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My revelation
Jesus as God’s son dominates Christian
theology. Some Muslims now and then like to tease Christians by saying that not only does God not have a son, he doesn’t have
a wife, daughter or mother-in-law, either! But God in fact has a son, and he has a wife also—probably several of them. God
is in fact a sexual person who engages in sexual intercourse with his wives.
Why make such outlandish claims? I have
been a scientist by training and profession, with a Ph.D. in physics, and I’ve done research in physics and geophysics for
about 30 years. Many of my colleagues in science have been unable to accept the Bible as anything other than a collection
of ancient tribal stories and writings with little spiritual heft. Many cannot see how the God of the Bible can be compatible
with science.
The fossil record shows life forms coming into existence haphazardly down through time and then often
passing out of existence haphazardly, as if they had no purpose. Atheists seize on this to support their belief that no intelligent
being was in charge. Seeing God as a husband, a person not consumed by a desire to control, will make this mode of creation
seem natural and understandable. A husband God thus should have a better chance of winning credibility from people who know
science than an authoritative father God.
My primary motive for making such claims about God’s sexuality is more basic,
however. It arises from a 20-month relationship I had with God more than 40 years ago. My relationship with him at that time
can only be characterized as sexual. To give details of this relationship, I’ll have to redefine the word sexual. The word
needs to be generalized to apply to spiritual persons such as God.
Before getting into those details, I point out
that the Bible itself portrays God as a married person, and everyone knows that marriage includes sex. In several places the
New Testament indicates that the Christian Church is Christ’s bride (for example, see Revelation, chapters 19 and 21). Old
Testament prophets Hosea (chapters 1 and 2), Jeremiah (chapters 2-4) and Ezekiel (chapters 16 and 23) give a few unpleasant
details about God’s rocky marriages. Some Christians take these marriages literally, while others assume that the marriages,
especially the Old Testament ones, are figures of speech. These marriages have special meaning for me, and I take them literally.
Sexual behavior involves genitals, most commonly male and female genitals. God as a spirit does not even have a body,
much less genitals. So God’s sexual behavior cannot be sexual behavior as commonly understood.
Nonetheless, God showed
me that sexual intercourse needs to be seen from a new perspective. A common perspective is that animals have sex, and the
sex leads to reproduction. Human sexual intercourse is just an extension to humankind of this thing animals do, and it’s simply
the way we propagate our species.
God made it clear to me that this perspective leaves out something important. He
taught that sexual intercourse is fundamentally a spiritual interaction between persons. The physical interaction finds its
meaning in the spiritual interaction, not the other way around. God would have us define ourselves from above, in him, and
not from below, in terms of animals.
Does this mean that all two-person spiritual interactions are sexual? No, it
does not. There are two fundamentally different kinds of spiritual interaction. One is sexual, the other is not. The sexual
kind involves persons redefining themselves in new relationships, while the other kind of interaction involves no redefining
but merely establishing or reinforcing relationships on the basis of who the persons already are, on the basis of their already
established identities. More on this later.
Spiritually speaking, it is as if there are three distinct genders, not
two; or possibly there is a continuum of gender. God is at one endpoint and the most feminine of women is at the other endpoint.
Human males fit between the two. I am a male, but relative to God I am feminine. My relative femininity makes it possible
for me to have sexual intercourse with God.
There is much more to say about the details of spiritual sexuality, but
first I want to list some of the consequences of regarding God as a sexual person. It is in these consequences that God becomes
unusually compatible with discoveries of science and hence has a better chance of becoming a believable person to those who
know science.
The common Christian (also Jewish and Muslim) view of God as almighty, dominating, law-giving creator
and ruler of the world is no longer believable to most scientists. That such an authority figure should have created the world
out of nothing just a few thousand years ago has become, frankly, a joke to them. Many different threads of hard evidence
all point in a completely different direction.
One of the most compelling of these threads involves the amazing variety
of animals inhabiting our planet over past eons. We know these animals from fossils. Few of the species that were once common
in the distant past are alive today. Most people who know the details simply cannot believe that an intelligent, almighty
God who rigidly controlled and directed creation would have taken such a roundabout, erratic way to arrive at his final result.
To all appearances the succession of animals down through time is random and definitely not the product of a well thought
out, intelligent plan.
The net effect of this thread and the others is to make the Bible lose credibility. The Bible’s
creation story, if we are supposed to take it as literal, historical fact, is simply not believable. Nevertheless, to reject
the entire biblical message because some of its parts need reinterpretation would be throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Dad was a fundamentalist Lutheran pastor. He believed the Bible was error-free. It was God’s word, and God could not
have made mistakes. Although Dad would acknowledge the possibility of scribal errors and translation errors, there could be
absolutely no error of substance. He liked to say that, if you reject a single teaching of substance, you open the whole Bible
to attack; to reject any part of it is to say God’s word is fallible. On this last point, of course, Dad was as right as can
be, if you believe everything in the Bible is in fact God’s literal word. We now know beyond doubt that parts of the Bible
purportedly presenting historical facts cannot be literally true, and this means that all of it is open to human interpretation.
The armor of infallibility has cracked and fallen off.
To say that the Bible has become worthless, however, would
be going way too far. Although not dictated by God, the Bible was inspired by God. The God of the Bible is real. It’s just
that the biblical portrayals of him written all those thousands of years ago are just too parochial to fit any credible modern
worldview. They served important purposes at the time, but they do not convey universal truths. Simply to recognize that
God is a sexual person dramatically improves God’s apparent fit to our world. Let’s consider the ways:
That God interacts
with humans sexually indicates that God is a person much like human persons. If it were not so, the sexual intercourse would
be relatively unsatisfying, more like masturbation than the merging of spiritual persons that actually takes place. To say
that God is a person is nothing new to most believers, but many who are less tradition-bound think of God more as an impersonal
force than a person.
Sexuality of God explains his mode of creation. God’s goal involves finding a person whom he
can love sexually. One does not have sex with one’s children. That would be perverse. From the kind of creation described
in Genesis, God gets only children. That is, a dominating father figure like the God of Genesis, who brings the world into
existence by speaking a word, does not create persons suitable for marital relations but only children who are forever dominated
by their creator.
Persons whom God can love sexually must somehow come into existence independently of him. When a
man takes a wife, he does not choose a daughter, sister or other close relative, but someone who has grown up independently
of himself. Therefore, to satisfy his need for a lover, God’s creative activity must be so subtle that the persons he creates
must seem to come into existence on their own, independently of him. This is why species appear to scientists to have originated
at random and not by design. Those of us who believe in God know that he somehow guided or arranged the processes to give
him the lovers he needs, but his touch has been so subtle that we can think of ourselves as having come into existence independently
of him.
An important consequence of God’s sexuality is that the old problem of evil disappears. Question: How can
an all-powerful and good God allow this or that terrible thing to happen? Answer: God wants a lover more than he wants a child.
The world in many ways functions as if independent of him. His control nevertheless remains sufficient to yield his desired
outcome.
A further consequence is that God does indeed interact with matter. Some scientists like to say that our
understanding of laws of nature is so complete that God is unnecessary. There is nothing left for him to do. Such a view ignores
God’s sexuality. God interacts sexually with us. Since we are made of matter, God interacts with matter.
Another consequence
is that sexuality itself is seen to have overriding spiritual significance. Many people these days believe that the function
of sex is procreation, so that if we stop bad reproductive consequences, sexual practices become ethically neutral. God teaches
by way of his own sexuality that sexual practices far transcend procreation. They have to do with spiritual persons redefining
themselves in other persons, and every aspect of such redefining has ethical significance.
God’s sexuality means that
gender is something different than what people have commonly thought. Gender is defined not by the shape of one’s genitals
but through personal relationships. In a given relationship, the dominant person takes the role of the male, while the more
submissive person is the female. The spiritual interpretation of sexual intercourse seems to require that one partner be dominant
and the other submissive. Although both partners are deeply affected by the intercourse, the dominant partner provides the
identity, and the submissive partner redefines herself in terms of this identity. Possibly both persons redefine themselves
also in terms of the marital union.
We see from God’s mode of creation that death is part of the natural order. Sexuality
of God thus implies that death is not, as Genesis says, a punishment for sin but is, in combination with births, God’s means
of renewing and forging his creation. This change in the meaning of death is a profound departure from traditional Christian
theology and hence may be hard to swallow for many Christians. God as father instills guilt for wrongdoing and ultimately
punishes sin with death. God as husband overlooks sins in his wife as long as she commits herself to his cause.
Emphasizing
God as a sexual person thus can raise conflicts with the traditional Christian view of God as father. However, most such conflicts
fade to insignificance when we understand that God assumes different roles for different persons. God is still a father to
his children, but he is a husband to his wives.
In emphasizing God’s sexuality it is important to see how Jesus’ role
expands. Jesus came originally to a community that saw God as creator, lawgiver, protector and punisher. Jesus’ role for members
of that community was to bring them into a loving relationship with God as father and thereby to save them from bondage to
law and to sin and its punishment, death. When Jesus died on the cross he somehow funneled all God’s anger with human sins
onto himself so that those who believe in him no longer need fear God’s anger but have forgiveness through him. Christians
call this process vicarious atonement.
Knowledgeable people in our time often cannot see God as creator or father
or indeed as much of anything. Jesus’ former role thus has no meaning for them. In view of God’s sexuality, Jesus’ role becomes
one of advertising God’s unconditional love. Jesus in giving himself to die on the cross vividly demonstrated God’s unconditional
love. By giving himself in humility to people, Jesus made God to be an attractive person worthy of love. Jesus thus furthered
God’s efforts to win a wife among human populations. The Christian Church on earth became God’s wife.
The sexuality
of God thus detracts little from his role as father to individuals, but it identifies him as husband to groups of believers.
It seems natural to interpret each Christian denomination as a separate wife of God. According to the New Testament,
the Christian Church as a whole is to be the bride of Christ; but the consummation of that marriage is to be in the hereafter,
not in the present. In the present God seems to have many wives.
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Having outlined how God’s sexuality makes him compatible with
modern worldviews, we can now get into details of God’s sexuality and my own sexual relations with him.
Adults can
have two different kinds of intimate personal intercourse. The first kind of intercourse depends on adults’ sharing themselves
as the persons they are, in terms of identities they have already established for themselves. In this first kind of intercourse
the persons maintain their individual identities. Also, dominance is not a defining issue: one person may dominate or the
persons may interact as equals. The second kind of intercourse depends on a mutual recognition of fundamental differences
between the persons and a need to resolve the tensions built up because of those differences. In such intercourse dominance
is an issue, and the more submissive person makes a decision to yield to the more dominant person. Persons redefine themselves
in one another through intercourse of the second kind; the submissive person under the right circumstances changes her identity,
as a wife traditionally changes her name.
Provided the intimacy is voluntary, both kinds of intercourse can bring
both persons deep pleasure. In humans the focus of pleasure in intercourse of the first kind is often in the region of the
body just above the heart. The focus of pleasure in intercourse of the second kind is in the genital area. In both kinds,
each person gives full attention to the other person. The pleasure is a welcome side effect; but—as we shall see—it serves
a practical purpose also.
When a man and a woman have intercourse of the second kind, we call it sexual. We call it
sexual partly because the man and the woman have genitals, their genitals have a major role in the intercourse, and procreation
is often a possible outcome.
What if one or the other had no genitals? Would we still call the intercourse sexual?
Maybe not; but if the two still had the intercourse, what else would we call it? God as a spirit has no body and certainly
no genitals, but I know from experience that he engages in intercourse of the second kind. Consequently, by analogy with sexual
intercourse in humans, I call intercourse with God of the second kind sexual. So God is a sexual person and has sexual relations
with human beings. The meaning of sexuality thus is broader than people have commonly regarded it. Spiritual beings can have
sexual relations with humans.
What exactly was it like to have sex with God? To this day, 40-plus years after
the fact, I remember distinctly how we got started. As I described in a partly autobiographical book I wrote several years
ago, I fasted 42 days in a fanatical search for a better relationship with God. For 42 days I consumed no food whatever but
drank only plain water. This behavior eventually got me expelled from college so that, partway through my fast, I returned
to my parents’ home in New Plymouth, Idaho, a small farm town near the Oregon border. During that fast and for several years
after, I made no personal notes and so cannot provide much in the way of quantitative detail. However, I recall that my return
home was in the fall of 1958, when I was 21 years old, somewhat before the peak of the Idaho apple harvest.
A week
or so after I’d resumed eating, God and I got started. In the late evening I was sitting near the small windows of my small
upstairs bedroom in my parents’ house and, as usual, was trying to communicate with God. For the first time ever, as I drew
close to him, I felt pleasurable stimulation in my genital area. This feeling was not appropriate, I thought, so I tried to
redirect communication with God to a more intellectual plane. It didn’t work, so we parted unsatisfied. The next evening I
decided that, since I was God’s, he had a right to stimulate my genitals if he wanted. I did not withhold myself, and our
relationship that evening, though unconventional and awkward, was somewhat more satisfying.
Within three or four days
the initial trials were history, and we went after one another with abandon. We could not get enough of one another. I surrendered
myself to him, and he penetrated every fiber of my being. No part of me remained free of him. He sucked my being into himself.
He caused extreme pleasure in my entire person, but especially in my genital area, pleasure of a sort that I associate with
sexual orgasm in women. The orgasms were not male orgasms, because no semen came out. But the genital pleasure was very intense.
At the same time he came into me through my breathing, so that with every breath I seemed to be taking him bodily into my
innermost being.
Our intercourse lasted for hours each time. And then, when we would take a break, my genitals would
soon sense him again, and I would immediately be consumed again by ravenous craving for him, and we would come together again
for more hours. In the early months it was not unusual for us to go after one another an entire night and even into the following
daylight hours. My parents knew that I was recovering from a fasting ordeal, so they did not question the unusual amount of
time I spent in bed.
In the early months I could not spend much time at all away from God before this craving for
him consumed me again. Fortunately I had no obligations at that time and could usually get to a private place to resume sex
at almost any time of the day.
Eventually pressures built up for me to find a job. That’s what parents will do for
you. I took three different kinds of jobs over the 20-month period of our sexual involvement. The only reason I remember the
jobs distinctly is that I recall instances of on-the-job sex with God. First I worked in an apple orchard, then at Idaho Canning
Company, and finally at an Ore-Ida Potato Products plant. I recall an instance when the cannery boss put me in one of their
trucks to make a haul from Payette, Idaho, to Nyssa, Oregon. As I was driving I let God in, and from then on it was a major
challenge to keep the truck on the road. Fortunately, traffic was never heavy in that part of the country. Still, on-the-job
sex with God was never as satisfying as intercourse with him in bed, because you cannot abandon yourself to your lover as
completely when you have to pay attention to things going on around you.
The first ten months or so of our affair
was a time of great joy and personal fulfillment for me. At last I was in a relationship with God that was truly satisfying.
Although God was still—as ever—a spirit, he was no longer elusive. In fact, throughout those months he had come to be as real
and as accessible to me as our kitchen table. Even though I could never have anticipated the nature of our relationship, I
recognized when it happened that what we shared went far beyond my fondest hopes prior to that time, and that I was becoming
permanently and indelibly God’s.
The latter half of the 20-month period of sexual intercourse was less satisfying,
even unsettling. There was major contamination. I elaborate on this in my book in the chapter on evil.
Part of this
description of sexual intercourse with God could apply as well to intercourse of the first kind. That is, in both kinds of
intercourse God enters and merges with every fiber of one’s being, and in both kinds God can bring great pleasure. But that
is pretty much where the similarity ends. Pleasure in intercourse of the first kind can be fulfilling but is less intense
than in intercourse of the second kind, and the focus of pleasure is quite different. Furthermore, intercourse of the first
kind is never accompanied by the kind of insistent, ravenous craving that can characterize sex. Intercourse of the first kind
has been best for me when I go into the desert alone to seek communion with God. Sexual intercourse, in contrast, usually
required little or no seeking and often took hold of me powerfully even at inopportune times, so that only if I was fortunate
could I get away to a private place and give myself satisfactorily to God.
I believe that my sexual intercourse
with God constitutes one of the most remarkable and dramatic revelations of God ever. Yet my experiences of intercourse of
the first kind with God actually have been much more common over my lifetime and often have been very intense and powerful.
So why should I not regard these latter experiences as equally significant or even more significant? One reason is that experiences
of intercourse of the first kind are much easier to dismiss. On hearing descriptions of them people can quickly and easily—albeit
erroneously—conclude that the person describing the experiences was simply caught up in emotional highs that may have had
nothing to do with God. They might say the person was simply misinterpreting relatively common psychological states as religious
experiences. The sad fact is, if other people find them easier to dismiss, I find them easier to doubt. Sexual intercourse
with God cannot be as easily dismissed—at least, not when it consumed an average of hours per day over a period of 20 months.
No one can diminish the reality and power of that.
Autoeroticism or some form of masturbation, of course, is very
common in humans. But who has heard of it lasting day in and day out for 20 months, and in the absence of physical stimulation?
Furthermore, masturbation for most men involves imaginary physical relations with women, and it becomes intense only as they
approach orgasm. I am no different in that respect. Sexual intercourse with God had nothing to do either with women or with
physical relations with another person or with any physical stimulation, and the intensity was often very high over periods
of hours. It always involved another person, but that person had no physical presence.
I recall that when the level
of sexual intimacy with God and the associated pleasure reached an extreme, I sometimes imagined that God would actually take
on a physical form to complete our intimacy. Occasionally I came to believe that I could know ultimate intimacy only if God
would materialize and become a physical being. But that belief was foolish, because God is a spirit. Any physical form God
might come up with would not be himself but would be a step removed from his true self, so that any such manifestation would
have hurt our intimacy instead of helping it. The truth is that God was fully real enough as a spirit!
While autoeroticism
involves imagining physical relations with women in order to generate genital pleasure, in my sex with God my focus was always
on achieving complete intimacy with a person. My whole being, not just genitals, merged with God. My goal was not to enhance
my pleasure but to enhance intimacy with the person. The pleasure had an important role, because it attracted me to God, drove
me to him and kept my attention riveted on him. If my mind would wander, the intensity of genital pleasure would refocus my
attention on the person. The pleasure was an aid and a welcome side effect, not the objective.
Masturbation you can
turn on whenever you’re in the mood. If people could turn on sexual intercourse with God at will, I believe they would do
little else with their lives. The pleasure was so intense and of such duration that everything else in life lost significance.
Even now, if it were possible to resume such relations with God, and if I didn’t know better, I would jump at the chance.
The pleasure would be impossible to resist. The reality is that sex with God had a goal, and once the goal was met, further
sex simply became impossible. Further attempts to pursue it would have been perverse. Unlike masturbation, which can happen
in a man whenever his penis is ready for it, sex with God depended on God and the objectives of our relationship. When God
completed me, that was it. No more. Then I got drafted into the US Army!
For such reasons sex with God is less easily
dismissed than intercourse of the first kind with God. Hence the sexual intercourse constitutes a more powerful witness to
the reality and love of God than any amount of intercourse of the first kind.
Do I now recommend that everyone
strive for and expect to have sexual relations with God? No, not as an individual, but yes, as a member of a community of
believers. Then, do I believe my experience was unique, that no one else will be able as an individual to have such an affair
with God? Yes, this is the conclusion I reached after much prayer and contemplation. Still, in the end God is the one who
decides, and my conclusions have been wrong before, so there is a small hope for a person who might desire such an experience.
Of this much I am confident: A man does not choose God, but God chooses the man. Yes, I was seeking God before God
showed himself to me, but I didn’t know what I was looking for. One can seek, but one will never find God unless God finds
him first. One cannot seek properly unless one has already been found.
When God first showed himself to me at age
19, I knew at once that I would be better off dead than not to have a satisfying relationship with this person. Overnight
I changed from conservative theological student to raving religious nut. In time my raving tapered off, but not my resolve.
Within two years I fasted 42 days in my search for a satisfying relationship with God and would have continued till death
had I not found it. But this behavior in a sense was not of my choosing. Once I’d met the person I was searching for, I could
not live without him. I would never have chosen such fanaticism voluntarily. God made me do it simply by being a person I
absolutely had to know well at any cost.
I know now that this sexual relationship that so took me by surprise at first
is the only kind of relationship with God that I would have found adequate. Through decades of skeptical thinking since then,
the one thing about God I have never been able to doubt is the reality of those 20 months of sex with him. That sort of revelation
one cannot explain away or deny, and its influence does not wane with time. Seeing spectacular signs in the heavens or on
earth, or hearing thunderous voices, or seeing glorious visions all would only lead to doubts and questions afterwards; but
merging sexually with God over a period of many months is simply not open to challenge. It gave me my identity at the most
elemental levels of my being. I am God’s.
My accounts of my spiritual experiences with God are as truthful and
accurate as I am able to make them. The conclusions I have drawn from those experiences and recorded here and in my book are
also as good as I can make them, but I am sure that they are not as valid in every case as the accounts of the spiritual experiences
themselves. Hard realities more than once have persuaded me that one or another of my fondly held conclusions or extrapolations
was simply incorrect. I needed to draw lessons from my experiences in order to get on with my life, but some lessons have
held up better than others.
One of the clearest examples of an invalid deduction took shape soon after the 20 months
of sex with God. As I was being drafted into the US Army, I recognized that the time of sex with God had pretty much ended.
An unyielding conviction soon grew that the logical next step in my life would be to find and marry a woman who would be
as devoted to me as I was to God. Together we would then present to the world an amazing witness to God. Unfortunately for
this scenario, all the women I’ve ever met have been real women. The ideal woman of my dreams never materialized. Even so,
the concept died slowly and with difficulty. When I married the Chinese woman who has been my wife now for 30 years, she brought
me down to earth fast! —As would have any other woman.
The lesson is that, even with most intimate knowledge of God,
I am unable always to deduce accurately the significance of what I have experienced. I’m rather less infallible than the pope
claims to be. If some conclusions I’ve reached are particularly hard to swallow, keep in mind that they just may be wrong.
I told no one of my sexual relations with God for more than 40 years. Over all those decades, apart from a weak
stab or two at being forthcoming, I had assumed that what had gone on privately between God and me would always be our secret.
I could not see how telling anyone would accomplish anything. That’s why, when I wrote my book, I made no explicit mention
of sex with God even though it was at the heart of everything else I wrote. So why all of a sudden should I tell now?
I
tell now because I’ve concluded that’s what God wants now. But there are several reasons why I came to that conclusion. One
of the more important reasons is that, unless I divulge what actually happened, the things I say in my book carry little weight
and could easily be dismissed as merely an old man’s weird opinions.
In living with God over many years, I’ve come
to know a little about the methods he uses to get people to do what he wants. He rarely comes right out and articulates specific
wishes; instead, God plays hardball. He gives us life, but he expects us to use our lives. He reminds us that this phase of
our existence comes to an end, so we should devote ourselves less to self-preservation and more to self-sacrifice. In short,
God sent me a message, so to speak, that now is the time.
I had worked 25 years as a research geophysicist for a major
US corporation and was just settling into a comfortable retirement. I had always thought that God would use me as his witness;
and even though it seemed the need for a major witness to him was growing by the minute, I could not see what to do. So I
was simply getting very comfortable and concentrating much more on self-preservation than on self-sacrifice. If God needed
a witness, he would assert himself in his own time and in his own way, I concluded.
Then came cancer. As I approached
age 65, the urologist announced I had prostate cancer. The diagnosis hit like a ton of bricks. Suddenly I found myself busy
reevaluating all my assumptions and conclusions. The cancer focused my prayers: “God, why don’t you do something? What is
your problem? Are you just lazy? DO something. DO SOMETHING!”
A few hundred years ago nearly all intelligent and informed
people in the Western world acknowledged God’s existence and honored his reign (verbally, at least). In our time many who
are ignorant of the discoveries of science still honor him, but a large fraction of the best-informed minds treats him as
irrelevant or worse. Why did God just sit there and do nothing about it?
Before my diagnosis I’d have been content
to go on indefinitely just tending the fruit trees and veggies in my large garden. I was living in the closest thing to paradise
on earth, and for this I was duly thankful to God. But the thought of having it all come to an end so soon, and the thought
that God was just sitting there doing nothing to assert himself created a crisis. Was God going to let my potential as a witness
for him just wither and die? The thought of taking our secret quietly to the grave with no further witness was intolerable.
It would be as if the most important events of my life had never happened.
God had to assert himself, but what could
he do? After Jesus, even though God plays hardball, he could not lash out with some cosmic punishment or raw display of power.
All such tactics ended long ago. Elijah had always been one of my favorite prophets, but the coming of Jesus has made any
further resort to Elijah’s methods out of the question. He who has made his case through Jesus that he is a God of love cannot
now revert to calling down fire from the sky to roast his enemies alive. Because of Jesus, God needs to employ methods that
are powerful yet subtle and gentle.
It wasn’t as though I hadn’t tried to do my part. As I mentioned, I wrote a book
that presented the conclusions I had drawn from our intimate relations. When I tried to publish it, however, I found neither
market nor audience. So I abandoned it as a failure. If I were charismatic or a good salesman, I could have tried promoting
it on my own. The reality is that I am no leader of men and terrible at selling, so any such initiative would surely have
failed.
On rereading my book I noticed that the most important events of my life got really short shrift. Only a few
short and scattered references covered the entire 20 months of my sexual relations with God, and they were not explicit. I
said only that God satisfied my desire for him more fully than I’d ever expected. But what could a reader conclude from that?
Considering what actually happened, that’s a very weak statement.
What actually had happened, it gradually dawned
on me, was truly extraordinary. Our sexual relations constituted one of God’s most dramatic and remarkable revelations in
all of history. And I was keeping the thing to myself. What if the major revelation from God I’d been expecting all these
decades was this thing he’d already done with me back in the late 1950s?
Eventually it became clear that this revelation
had significance well beyond its private meaning for God and me. Consequently, it needs to be made available to the rest of
the world. If I’ve misjudged, and this is not really what God wants, then he can do what he wants and more power to him. But
if this is the way God is choosing to assert himself in our time, then I’ll be his willing vehicle. The last thing I’d want
to do would be to stand in his way. If I do all I can to enable God to assert himself, then I will be able to die in peace.
To carry our secret to the grave with no further witness would be for me the worst of all possible deaths.
All
these decades God had not wanted to make our secret public, but now he wants to. It had not occurred to me to reveal it, but
God knew precisely how to get me to do my part.
Forty-some years ago I redefined myself privately in God. Now
I take this identity and redefine myself publicly. A wife redefines herself in the world by bearing a child. I redefine myself
in the world with words, by divulging secret love. The redefining causes considerable travail for both the woman and for me.
Once our new identities are out there for all to see, we can never go back to being the persons we once were. But once my
new identity is out there for all to see, for the first time in my life I become who I am.
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