Category: Explore Selections From The Book

storytelling

“It Leaves Out the Most Interesting Part of the Story.”

September 12, 2024

“Lord, is the theory of evolution correct?”

It is not a bad theory.  It is a short-hand that works, but it leaves out the most interesting part of the story.  It is like behavioral psychology in this respect.

While Pavlov’s dog salivating tells you something about animal and human behavior, seeing people solely through the lens of stimulus-and-response conditioning leaves out what is really interesting about them.  Similarly, the theory of evolution is okay as far as it goes, but leaves out the best part of the story.

“The extended lines of relations meet in the Eternal Thou”

September 5, 2024

I had read Martin Buber’s I and Thou when I was a college freshman and had not looked at it since then.  But, when I fell in love and realized that she loved me back, the opening words of Part Three came back to me:  “The extended lines of relations meet in the Eternal Thou.”  Love between human beings has a trajectory toward God.

These Have Been My Most Faithful Servants

August 29, 2024

It [a new divine message] will be most hard for two groups—the atheists, secularists, who have set their hearts against Me, against hearing, and (followers of) the old religions, who are set in their ways, very attached to specific forms and formulas.  The latter pains Me because, in many ways, these have been My most faithful servants.  Like a servant whose master has died and faithfully carries out his last wish—but misheard the wish. The old religions are mostly based on insights, revelations I gave them.  But they became rigidified.  Partial insights were mistaken for the whole. 

 

He Got Most of it Right

August 22, 2024

The brash display at the front of the bookstore announced Conversations with God—the first of three volumes in which God tells all … to somebody else!  I thought I was the one anointed to carry God’s message.  What’s going on here?

Before my own experience, I would not have thought for a minute that the author, Neale Donald Walsch, actually heard from God.  But, if God spoke to me, He could surely speak to someone else.  In fact, He had told me that He communicates with people all the time.  Walsch also reports God as saying, “I talk to everyone.  All the time.  The question is not to whom do I talk, but who listens.”  Just what I had been told.

Has God appointed two messengers?  With different messages?  Or is this guy not on the up and up?  I have to admit I was skeptical.  My own prayers were herky-jerky and the voice I heard spoke in my own casual vernacular.  Walsch’s conversations are reported in polished prose.  That looked rigged.

Nor was I impressed with what Walsch reports having been told.  It sounded like pop Buddhism—feel-good stuff that sells books but is unlikely to be God’s authentic word.  Wasn’t Walsch just a charlatan?

When I asked, I didn’t like the answer.

The book of prayers [Conversations with God] is nice enough, but it will be dismissed by most as an oddity, not a revelation—even though he got most of it right—but I couldn’t write the blurb!

 

 

 

 

Suffering is the Test of Humanity

August 8, 2024

“All that’s rather abstract, Lord.  What exactly does disease do for us?”  I thought of Job’s boils.

Suffering is the test of your humanity.  There is no greater test than pain—how one copes with it.  It is easy to be nice, faithful, and such, when things are great, but very hard under adversity.

“But, Lord, that just seems perverse—or cruel.”

No, that’s not so.  Think about your own times of physical suffering—in the hospital, for example—the shots, the clumsy aide, the itch, the nurse about urinating, those were full of growth.

Those examples brought back memories.  When I was still single, I had suffered a mild heart attack.  I was put in the intensive care unit.  They took blood tests, day and night.  There are a limited number of places from which blood can be drawn, and the same spot cannot be used again right away.  The wrists are ideal, but mine are sensitive and a needle there smarts.  One does not have much power as a patient, but safeguarding my wrists became my prime imperative for the next two weeks.  One after another blood drawer would come, and I would plead, argue, wheedle, and insist that they find some other place to puncture me.  Each resisted at first, then managed to find a spot.

 

“Yes, that is certainly Me.”

August 1, 2024

“Lord, do any of the gods of the world’s religions fit You correctly?”

Some—many—come pretty close.

“Lord, is the God of the Old Testament one of the accurate depictions?”

Yes, that is certainly Me.  And that is what I was like at that time.  I led you to the Miles book because that is something he got right.  Much else he got wrong—such as his reading of Job.

I had read and liked Jack Miles’ award-winning book, God: A Biography.  Though a trained theologian, Miles reads the Bible as a work of literature in which God is the main character.  That may sound as if it would fail to do justice to scripture, but in fact it enables him to avoid the worries that theologians and historians usually bring to it.  He just lets the text—and the character of God—speak for itself.

My Revelations Evolve

July 26, 2024

My revelations evolve.  I reveal different things now than millions of years ago.

“Millions of years ago?”

Yes, I revealed things to prehistoric people, though they had a limited ability to understand.  My revelations to Abraham and Moses were unusual, because they marked the first of the clear messages that got through and were really understood.

You Are Both Other and Same as Me.

July 18, 2024

The living reality of God was already more than I was comfortable with.  As I got into the frame of mind to pray, I would feel as if His Spirit was coming into me, like the infusion of a spiritual presence—as if we were, if not one, at least overlapping.  That made me uneasy.

“Lord, what is the purpose of those experiences in which You seem to fill my soul and body with Your Spirit?”

Those moments are infusions of energy, focused versions of the energy you draw on all the time.

“Am I merging with You at those moments?”

Yes, that is a good (acceptable) way to put it.  When you open yourself sufficiently, I can enter.

“Do You get something out of it as well?”

Yes, I benefit from the in-dwelling of the Spirit in a body.  My nature is essentially spiritual—it both benefits and suffers from not being embodied.  Your spirit is embodied.  By entering your spirit or soul, I enter your body as well.

God is limited by not being embodied?  That seemed strange to me.  “Why do You need that?”

Spirit is diffuse—it is valuable to energize it.  Spirit has no sensory apparatus.  I am enriched by participating in yours.

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.