Category: Explore Selections From The Book

“They shook your faith.”

January 6, 2023

One morning I started to ask some trivial question and was interrupted.

You stopped asking about Me because some of the answers disturbed you. They shook your faith.

That was true. When answers upset me, I would start thinking that, surely, this was not the voice of God. “Lord, why is faith like that? Why is Your interaction with us so tenuous and subject to doubt?”

First, it is not. During most times, people have not had trouble believing. Believing in Me or in some gods was—is—the most natural thing in the world.

Second, my “invisibility” has to do with the kind of Being I am. It’s like asking why we can’t see neutrinos. Nobody can see your “mind.” You believe in “other minds” with no greater “evidence.”

God was alluding to the topic of my doctoral dissertation. One of the great philosophical puzzles concerns skepticism with regard to knowledge of other minds. The problem arises from the fact that we do not have direct access to other people’s thoughts and feelings. We only observe their outer behavior. In fact, we do not have any proof that others really have inner thoughts and feelings at all. Yet it is reasonable to believe they do. Is God any more elusive than minds? Well, He certainly seems so.

 

“A Serious Question.”

December 29, 2022

A serious question.   

My life with Abigail was not simple.  She was still teaching full-time in New York, and I was working in Washington, D.C.  Whenever possible we would spend all-too-brief weekends together.

Come summer, we were spending more time together.  She needed a car.  I looked at the ads and found a nice little white used car.  The guy selling his car was the youth minister at a local church.  I started to explain that I was buying it for my girlfriend.  No, that would not sound right, and it was not true.  I was buying it for my future wife.  “I’m buying it for my fiancée.”

There had never been any doubt that I wanted to marry Abigail.  I never considered anything short of that.  But, in my methodical way, I had held off for six long months.  It was time to pop the question.

I took her to a dark, romantic Spanish restaurant in Alexandria.  I don’t know how we behaved in those days but the waiters called us the love-birds, and they put us in the “lovers’ cove” upstairs.  I had written her a little poem, a bad poem.  I can’t write poetry, but I thought the effort might soften her up.

But it was not our night.  A thunderstorm came up and, just as I was warming up to ask her, water started dripping right on our table.  Ink in the poem ran.  We scooted the table to the side.  And then I told her I loved her and would love her forever and would she be my wife?  I knew well the scene in Hollywood movies; the woman looks longingly into her paladin’s eyes and gushes, “oh yes, yes!”  Well, not the philosophical Abigail.  I asked, and waited.  And waited.  Then waited some more.  She seemed lost in deep thought.

Finally, I reminded her that I had asked a question and was still holding my breath for an answer.  In the gravest tones, she said Yes.  Why the long pause?  “It was a serious question and I thought I should give it a serious answer.”  She certainly had.

 

God and humans, mirror God

“For the first time, humans mirror Me, look at me eyeball to eyeball.”

December 8, 2022

God and Humans

I wondered how God interacted with these first humans.  “Did You communicate with them verbally?”

In a sense.  Early on, they do not have what can properly be called a language. 

They have sounds and gestures (and) live in a very short time-horizon—no signifiers for things distant in time or space.  I communicate in grunts and such like, in their inner ears, to give them a sense of awe and My presence.  Of course, their consciousness is still very undifferentiated.

This is not a criticism or insult.  They are quite wonderful creatures. 

Some respond in a very spiritual way.  They catch the drift and are in awe, and feel the splendor of creation and My divine presence.

“Do you give them commands?”

Yes.  Some “grunts” are warnings not to do something.  They live on the edge of subsistence and can be very cruel. 

Life is brutal and they are often brutal.  They die young.  But that does not keep them from responding spiritually.

“What does this mean for You, for Your life?”

For Me, it means the first spark of real interpersonal interaction, not just vague spiritual rapport. 

From very early, humans—protohumans—have a sense of something more, something higher.  (Their sense of) the divine is not just fear and wish-fulfillment, though there is plenty of that.  There is a real sense of relating to Me as a Person, not just as the vague spirituality of nature.

It is hard to convey in retrospect but, at this point, I do not quite know I have a personality, an individual personhood. 

Events pass through my consciousness.  I have a sense of My intelligence pervading the world, of fulfilling a universal telos.  I feel a spiritual rapport with life.  But none of that constitutes a sense of personhood, of an I standing opposite a You.  The protohumans gave Me that, or I developed it or became aware of it in relation to them.

For the first time, human beings mirror Me, look at Me eyeball to eyeball. 

spiritual doubt divine presence

“Don’t worry about doubting.”

December 2, 2022

Doubting Divine Presence

I continued to investigate the problem of discernment.  I looked for something more recent and found it in The Art of Praying: The Principles and Methods of Christian Prayer, by Romano Guardini.  According to Monsignor Guardini, “It may happen in contemplation that we have a strange experience.  We may have been reflecting on God in faith alone.  Suddenly, God is present … a wall which was there before is there no more.”  Okay, this spoke directly to my situation.

According to Guardini, there follows a period of divided reactions:  “Our intuition tells us that this is God or at any rate connected with Him.  The intimation may frighten us.  [‘Yes,’ I thought.]  We do not know whether we dare presume that this intuition is true and we are uncertain what to do.  [‘Yes, exactly.’]  However, the intuition becomes a certainty, even an absolute certainty which leaves no room for doubt.  [‘That is true also.’]”

However, Guardini says, doubts may return “when we discover that other people have no knowledge of these things.”  Yes, the problem of what will other people think.  This, he says, can lead to total unbelief.  “It may also happen that one doubts whether the whole experience had not merely been a delusion or temptation.”  Well, I never went that far.  But all is not lost, he says, if one follows this advice.  “In the face of these difficulties and doubts one should remain calm and trust in God.  One should submit to His will and pray for enlightenment.”  “Thus,” he concludes, “faith is fortified and love becomes pure.”

In short, there is a problem in believing every voice you hear.  But there is also a problem if, having sensed the divine presence, you give in to doubt.

“Lord, I am skeptical by nature and that worries me.”

Don’t worry about doubting unless it interferes with faith.  Doubting is a natural response of a thinking mind to conflicting evidence.  You may doubt—you might always doubt—but faith must transcend doubt as it transcends knowledge.

I determined to follow that path, maintaining a critical distance on my experience of God while, at the same time, yielding to divine guidance.  It is not an easy balance to strike, but it seems to be a challenge at the heart of the life of faith.  Would I be up to the challenge?

 

new Elijah, voice, Experience God: An Autobiography

“Are you going to take the voice seriously?”

November 10, 2022

“Are you going to take the voice seriously?”

The historian Paul Johnson writes in his spiritual memoir about having once called the prime minister’s office and, instead of getting the secretary’s secretary, the prime minister herself answered. “It happened to me once with a prime minister,” Johnson writes. “But with God it happens all the time.”

I don’t know if Johnson’s experience is like mine, but from that day on, when I prayed, I almost always received a verbal response, often with quite specific guidance. At first, it just seemed an oddity that went too much against my agnostic worldview to be taken seriously. Once my son had classical music playing in his ear all the time. It turned out to be an ear infection, causing buzzing signals that his brain skillfully translated into Mozart. Maybe my prayers were like that.

I would tell Abigail about these odd experiences. While I always disdained paranormal reports, near death experiences, and the like, she did not. I assumed she put the voice in that category. I didn’t really know because, usually, she just took in what I told her and didn’t say much. She explained to me later that she thought I was engaged in a sensitive communication and did not want to create static.

Then, one day, she did speak up. “Are you going to take the voice seriously, or is this just entertainment?”

She had put her finger on the contradiction I was living.

The voice was too real and benign and authoritative to ignore. Yet I could not imagine acting on it. Well, actually I could and did act on it, but without taking it seriously. I would be told to do this or that. Sometimes the guidance was about some matter facing me that day, and following the guidance usually worked out pretty well. Other times I received arbitrary directives which, since harmless, I followed. For example, one morning, Abigail and I had just sat down to breakfast when I was told,

Don’t eat.

So I just sat there for maybe fifteen or twenty minutes.

You can eat now.

I always did as I was told, but it was still more like a game of Captain-may-I than a life imperative. I was not ready to answer Abigail’s question.

On a visit to Boulder, where I used to teach, I told a former colleague about my experiences. I was afraid he would think, “poor Jerry, he has gone daft.” But he listened with interest, and recommended that I read American philosopher William James’s classic essay, “The Will to Believe.” An influential British scientist had declared, as a principle of the ethics of belief, “It is wrong, always, everywhere, and for every one, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.” The scientist had religion in his crosshairs.

James responded that there are some beliefs that, if you accept them, will shape your whole life. And shape it in a different way if you do not. You cannot remain neutral; yet evidence is inconclusive either way. You just have to decide which belief you would rather live with.

My situation seemed to be exactly what James was describing.

Facing a similar choice between belief and unbelief, the seventeenth-century philosopher Blaise Pascal, had seen it as a wager. If I believe in God and am wrong, well, I’m dead anyway, so I haven’t lost much. But if I don’t believe in God, and there is one … well, you might say, there’s hell to pay.

I faced my own wager. Either I follow the voice or I don’t. If I follow the voice and it is not divine, what is the worst that can happen? Well, I would be a fool, maybe a laughingstock, and would say goodbye to an excellent career. But, if I decide not to follow the voice and it is divine, then I would have missed my purpose in this life. What if Moses had done that? Or George Fox, the founder of the Quakers? The Old Testament is full of people called by God, who at first demur and only reluctantly heed the call. Even Moses worries (“suppose they do not believe me”) and feels inadequate to the task (“I have never been eloquent … I am slow of speech and slow of tongue”).

I am not comparing myself to these great religious leaders, but all of us in our lives face moments when we have to decide whether to respond to a certain call—be it the call of duty or service or simply, as Joseph Campbell puts it, to “follow your bliss”—rather than continue a more conventional or comfortable course. If I had to live with one worst-case scenario or the other, I could live with being a fool, if that’s what it came to, but I could not live with having refused God’s call.

Making a decision to believe is not quite the same as accepting that belief in your bones.

It is more like the first step toward believing. My philosophy still had no place for God—especially for a God who talks to me. Outside the Bible, who talks to God?

Another notable book by William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, helped answer this question.

The founder of pragmatism, the only distinctively American school of philosophy, James also taught physiology and psychology. He was a man of science but, for him, empiricism did not mean restricting our understanding to what science registers. He looked without prejudice at all kinds of human experience. He talks about famous people such as George Fox as well as ordinary people who have received answers to prayer or psychic intuitions or visitations from recently-departed family members.

Many people have had moments of divine or non-natural awareness, probably more than feel comfortable talking about them publicly.

Duke English professor Reynolds Price writes about his own battle with cancer. During the course of his treatment, he had an encounter with Jesus in a vision or, as it seemed to him, in another dimension. After he published his story, he received letters from many people with similar experiences—experiences that they had never told anyone. My experience was not as out-of-line as I had thought.
I decided to follow the voice and see where it would lead me.

the mind is God

“The mind is a little reflection or mirror of God.”

October 27, 2022

The Mind Is A Reflection Of God:

Early man was a whole new phenomenon, not entirely expected.

“How can that be, Lord?  Weren’t human beings part of Your plan from the beginning?”

Remember that I am following a plan, not inventing it.  I don’t know the whole plan Myself.

“So the emergence of human beings was a surprise?”

Yes.  Even though I saw the unfolding of life and understood its trajectory, there is a discontinuity between animal life and human life that’s surprising.  People are not just smarter animals.  It is not just that they have souls—animals have a kind of soul too—it is that they are creative, free, self-reflective, open-ended, have a yearning to go beyond themselves.  They are in fact like little gods, though I do not like the usual use of this notion.  But people are much more of the same substance and kind as God.  That is why I can communicate with them so effectively.  The mind is a little reflection or mirror of God.

________

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.