We should go back to the Beginning.
Enter into Me, and experience the Beginning as I experienced it. Record what I say as I re-experience that moment.
Enter into Me? I was not sure how to do that. I tried to still myself and yield to whatever experience I was about to be given.
I am in the midst of Nothingness …
“In the midst of Nothingness?” My logical alarms went off. “Lord, how can I make sense of this?”
Don’t worry now about making sense of it. Just listen.
I tried again to still myself and yield.
I am in the midst of Nothing.
I don’t know who or what I am—I am like a baby in a womb. I hear nothing, see nothing—because there is nothing. I feel alone, very alone, except that I don’t yet know what alone means. I feel growing strength, and Myself being drawn toward the light, just a glimmer at the “edge.” I am in a kind of “pain,” like stretching aching muscles.
Suddenly, it is as if I punch my arms and legs through the sides of a bag I’m in.
It is like an explosion. In a split second, fragments are zooming out in all directions. I am at a throbbing, pulsing center. I am not sure what’s happening. It is like a tightly coiled spring being suddenly released and springing out into a vast space instantaneously.
I scramble to take control, to provide order.
I tried to picture all this in terms of the Big Bang theory of the origin of the universe. In the first trillionth of a trillionth of a second, the new universe expanded faster, much faster than the speed of light. “Within a fraction of a second,” writes physicist Michio Kaku, “the universe expanded by an unimaginable factor of (10 to the 50th power).” It became 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000 times bigger than it had been less than a second before.
“Lord, were there already laws of nature or did You have to establish those regularities?”
At this point, I know nothing about laws of nature. All is chaos.
Slowly I reach out to extend Myself over the whole, to infuse it. It becomes calmer, but still full of flux and dynamism and outward expansion.
I relapse, as if tired. I have done all I can do at that stage.
________
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.
Johan Herrenberg May 5, 2014
God sounds like a creature, made of spirit and matter like us, and not a Creator who creates the universe out of nothing… Then he is ‘a’ god, being contingent, perhaps the god of our universe, but not God?! Fascinating. And not miles apart from what I myself have ‘seen’ through my writing.
Jerry L Martin May 8, 2014
There is more to the story, so I hope readers won’t draw too many conclusions at this point. You might say, provisionally, that the familiar Creator-created distinction doesn’t quite apply here. I grew up with that distinction and these chapters about the Beginning were disturbing. As I read more, I learned that, in Eastern Christianity and various other traditions, what I was told would not be so unusual. And it is interesting that it is not too far out of line with your own glimpses, as an inspired novelist, of the divine.