance, symbolism, ideational systems, thought forms …

So, looking at each cultural form, I should be able to figure out how it reflects You?”

The starting point is not the cultural forms and asking “What kind of God or transcendent order does that imply or suggest?” but start with Me and ask “What am I doing with that culture, individual, art, art form, or whatever.  What is it to Me?”  Pray and I will tell you.

The moment of death is every moment.

May 7, 2026

“The moment of death is every moment.”

There had been a time when getting tenure had been the most important thing in the world to me.  For an academic, it is a matter of professional life or death.  I had loved my years at the university.  Surrounded by the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, Boulder valley is a little piece of heaven.  But teaching philosophy was no longer my calling.  It was time to move on.

That does not mean that giving up tenure was an easy decision to make.  Nor should it have been.  Congressional staff have no job security at all.  They routinely lose their jobs because the congressman dies or retires or runs for another office.  Or it can be more dramatic.  One congressman who had given no hint of dissatisfaction came into his office one day and simply fired everybody, effective immediately.

So the risk was real, but the risk of not making the change was real also.  Time is the most important asset you have in life.  T. S. Eliot tells us, “The moment of death is every moment.”  The moment of death is an epitaph defining the meaning of one’s life and, if Eliot is right, so is every moment.  There is an urgency to life.  If there is something important to you to do, you should do it now.

So I thought, what is the worst case scenario?  I could always work for my father, who had a business selling advertising specialties—items like pens and calendars with ads for small businesses to give to their customers.  I did not think I would be happy doing that, but it would put food on the table.  So I sent in my letter of resignation.  A week later the letter was returned.  I had “forgotten” to sign it.  As I left the university, the Denver Post ran a feature about my job change.  I told them that giving up tenure was “like jumping out of an airplane with an untested parachute.”

Experience God: An Autobiography

“Do you think I could come to the ancient Jews in the same way I came to the seventh century Chinese? to Americans today?”

March 26, 2026

How God Comes To Different People:

I had been told that culture is a factor in divine revelations.

“Lord, why is culture so important?”

That’s like saying, why language?  If I am going to communicate with people, they need a language.  For the same reason, they need a culture.

“They need a culture, but why such a variety of cultures?”

There are many ways of realizing (actualizing) the human story.  Culture enables lives of different (types of) significance (meaning).

“But why, in terms of Your story?”

I need to come to people in all their particularity, not to mankind-as-such.  The Chinese is one way of being.  The primitive is one way of being.  I come to each in its own terms.  Each enables Me to show a different side of Myself.

Do you think I could come to the ancient Jews in the same way I came to the seventh century Chinese? to Americans today? to you?

Learn more about how God comes to different people.

Just take in what comes to you.

March 12, 2026

Just take in what comes to you.

 “Lord, how should I approach the ancient scriptures?”

Get into the frame of mind for reading the (particular) work.  That frame of mind is reverential, quiet, respectful, open-hearted.  It does not consist of analyzing metaphors and stories of gods.  Just take in what comes to you.

That guidance cut against my own scholarly training, but from then on I tried to read not only with an open mind but with an open heart.

 

an inconvenient God

Being facing Being

January 29, 2026

I wondered what it could mean for “Being as such” to be a Person, a Thou, as surely, from my own experience, God is.  Then it struck me that this rushing Stuff, this force of Being, is also the being of me.  And I am a person.  So why shouldn’t the rushing Stuff, the Being of—of what?—the World, of Being itself, be a Person writ large?  I don’t mean the World merely in a physical sense, since my own being is not merely that of my body.  Similarly, the Being that animates everything could be a Person.

Looking out the window at the passing trees, it struck me that their very leaves are full of Being as such, the Being that is also a Person, and that it made sense for them to be a Thou for me.  And, more remarkably, for me to be a Thou for them.  I felt that Being facing Being, not necessarily speaking but simply facing, is what personhood is.