Scott Langdon [00:00:17] This is God: An Autobiography, The Podcast. A 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. Episode 146.
Scott Langdon [00:01:17] Hello and welcome to episode 146 of God: An Autobiography, The Podcast. I'm your host, Scott Langdon. And this week Jerry and I sit down for another episode of our series What's On Our Mind. With the last four episodes of this podcast firmly planted as seeds in my mind, the questions that came as a result grew like weeds. It's very easy for me to make things complicated. Thankfully, Jerry is willing and able to help me sort through these questions by sharing his insights, and not just for my sake, but so that you also can know that you're not alone as you try to navigate this thing we're all doing called Life. I hope you enjoy the episode.
Scott Langdon [00:02:00] Welcome back, everybody, to another episode of What's On Our Mind. I'm back with Jerry again today. I'm Scott Langdon. So glad you joined us. Jerry, I'm really excited about our conversation this week.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin [00:02:10] Well, we've had some very interesting things going on in terms of the things we've posted recently. So I think they offer us a rich array of topics that are stimulating to our religious journey and hopefully to the journey of our listeners.
Scott Langdon [00:02:24] I hope so too. Yeah, we're talking about the last four episodes of our podcast, the things that have, as I have been working on them, putting them together and as our team has been working on them and we produce them and we release them, it's interesting to go back and see what it is in this past unit, as I like to call it, this group of sort of four episodes, and what kind of theme or what kind of ideas have really captured my attention and made me want to think a lot more and ask God some questions and well ask you some questions. This time we went back to episode 142 From God to Jerry to You, that episode was called Why Is God Hiding? And I really liked that episode. I thought it was a really interesting take you had on a common question that many people ask. You know, why is God hiding? It seems that God is not around except when we have these, you know, feelings of goodness or whatever. We feel abandoned sometimes. Why is He hiding in the dark times?
Dr. Jerry L. Martin [00:03:36] Yeah. If you go back to the Old Testament, it's an invisible God.
Scott Langdon [00:03:41] Right.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin [00:03:41] And so they didn't have trouble with believing in God back then. As one Jewish scholar told me to say, "Do you believe in God?" Would be a little bit like saying, "Do you believe in the weather?" You know, God was present in their lives, a real being, nevertheless invisible. And it seemed, you know, I got irritated early in the prayers. It's a very early prayer where I say, you know, well, ask, "Is human recognition important to you?" And God says, “It's essential to My being,” you know, a very strong statement. Well, then I was kind of irritated. Why are You so hidden? You know, if you want to be known, why don't you show yourself all over the place? In, you know, thunderstorms and everything, like the great religious movies, and instead of being so elusive and hard to contact. And often, and this was true in one of our What's On Your Mind people we talked about where one of those two people had rich experiences of divine presence. And the other had the opposite. And as I saw it, these are two sides of the spiritual life. You have times of divine presence, whatever that means to a given individual, and times where you just can't find God. Or in fact, as that person put it, God seems, has his back to me. God seems to have turned away or left and you feel, uhoh, you know, either I'm being bad or like God is being bad. And that guy said, "I don't like him."
Scott Langdon [00:05:28] Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't like that. God. Yeah, yeah.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin [00:05:31] That's very honest. And I always advocate praying. Talk to God, and if you want to tell God I don't like you, tell Him, but use any speech that's sincere. Any prayer that's sincere is very worth your time and God's time.
Scott Langdon [00:05:52] Sometimes it can feel like God is hiding and we don't necessarily know what to look for or where to go if we feel like God is hiding or if we're lost again, you know, it might be that question like you just said- Did I do something wrong? You know, is God upset with me? Or, you know, all these kinds of feelings might go around in our mind. But God reveals to you in episode ten of our podcast How God Reveals Himself to Humans. And I thought it was a really good way to sort of follow up Why Is God Hiding with episode ten? I thought it was a really nice combination because it's God's version, not God's version, but God telling, you know, hey, I'm here all the time. But also there are many, many ways that I'm going to show up, that if you're open to it, to whatever, you'll see that I'm there. But maybe there's something about looking for a specific type of answer, whether it's the way you were brought up so you're looking in a very narrow way for a very narrow answer or--. So, there's a-- the key to it seems to be an openness and a willingness to see other answers than the one we might have in mind.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin [00:07:10] Yeah, it's a problem in a lot of our religious traditions that each tradition has its own favored ways, and it can be through the Eucharist or something like that, or through a list of things you're supposed to do. And then if you do them, then God will be present to you. In the East, it's often assumed that it's got to be meditation of a certain kind that goes through various steps and so forth. And that's the one and only way or the only really good way, you might say excellent way. But there are many ways and God is everywhere. And, you know, God answered my irritated query by saying, "You see Me everywhere." Well, I found that totally puzzling. And I looked around and I didn't see any God everywhere. You know, here I was a believer, a completely open believer in the God speaking to me. Sorry, Lord, I don't see You anywhere. And I had several experiences then that kind of opened me, you might say, to a more relaxed idea of what it would be like to see the divine in things. And you put your finger on it, Scott I think, it's you got to be open to all the dimensions of experience and that God is present not just in one kind, but all over the place. And you have to notice this is the divine. And I often mention the voice of conscience, because conscience is not just your DNA speaking. And it often, by some theories, it's your culture telling you the do's and don'ts. But I don't think that's an adequate theory of conscience. And the element is, you know, where did the culture get things like the Ten Commandments after all? Well this is God going back to-- it's God coming through with them, giving us a moral conscience, a sense of right and wrong, better and worse, and living up to our best self or falling down to our worst self. That's God.
Scott Langdon [00:09:18] Some of the eastern religions that I've studied for the first time in some kind of depth since we began working on this project, and some of the teachers that are out there today with it that I'm hearing lecture and whose books I'm reading and such, are really some that I really, really like and enjoy, want to get to the essential nature of our existence. So that's really the-- it's not even really a religious practice. It's an inquiry, a self-inquiry, you know. And so when you break everything down and take everything away, that's temporary. All there is is God, right? And when they get to that place of, you know, the oneness and we've talked about before, how God laments that the mystics get too caught in the idea of the oneness and wanting to be in the oneness. That oneness, they say, has no qualities. It is that which has no qualities, no thing. I have found that not quite convincing because there is this, I don't know what to call it, so I'll say movement, but a direction. And you touched on it earlier, where does a culture get the Ten Commandments or where does a Native American culture get their ideas of good parenting or ideas of what is kind and what is not kind. There is a directional movement against which you can see your moving if it's a negative thing, do you know what I mean? So this idea of no qualities at all, no actualized qualities, as we've talked about before, right to be in the world is the actualization of the otherness, but this idea of of God, and I think you've talked about it is the God beyond God, is something, is a direction in and of itself, if we can call it itself.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin [00:11:25] Well, you can speak that way. And since I don't engage much in the Eastern studies, I did, and I prayed about them in God: An Autobiography, and they're there, and God supports all of them. When Atman is Brahman. God says that's true, and the essential truth. And I think, what? You just said these other things were true and the essential truth. Well, the challenge of dealing with multiple religions, multiple deep worldviews is that there are different ways of being true, just as there are different map projections, and they're very different from one another. There's the orange peel projection, for example, of the globe and the more familiar Mercator. Neither is incorrect, but they look completely different from one another and the religions are more radical than that. They're picking up on, I think this would be the conclusion, I'm told, to start Theology Without Walls, and that seems to be a premise of that effort that, okay, these religions also contain some truth. And so the question is not which religion is true, but what is true about each religion. That's the way Richard Oxenberg put it in our dialogues, which I should mention are going to be published soon under the name Two Philosophers Wrestle with God. But it's dialogues about God: An Autobiography. But yeah, you can have multiple truths. And one might be the kind of truth expressed by a you know, the ultimate reality as one, and your self is identical with that one. Now, there's another truth that I respond to more, I personally in God: An Autobiography, but both are there, and the other truth is you have a relationship with God. God is both-- you are God in some deep, deep way. But equally deep is that you and God in this world, which is the arena where things count, are in a relationship and a relationship has to be between two. It's not just relating to one's self in some, I don't know, narcissistic way or something, but it's a relation to a genuine other. And then living in this rocky reality we inhabit together. And we and God are in that reality contending with its negative forces and also its positive potentialities together.
Scott Langdon [00:14:24] In episode ten, How God Reveals Himself to Humans, which was the topic of discussion in the Life Wisdom episode that you had with Mikhail Sergeev, God talks about the very specific time that we're living in and, you know, sort of the answer to the question why now? What God says, first of all to you, "I want you to be my new Elijah." And the reference to Elijah is the Prophet and specifically Elijah- what did that mean to you to have that particular name?
Dr. Jerry L. Martin [00:15:07] Yeah. The name Elijah meant nothing to me. I had to go look it up and I found it seemed to me it was like in the last verse, the very last verse of the Bible. I can't remember, if I may be mistaking that, but at the very end, Elijah is not just a prophet. He is the prophet who is going to return with a message. And that's one reason when people, when Jesus asked John-- No, no. When Jesus asked Peter, I guess, "Who do they think I am?" Well, some think this, some think that, some think you're an Elijah. That would be right in the Jewish tradition for Jesus to be Elijah returned with a new message. And of course, it wasn't filled out beyond that. What sort of new message would it be, you know? Well, you got to wait and hear the new message to see what it is. And that's the Elijah. And I thought, boy, this is weird.
Scott Langdon [00:16:03] Yeah, I can imagine. I can imagine. But God was making that comparison because it was a new-- it's a new time. It's the right time for this kind of revelation. And this is something we've touched on several times before, but I think it's very important and imperative because one of the reasons that I continue doing this and we keep going on together is that I do think it's an extremely unique and important time. And God says pretty much directly to you that I can't just give a message to a single prophet that will be heard on the whole world. The best I can do is give, you know, bits here and bits there. And I think God was really talking to you with a knowledge of the development of humankind in the world to the place that we are now with, as we've talked about ad nauseam, technology and the fact that I can talk to you right now via Zoom. And you know, you're in Doylestown and here I am, that all of that, you know, God is not only aware of that, but God is that if we talk about what we were just talking about, that God is inextricably connected to us individually, but also collectively and also in a Godward movement.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin [00:17:18] My memory is that when God first spoke to me about being an Elijah, I, of course, want to know why. And I was told the world's religions are sort of losing steam. You know, they're losing authority. And we know by sociological studies, demographics and so forth that this is true of many of the religious traditions. People whose parents were faithful to that tradition are now- it doesn't- it's not compelling to them. You know, a religion can't just be something you join like every member of my family is in the Lions Club or a Mason or something. It's got to have a spiritual hold on you. It has to be deeply meaningful to you, or you're going to think why am I spending my time this way? I'm going to go off, and there are a lot of other things meaningful and other ways, I can do them. But, at the same time, the established religions are declining and trying to reinvent themselves. There's a spiritual energy abroad, and you see that in various ways. And one is a lot of the spiritual but not religious is the category that the scholars put these people in, but it's a growing group of people who are not affiliated. Nevertheless, as the title implies they are spiritual. People want meaning in their lives. They want values that matter to them and that can be articulated and lived out. And they want to know what is the meaning of life, the meaning of the universe, the meaning of history? What is the answer to these things? They want answers. And it's not that they're just waltzing along and tripping down a meaningless path. They're looking for something. And you take them to a church and say, oh, here's the creed and here is the things you have to do, and the 14 points and so on. They say, no way. We're not interested in that. That's not answering my questions about the meaning of life. You've got to speak to people's actual questions. And God: An Autobiography is a kind of revelation for our times would not have been possible, would not have made sense at an earlier period. Right now, it's precisely the revelation that's called for.
Scott Langdon [00:19:58] In episode 144, that was our Life Wisdom episode that you had with Mikhail Sergeev. And Mikhail was born in Soviet Russia, and now is he an American citizen? He lives in America now, right?
Dr. Jerry L. Martin [00:20:14] He certainly lives in America, teaches in America. I don't know the citizenship rules and timing and whether-- how that's worked out. But he came to the U.S., got a Ph.D. in religion at religious studies at Temple University. And I then met him when he was teaching in Philadelphia at the University of the Arts. In this episode, he mentioned some things about the arts and also had written a book on the Baháʼí because they are people who drew in the spiritual truths from the different traditions. That's their mission. And I think he now works with them, a kind of director of studies and seminars and so forth for the Baháʼí organization. And as he explains in that dialogue, he lost his faith when the Soviet empire fell, it wasn't much of a faith, but it was what he was raised in and it gave coherence to life. And all of a sudden that was kind of erased from the universe, you might say. And what to do next?
Scott Langdon [00:21:17] That was so fascinating to me. His story was so fascinating because we're roughly the same age. I think he's a few years older than I am, but I can imagine my growing up and my religious experience, and when he was talking about his growing up and the societal framework in which our growing up took place and our introduction to God in any kind of religious tradition, the structure in which that took place. So in the Soviet Union, this way, this whole national way of being was a structure in and of itself. And that was the thing that held everything together, the morals, the-- all of it. And when that collapsed all of his friends who were atheists suddenly went to the complete opposite and were Orthodox Christians to the max. And it was just so interesting to me how he talked about that, because it was the structure that they craved and it was the structure that had the rules and all of that. And when the one collapsed, there was this yearning for another. And just whether that's God or not, just in this part of the discussion, I just want to hear your take on the idea of the need and desire for structure.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin [00:22:44] Yeah. As he put it, for authority.
Scott Langdon [00:22:47] Yeah.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin [00:22:47] He talked about this American way of religiosity, that we each follow our own path. And he talked about child rearing. You know, once the communism wasn't the enveloping understanding of life, and he and his friends became Russian Orthodox, what else would they be? For them, the idea of religion was the Russian Orthodox Church. And he confirmed, or whatever they call it, his own child.
Scott Langdon [00:23:19] He baptized him.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin [00:23:20] And baptized him at age seven or eight or something into the Russian Orthodox Church. He found his American friends objecting that- well, what you're rooting him in this one thing, shouldn't he be free? And they thought you should give the kid no background. And for Mikhail, that made no sense at all. It would be he's supposed to invent his own language or something. What kind of freedom is that? It's a kind of freedom in a vacuum.
Scott Langdon [00:23:53] Well, it's so fascinating because there's a piece, I think, that might be missing that I had in my growing up. So the societal structure of the Soviet system, you know, was much different than the societal structure of America, which is the freedom and so forth that he's talking about. Absolutely. And yet, when I was growing up, so you just take the national but then take it down a level to our community, which was the Evangelical church. So my parents from my birth essentially raised me in that, you know, that there was Jesus, that there was God, that Jesus was God's son, and even if we sort of moved into a different kind of tradition, it was still Christianity, and even more so in the Evangelical tradition that I was raised in became, you know, here's the rules, here's the way, here's the only way. And then the rebellion for me came in that community. So I did have this movement and structure to rebel against. It just wasn't the societal structure. So I was kind of rebelling against the theology and the Christian Evangelical tradition, but within the freedom of America, to be able to choose to study philosophy or choose to be Catholic, or choose to be an atheist entirely, so that idea of the freedom makes sense. But I do think we did push back quite a bit, even within sort of a meta community, if you will.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin [00:25:27] What do you mean by push back?
Scott Langdon [00:25:29] Well, the idea of the structure was that it's the only way. Anybody who-- if you're going to be saved, you became a member of our way of thinking in our community, our church, and everyone else was not saved. So theologically, intellectually, I didn't think that idea made sense in light of the freedoms that I had in school and society to explore other ideas, which I understand under the communist system, you know, would have been, you know, you're not free to study these other ideas. So I did have that. But the rebellion came against the community that said theologically, in order to be in our community, you have to do this way. And I said, I can't do that way anymore.
Scott Langdon [00:26:15] Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting. One of our Life Wisdom episodes is with this horror writer, wonderful writer Matt Cardin, and Matt Cardin grew up in something like what you're describing, Scott. I think it was maybe Southwest Missouri, everybody in town, everybody he knew was an Evangelical fundamentalist type. They had different little labels, but they're the rival versions of that, but they were all on the-- all the fundamentals the same. And he was very religiously turned, so these were of absorbing interest to them, as I believe they were to you, Scott. First in a Lutheran context, but for most of your growing up in this Evangelical context. And then it was quite-- then you don't know what to do when you start opening up. I don't know if he would call it rebellion. I sometimes, I think I mentioned this concept maybe in talking with Mikhail, John Dewey has this concept of a person's problematic situation, and we each have our own problematic situation. And so things that are answers for one person aren't necessarily answers to the other person because the other person doesn't even have the same questions.
Scott Langdon [00:27:31] Question. Yeah.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin [00:27:32] And issues and problems in their circumstances. So what kind of rebellion you do? You know, Mikhail uses the analogy with the arts here. He says In Russia, if you're an avant garde artist, you're rebelling against some established tradition, the status quo tradition, and says in America, and of course, he had these students in his classes, he knew them well, you're just making it up from the get go. You know, you're not rebelling against them. You can't really rebel. The new stuff, everything is vaguely avant garde, but not in the sense that it's rebellion. It's just people following their own creative impulses and creating whatever they want to create. You might say. And that's, in a way, kind of strange because you're rebelling against your tradition. The tradition had a meaning, and so the rebellion has a meaning.
Scott Langdon [00:28:28] Yeah.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin [00:28:29] Now, if everyone's just making it up, you know, and take that to religion, everyone's just kind of making up their own religion-- I'm writing something now about a young woman called Sheila, who is interviewed by Robert Bellah and others doing a study of community in America. And she says, well, I just have my own religion. I call it Sheilaism. And Sheila's a very nice girl who is living a good life, as far as I can tell, but they make great fun of Sheila. You know, what does that mean? But she's following her sense of what God would want her to do. And I think that's pretty good. I don't know if these sociologists are doing so well. But anyway, you know, but you end up with something like that. Everything's just kind of made up and no context, no tradition, no nothing? As I said, somewhere maybe to you just now, it's like inventing your own language. You're going to raise the child without a language so the child is free to make up the language- what does that mean?
Scott Langdon [00:29:35] Another thing that was really interesting is when you look back at what Mikhail was talking about, about his atheist friends who had the structure of the Soviet system and when it collapsed, became right away, you know, very attached to the Orthodox tradition wholeheartedly. It made me start to think of looking at the finger instead of what it's pointing to. So it seems as if, and I've had this experience myself, I've witnessed other folks have this experience, and it sounds as if Mikhail's good friends were having this experience, that they're looking for the structure as the thing that saves. And that's something that we wanted to guard against. When I was moving out of a religious tradition, I was wanting to move away from the giving so much attention to the structure that I lost the idea of why the structure was there in the first place- to support each other in love and in community. You know, when we want to bring others into the church, it's that we want to love them and bring them into community and compassion. But growing up, it always seemed like a numbers game. It always seemed as though, you know, we need to baptize more people and get them in to get them saved, like on their behalf. And we find that idea often complicating community and personal relationships because people go- I want to bring you into our fold so you can be saved. And the way you're going now is wrong. And we need to bring you to the right way. And when somebody is confronted with something like that and they go, hey, I didn't even know I was going the wrong way. And am I? You know, it's like when people are losing their interest in these religious traditions. I think it's because of that, because- you're living wrong, you're unhappy, you really are headed down the wrong road. And people go- actually, I'm feeling pretty decent. I am married. I have kids or I don't, or I have a decent job. You know, so it's the pressure to change your life because you are heading down the wrong way. That's challenging. And it seems to be opposite of- are you lost and struggling? Can I help you and can I show you compassion? That seems like a different story.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin [00:31:57] Yeah. The problem is these people who've got one jacket fits all. You know, you come in and it's not that they're going to fit a jacket for you. They're going to-- they've already got umpteen copies of size 12 or whatever that means, and they're trying to get you to sign up for size 12. A favorite place of mine is the local church we have here, Pebble Hill, something, something fellowship. And their creed is, you look at their statement, it's they're helping each other on their spiritual journeys. They're people mainly of a Christian background, but not solely, you know, because they're open to everything. We're helping everybody. And so if you come from a different tradition than me, maybe I can learn something from you that will help my spiritual journey. And so there's not one size fits all, and there's no sense we have to regiment people. I would say on the other side against this notion of each individual has a different problematic situation, a different set of questions, my daughter became a Catholic. I knew about my daughter from a very early age that she really needs structure in her life. All of her schooling, some kids do well with this kind of free for all environment. I remember this from elementary school, and my daughter did not do well. Some do well with-- she was the kind of kid who would need phonics rather than open, I forget what they call it, open something. Learning the language by just using it out of the air, you might say. No. Give her some rules that she can follow. And in part, she gets an anxiety, if she doesn't have rules, she doesn't know if she's doing the right thing. She can't just follow her instincts or whatever because what would inform them? And it made all the sense in the world. So I often say for each person, you need to find where God is accessible to you. And it can be this church, that church, no church. It needs to be the genuine divine, not just where do you enjoy being or feel good, or appeals to some other aspect of yourself. But where do you actually find your connecting with the divine? And it might be in deep meditation. It can be in an evangelical rousing style megachurch. It can be any of dozens of other places one could imagine that can be inverted, the Hopi sweat lodge or something. You know, it can be many different places and you need to be open to that. And that's why you and I often talk, Scott, about spiritual discernment. That's what you have to pay attention to. Does this ring true for me? Is this speaking to my soul, you might say, not just somebody else's idea of my soul. Does this speak to my own sense of who I am, where I am, and my journey forward? And does it give me genuine spiritual nourishment, not just a spiritual boost, you know, like a sugar high or something? Because you can get a lot of those. But does it give me spiritual sustenance? People talk about sustainability, well, it's not just the environment that needs to be sustainable. You need to be sustainable as a person. So does this give me a sustainable spirituality? And that may mean structure for some people, but again, not structure for its own sake, not where you're just thinking the structure is the purpose, the structure isn't the purpose, it's simply a means. The way the highways are means to get places. You don't ride the highways to ride highways, they are means. And you've got to keep that in mind as you deal with religious institutions and options.
Scott Langdon [00:36:37] Thank you for listening to God: An Autobiography, The Podcast. Subscribe for free today wherever you listen to your podcasts and hear a new episode every week. You can hear the complete dramatic adaptation of God: An Autobiography, As Told To A Philosopher by Jerry L. Martin by beginning with episode one of our podcast and listening through its conclusion with Episode 44. You can read the original true story in the book from which this podcast is adapted, God: An Autobiography, As Told to a Philosopher, available now at amazon.com, and always at godanautobiography.com. Pick up your own copy today. If you have any questions about this or any other episode, please email us at [email protected], and experience the world from God's perspective as it was told to a philosopher. This is Scott Langdon. I'll see you next time.