Tag: divine encounter

“Think in a Different Way”

March 27, 2025

“Lord, I have the feeling that you want me to read and think less, and to listen more and just write down your story.”

Don’t stop thinking, but think in a different way. Don’t work so hard to figure everything out, to make it rational, to make it fit your categories. Just listen and think through the implications of what I tell you.

“But, Lord, some of what I learn from You comes from worrying over what you say.”

Sometimes yes, but often no. Sometimes your questioning just gets in the way. The main point is to open your mind, to try to understand what I am saying on its own terms, and to see ways it might be true or understandable to you.

If something doesn’t make sense to me, how can I supposed to “see ways” to make it understandable? How do you get to that vantage point?

 

God: An Autobiography, As Told to a Philosopher – is the true story of a philosopher’s conversations with God. Dr. Jerry L. Martin, a lifelong agnostic. Dr. Martin served as head of the National Endowment for the Humanities and the University of Colorado philosophy department, is the founding chairman of the Theology Without Walls group at AAR, and editor of Theology Without Walls: The Transreligious Imperative. Dr. Martin’s work has prepared him to become a serious reporter of God’s narrative, experiences, evolution, and autobiography. In addition to scholarly publications, Dr. Martin has testified before Congress on educational policy. He has appeared on “World News Tonight,” and other television news programs.

________

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.

experience God: An Autobiography

“Everything God has spoken, we will do.”

February 13, 2025

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.

“I Am Pulling Life Forward.”

January 16, 2025

Go back to My loneliness.  Feel it along with Me.  The universe has exploded into being, and I scramble to order it.  Then there are long eons, though remember that “long” doesn’t mean exactly the same to Me.

The following came to me as God’s experience:  “I am dwelling in the vast loneliness.  It is the loneliness of a huge figure who does not know He is alone, since the idea of others has not yet appeared, so it is just this huge unexplained emptiness.”

I was beside myself.  I had reluctantly given up my happy agnosticism—and for this?  I had higher expectations.  “Lord, that doesn’t sound like much of a god.”

You are diverting yourself from the task of describing My life because of fears that you will say something wrong and embarrassing.  Don’t let your fears guide you.  Just listen to Me and dwell within My heart and tell My story from that vantage point.

However disappointing, the voice was still authoritative.  I relaxed and, once again, was taken back to the Creation, in (for me) uncomfortably anthropomorphic language.

I am awake.  I rise and shrug off the cramps of night.  I stretch my arms, move my feet.  It is good to be alive.  I look at the world, matter, around me.  Dead.  Nothing there.  I am ready for action, for interaction, but there is nothing.  Just whirls and splashes and explosions.

Matter has a subjective side, a “within,” that subliminally experiences its surroundings, but that is too limited to interact with, too limited to be satisfying.  It is like the story of the tar baby—you can poke it but you do not get much of a response.  The Mayan myth of making men out of clay and wood is not far off.

In Popul Vuh, the Mayan creation story, God aims to make men who can “walk and talk and pray articulately.”  He first tries making them of wood and then of clay, and finds those don’t work very well.

So I infuse My spirit into matter, as if trying to blow life into it.  (Like blowing bubbles) I blow and blow molecules, complex molecules, the building blocks of life.

This was a meaningful image even if anthropomorphic.  Even for scientists, the origins of life—even the answer to “what is life?”—is a profound mystery.  If there is a God, then surely He would be part of that story, and “blowing life into it” might be about as precise as anything.

“But why did it take God so long—millions of years—to develop life?”

Long?  It was the twinkling of an eye.  Time is much more relative than you imagine.  Those millions of years were no longer than the first six milliseconds of the universe.

Listen to Your Body

September 19, 2024

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.

 

 

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.

“Death and the Hope of Immortality . . .”

July 4, 2024

“The next phase is what I wonder about.  It looks to me as if You communicate some sense of moral order and hierarchy, reverence for life and death, a sense of the meaning of life … I am feeling that this is Your voice, not mine, Lord.”

Yes, it is.  They were understanding Me well enough to understand that life has meaning—a beginning and an end and the sense of a meaningful movement from one to the other, summarized (judged, reckoned) at the end.  Death and the hope of immortality, which isn’t merely the fear of death but the understanding that there is a vertical  dimension to life and (that) its meaning does not stop with death, that there is a larger story the individual is part of, and his (and her) spiritual development is not limited to just one life.

Current Spiritual Transformations

May 16, 2024

“As You tell me things, am I supposed to ‘use my own intelligence,’ as Abigail urges, to interpret or reinterpret what You tell me?”

You have to use your intelligence, but you have a very direct line.

“Will we include the present age?”

No, the main goal is not to talk about some crisis or transformation in the current age.  A new revelation about the past is relevant to current spiritual transformations.

 

 

Rippling Waters

“I Breathe Life Into Matter.”

May 12, 2024

 

God continued,

I breathe life into matter, and matter starts responding.  As one translation of Genesis puts it, I “flutter over the waters” and nurture, incubate life.  And I am filled with joy.  It is like a child picking up a harp and being surprised to find that strumming it makes beautiful sounds—and delightedly playing with it.

At the beginning, the cosmos was My playpen, My garden of delights.  It was beautiful, dazzling.  I could play it like a vast organ, but one attached to laser shows and fireworks.