“Are you going to take the voice seriously?”

“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.

“Everything God has spoken, we will do.”

God Has Spoken:

One day, after breakfast at a little café in Alexandria, I was told,

Don’t go to work

It seemed to be a training in obedience.

“Lord, do you know we have to get that grant proposal in today?”

Of course.

My organization lived on grant money. But the voice said not to go in. What to do? Well, the sky is not going to fall if the proposal goes in the following day. I would go back to my apartment.

As I turned on the ignition, the voice spoke again.

You can go to work now.

I remember that incident because something was at stake, but usually I was told do something trivial, such as to listen to a different radio station or sit in a different chair. As these arbitrary commands continued—mounted as it seemed—Abigail expressed concern.

This sounded more like Boot Camp than spiritual guidance.

Maybe I shouldn’t do everything I was told. Maybe I should, as she put it, “use your intelligence.” I was puzzled. Was I supposed to second-guess God?

The next day I stopped at Border’s bookstore near Pentagon City. On the way out, I felt guided to move in a particular direction, like a dowser following his stick: first straight ahead, next to the right, then straight ahead, now stop. I was at the religion section. I felt guided down to the third shelf on the right, and finally to a particular book.

It was a book I never would have chosen on my own: John Calvin’s commentary on the Gospel of John.

I know that Calvin is one of the great theologians of the modern era, but I had an impression of him as stern and rigid. I picked up the book and it opened to John 8:28, where Jesus says, “I do nothing on my own.”

Calvin explains that “Christ wants to prove that he does nothing without the Father’s command … he depends entirely on his will and serves him sincerely … he does not just partially obey God, but is entirely and without exception devoted to his obedience.” It was a lesson in obedience.

Near the register, there was a display with another book I never would have bought on my own: The Ten Commandments, by Dr. Laura Schlesinger and Rabbi Stewart Vogel. Many people like Doctor Laura but the few times I had heard her on the radio, she seemed harsh rather than loving. I believe in tough love, but she just sounded tough. However, I opened it and my eyes fell on a line bold-faced in the text. It is where the people of Israel accept the covenant: “Everything that God has spoken we will do!” Another example of total obedience.

I had been led to one other passage in Calvin’s commentary. John 9:4 says, “We must work the works of him who sent me while it is day; night is coming when no one can work.” Calvin comments, “as soon as God enlightens us by calling us, we must not delay, in case the opportunity is lost.”

The note of urgency reminded me of the story a village chief in eastern Brazilia told of his own encounter with a divine being.

He had encountered the being while out hunting, but was too scared to speak and the being left.

“At night while I was asleep he [the divine being] reappeared to me. … He led me some distance behind the house and there showed me a spot on the ground where, he said, something was lying in storage for me. Then he vanished. The next morning I immediately went there and touched the ground with the tip of my foot, perceiving something hard buried there. But others came to call me to go hunting. I was ashamed to stay behind and joined them. When we returned, I at once went back to the site he had shown me, but did not find anything any more.”

He had missed his moment. I did not want to miss mine.

“There are different pieces of the same puzzle.”

Pieces Of The Same Puzzle:

If there is one God, why are there so many religions?  Philosophers call this the Problem of the Diversity of Revelations.  But I was told,

(There is) no reason to think (the) diversity of revelations is a problem, any more than for a therapist to say different things to different clients (whose needs and situations differ).

That analogy didn’t take me very far.  The therapist, like a doctor, is giving advice depending on the needs of the client.  But God is giving different people contradictory stories about Himself, and also about how they should live.  Perhaps God’s messages had to start simple, when cultures were primitive, and became more adequate as cultures developed.

“Lord, do Your revelations progress from lower to higher?”

Yes and no.  Much of what I have to say is universal, and good for all times and places.  Some is quite specific to the individual and his or her circumstances, the actions he or she faces.  Some is developmental, on the side of the culture and also on My side.

“Why not just give everyone the whole truth?”

Your question has presuppositions—that I have given different, incompatible stories to different cultures.  This is only apparently true.  If you think them through, they are different pieces of the same puzzle.  Names shift but that is superficial.

“Even though one says ‘God’ and another (thinking of Buddhism) says ‘Nothingness’?”

No religion puts Nothingness in the place of God.  If it appears to, think again.  What is the role of each (name)?  Is one a substitute or replacement for the other?  And (think about) the meaning of each.  Are they really incompatible once you examine their properties?

“Perhaps each religion is like a single eye-witness report of some strange event such as a Martian landing.  The reports might be wildly different from one another.  The challenge would be to sort them out and put them into a single coherent account.”

Not exactly.  It’s not to blend the religions into a single synthesis or theology.  It’s to put them into one story.  (To take your analogy,) imagine a reporter who interviewed everyone who had an encounter with the Martians, starting at the first encounter, and wrote it up as a narrative.  Certain consistent themes might emerge, but this would be different from a scientist trying to adjudicate and synthesize the reports.  In your version (of the religions), there will be an additional unifying factor—Me.

“The goal is to be ‘in tune’ with Me”

In Tune With God:

I had now accepted the assignment, but God wanted more.

You need purification. Transformation is a good word. It is obedience, which at its fullest is transformation.

“What does that involve, Lord?”

Putting Me first rather than last. Living every moment, making every decision, in response to My call.

“How do I go about doing that?”

You know this—start every day with prayer and let prayer guide you through the day.

There is another way to listen to God. One day, when I was fatigued from travel, I was told to take a day to rest.

“But I have so much work to do, Lord.”

Always listen to your body—it is also My voice.

I have not found it easy to live my life fully in tandem with God. Every day there are items on my personal radar, and I usually attend to them first, and fit God in when I have a chance.

One morning Abigail called breakfast and I held off, due to one of God’s seemingly arbitrary commands. “Is my husband becoming a holy man?” she asked with more exasperation than reverence. “I already am,” I said, in the sense of having a divine call, “just a very bad one.”

“Lord, I know I should try to live each day in response to Your purposes.”

That is right. Not just to do it mechanically, like a soldier following orders, but to do it as an organic flow, wishing to be in touch with Me and to live in accord with My will, My love.

“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.

Ask Yourself What I Am Looking For

Looking for God:

One day I learned more about God’s story when I asked simply, “Where should I begin today, Lord?”

Ask yourself what I am looking for.

“Love?”

Well, yes, but what is that love?

“Interaction, communication, understanding?”

YesI long to be recognized, to be understood, and then to be taken in.

I wondered why a great being like God would need to be loved by mere mortals.  “Why does that matter to You, Lord?  You’ve got it all, just being God.”

That is silly.  This is what I am.  I am like a function looking for a variable…only half the equation.

I looked for a humbler analogy.  “Like cement looking for bricks to hold together?”

Okay.

“Is that connection only what You need or is it also what the world needs?”

Both, obviously.  In your analogy, the world is like the bricks that need to be held together.

“But, Lord, I sense that Your yearning is not just a factual incompleteness, like needing a pair of gloves.”

Yes, it is a deep internal dynamic that drives Me forward to do the things I do.  I unfurl the world and call forth life and send signals to people.  Listen, and feel.

“The feeling that comes to me is Your desire to call into being a corresponding being.  It seems a lot like the dialectic of self and other in Hegel.  Subjectivity desires to objectify itself, as it does in artifacts, and to subjectivize the surrounding world, as it does in interpretation, and, even higher, to encounter another subjectivity.”

I am a Person, searching for …

“That’s what I wonder, Lord.  I can’t quite imagine what You are searching for.  Just interaction?  That seems too limited and, in a sense, too easy.”

It is not just looking for company.  Perhaps speaking of loneliness is misleading.  Why does a human being look for love? 

It is not just for company.  That is companionship, not love.  You want to pour yourself, your concern, your destiny into another person.  And you want them to respond in kind, to understand and recognize and sympathize with and care about you, (and) to share your life story, so that I becomes we. 

And the result is not just good feelings or good times; it is ontological, it is virtually molecular.  You know that, because you have experienced it.  Imagine how puny your love is (not to belittle it, but just for comparison) compared to Mine. 

What is barely ontological or molecular in your case is fully so in Mine. 

The constitution of the universe is altered by My love and My being loved. 

You can’t just say “God so loved the world …”  Love is a two-way street.  Anything unilateral is merely an effort at love, not its fulfillment, not its achievement.

You could tell My story, one version of it at least, through the history of love. 

What has love meant and been over time?  From Abraham’s love for his wife and his son and his God, through the Ramayana and the compassionate Buddha and Jesus and Plato’s philosophy as eros toward wisdom, to Christian chivalry and Buber’s I-Thou—these are stages that reflect My development and My interaction with human beings. 

________

Looking for 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.