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Sex and Worship (continued from preceding page)
Motives
for engaging in worship or sex can vary widely. Some people participate out of a sense of duty, some out of a need just to
feel good, some for momentary convenience, some for social or financial gain, some for enduring relationship, and some for
eternal commitment. It is at the deeper levels of surrender and submission that we more clearly identify the essence of sex
and worship, that the characteristics of sex and worship become evident.
Why should any being worship another being?
To surrender oneself to another so as to redefine oneself is not a kind of behavior that the human ego undertakes lightly.
No one would do it unless the behavior promised a significant reward. The reward lies in taking the new identity: The worshiper
regards her new identity as superior to the old one. In her new identity she discovers a depth of meaning, a level of personal
fulfillment, that was always out of reach before. She recognizes that through surrendering herself she becomes a more complete
person.
My impression is that many women, especially those who are able to have their first choice in mates, take
care to avoid a mate who they believe might pose a threat to their personal autonomy. In my years with God similarly I have
rarely or never felt as though I was losing either my autonomy or my identity to him. Yet after all those years it is clear
that I have changed my identity, I have redefined myself in him. When marriage succeeds, then, it does so because the wife
chooses when, how and at what rate to change her identity. The husband who truly loves never forces the change but allows
the wife to redefine herself at her own pace and in her own way.
In order for a worshiper to surrender herself she
must feel that the one to whom she surrenders is worthy of her. To be worthy an object of worship must be significantly different
from her and must appear to have status—or at least potential status—in the world.
If the object of worship is not
sufficiently different from the worshiper the relationship might involve companionship or role taking or competition, like
a sister with a brother, but not worship. In other words, the worshiper and the object of worship need to be sufficiently
different from one another so that they complement one another rather than compete with one another. The worshiper by being
different fulfills, complements and completes the object of worship, provides something that was missing in himself, just
as he does for her. Thus only if the object of worship is sufficiently different from her can the worshiper find in him a
satisfying new identity for her whole person, an identity that is clearly superior to her former identity.
As in
worship so also in sex one of the partners starts out with a somewhat elevated status relative to the other, a status that
makes him worthy of having the other surrender herself to him. He gains this status by an increased ability to confer meaning.
Part of his ability to confer meaning comes just because he is different from her and hence complements her rather than competes
with her. This kind of ability to confer meaning is shared by both partners. The special ability of the dominant partner
to confer meaning comes from the fact that he has established himself in the world, or shows promise of establishing himself
in the world, more effectively than his partner. Hence, by surrendering herself to him, she participates in his status.
Ideally the initially elevated status of the object of worship eventually diminishes and disappears when the marriage
matures, because he confers his status on the worshiper in return for her worship, and the two become in some sense one.
The initial status of the object of worship is clearly important, but how about the initial status of the worshiper?
If all else were equal, the object of worship would prefer worshipers with high status at the start, because worship from
someone with high status could be more valuable to him than worship from someone with low status. A problem is that those
with high status are typically less able to surrender themselves than those with low status.
Jesus had far greater
success among the “tax collectors and sinners,” those on the lowest rungs of society, than among the leaders of the society.
God often has greater success winning the full commitment of young adults than of old ones, and a man in choosing a wife usually
prefers a young woman to an older one.
In the latter two cases those who are to surrender themselves are perceived
as more likely to surrender completely if they are young. Older people are perceived as more discriminating, more cynical,
more skeptical, more likely to find fault and hence less submissive. Men often equate physical beauty in a woman’s face with
childlike simplicity of form coupled with sophistication, a look that advertises a person who has defined herself but is nevertheless
capable of being influenced and dominated.
While the worshiper’s status thus is not irrelevant, the worshiper’s ability
to surrender herself is of greater importance.
By surrendering herself the worshiper gains a new identity and status,
but the object of worship gains also. By surrendering to him she reinforces his self-image and his belief that he is worthy
of worship. The more completely she surrenders the more worthy he feels, especially if she entered the relationship with
somewhat elevated status relative to her peers. Through her worship he thus reaches a high level of personal fulfillment
and self-realization and can go forth with increased confidence to make new conquests and expand his influence in the world.
In order to be all that he can be in the world, God requires our worship. If he finds no worship, he gets unpleasant.
But since the coming of Jesus he has had no difficulty finding worshipers.
Some might agree that sex and worship
are connected in some ways but are still fundamentally different because of genitals. Genitals have a prominent role in sex,
they might argue, but no role in worship. While it is true that God as spirit does not have genitals like humans, he does
have the spiritual counterpart of genitals. The topic we need to address, then, is the spiritual character and significance
of genitals.
We can do this by contrasting genitals with the mind or intellect. If we were to draw a map of the
functions of the human psyche, the genital functions would be at one edge of the map and the intellectual at the extreme opposite
edge. The genitals are at the base of our existence. They have no capacity for reasoning or analysis but are gregarious
and friendly; they always like being in touch with others. They tend to be always seeking approval and attention, and they
care little where such attention might come from. The intellect in contrast is refined, subtle and aloof, seldom acting without
first considering the consequences. The intellect by itself often would not mind if it only rarely made contact with others.
God spiritually contains both kinds of function within himself just as people do. A big difference is that God’s
mind is always in control of his genitals, whereas people, both men and women, from time to time find that the mind not only
does not control the genitals but that the whole person comes to be dominated by the genitals.
For people to be made
in such a way that they can be dominated by their genitals is not all bad. Ultimately it is this property that allows them
to surrender themselves fully to others in sexual relations or to God in worship. If it were up to the intellect to decide,
few people would ever surrender themselves to other persons either in worship or in sex. Intellects typically consider such
surrender to be degrading, while genitals eagerly and wholeheartedly agree that doing such things is what they were made for.
We can now explain what it means for the man to be in control of himself. The man is in control of himself during
marital sexual activity if, instead of using his wife’s body as an implement for meeting his genitals’ demands, he puts himself
at his wife’s disposal so that she can use him in the manner she thinks best to redefine herself. When the man controls himself,
his primary goal is not to satisfy his genitals but to afford his wife the best possible opportunity to redefine herself.
In many cultures sexual activity has been widely if unofficially regarded as more for the pleasure of the man than
for the benefit of the woman. Now it is apparent that the man’s primary objective is to be not his own pleasure but the creation
of suitable opportunity for his wife to redefine herself.
Human genitals have an obvious role in reproduction: From
sex come babies. Spiritually, the child witnesses to the relationship between its parents. The child is evidence for all
the world to see that a relationship exists and that the woman has permanently redefined herself. Once she becomes a mother,
a woman can never go back. She will always be a mother, and others will think of her as a mother.
Does worship produce
anything like a child? It does. The child that comes from worshiping God is called the word of God. The word is the witness
to the existence and power of God in the world. This is how John describes Jesus in his gospel: Jesus is the word of God,
the one who makes God known to people. Whoever worships God ultimately will bear witness to God’s existence and power, and
by such witnessing she gives birth anew to the word of God.
Just as the man Jesus, the word of God, was the child
of God’s marriage with the nation Judah, so words of God are the spiritual children that emerge from our worship. All these
words mystically become one with Jesus. We give birth to him anew in this mystical sense when God creates his witness within
us.
This book is my own witness to God that comes forth out of years of worship. To do less than make it public
would be for me to live a lie. To continue to live as though God has not done extraordinary things in me would perpetuate
a lie, and so it cannot happen, because the Spirit of truth is in me. Once I give birth to this child it will change me permanently,
just as the birth of a human child changes its mother.
In sex acts and in worship people redefine themselves secretly.
They become new people, but the changes are within, personal and private. But when the woman gives birth to the child or
the worshiper gives birth to the word of God, then their new identities become public, exposed for all to see. So in reality
there are two redefinings, or two stages of redefining. The first is in secret and often brings deep pleasure and joy. The
second is in the open and comes through pain and hard work.
The new mother must reject fantasies that she is still
free and independent and possibly sought after by men. She must focus instead on bringing her child into the world and preparing
for its care. The worshiper must reject fantasies that she is an intellectually independent and self-sufficient individual
and focus on bringing her witness into the world. Her witness must openly acknowledge her bond to God and her dependence
upon him. Travail can be considerable in this second stage of the redefining, but the joy afterwards more than compensates.
We see that there is no spiritual respect in which worship is essentially distinct from sexual intercourse, so worship
of God is sexual intercourse with God. Likewise, worship of demons is sexual intercourse with demons.
But what about
human sex acts? If a man and a woman are attempting to pattern their relationship on the norm as I have described it, to
what degree is the woman’s behavior worship? If she loves God, then by surrendering herself to her husband she surrenders
to God and worships God through her husband. Her sexual relations still constitute a form of worship, but it is not her husband
that she worships but what her husband represents.
An ordinary man can never be a proper object of worship because
he is not fully in control of himself and does not understand his own sexual behavior. Furthermore, he cannot confer on his
wife more than a transitory meaning. The role he gives her will pass, but the role that God gives endures even beyond death.
Despite his dominant position the man does not have the right to lord it over the woman. He needs to recognize always
that the woman ultimately does not surrender herself to him but to one who works in and through him. He needs to recognize
in humility and awe that in sexual matters as well as in all else he belongs not to himself but to God and is an instrument
that God uses to achieve his goals in the world.
Spiritually speaking the woman does not in truth give herself to
the man and the man does not in truth love the woman in ordinary sexual intercourse. Rather, both seek their own fulfillment
independently of one another’s spirit even while they are physically intimate, for ordinary marriage does not bond spirits
but only bodies. Ordinary marriage is a metaphor for the marriages of God, which bind God to both the bodies and the spirits
of those who love him.
•
Up until now I have more or less simply assumed that the dominant partner in worship
or sex is male and the submissive partner female. This is certainly the biblical view, the traditional view, and also a key
reason we refer to God as male. However, there are good reasons other than just the Bible or tradition for this gender assignment.
The support comes from evidence that is physical, psychological and cultural.
The evidence for the norm of male domination
and female submission starts to become clear when we examine the origins of human societies. Whether one believes we owe
our origins to an arbitrary command of God, to evolution from random genetic mutations or to evolution guided by God, one
must acknowledge that we have been shaped for survival in primitive environments and that we as a species have spent by far
the larger part of our existence in such environments.
It is then unreasonable to think that we can change our fundamental
natures over a period of just a century or two. The human psyche is indeed malleable, but many of the major innovations in
human behavior patterns that exist in modern urban environments can persist only because the modern world supports them in
a way the primitive world never would. They would quickly vanish if we as a species were forced to return again to primitive
conditions. Notions of equal status for women would disappear as fast as the sedentary lifestyle.
Society is right
to support women’s efforts to achieve freely under God what they are capable of achieving outside the home and to receive
fair compensation for their contributions. But such achievements are peripheral compared with deeper realities such as sex
acts, which touch the core of human existence. Sex acts are a most elemental kind of behavior, behavior driven by motives
so deep that human intellect has almost no access to them. The psychological and spiritual significance of behavior at such
an elemental level cannot change quickly. Therefore, life in primitive environments reveals truths about who we are.
The
reality is that in all the world’s tribes, remote villages and backwaters as well as among the more prominent nations, human
social structures and traditions manifest great diversity. There have been societies that have reckoned lineage through the
mothers, and there are even instances where women have had several husbands at one time. But no one has found a society where
women truly dominate. Men have been dominant everywhere.
[I wrote the preceding paragraph before I’d visited the
Banpo Neolithic site near Xian, China. On the basis of grave artifacts, archaeologists believe women dominated in the Banpo
community. However, the archaeologists’ conclusions may have been politically motivated. Furthermore, it would take more
evidence than what they have to convince me that primitive men 6000 years ago would have been so gentlemanly as to allow their
women to dominate! Be that as it may, an exception or two would not really weaken my case.]
It is not hard to understand
why men have been dominant. They have greater physical size than women and higher ratios of muscle to fat. Larger size and
stronger skeletal muscles equip people better for engaging in and defending against violence. Such attributes by themselves
would give men a major advantage over women in a primitive environment where threats of physical violence from both men and
nature could be routine, and where no one could rely on a legal system or police force or army or well-designed buildings
for protection. In such environments the ability to fend off violence would be much more highly prized than in well-policed,
modern urban environments.
The difference in roles is perhaps equally significant. Under primitive conditions women
would be forced to take primary responsibility for the care of young children, leaving men with the more prestigious responsibility
of defending and preserving the larger community. Pregnancy and the need to nurse infants would prevent women at times from
moving around as freely as men in an environment where the ability to move swiftly and freely could be crucial.
There
is other physical evidence as well that God and nature have designed men to be the dominant partner in human sexual relations.
One is the lower voice. Instructors in public speaking sometimes encourage speakers to lower the pitch of the voice because
people associate authority with low pitch. After all, children’s voices are high-pitched, and women’s voices are closer to
them than men’s. Facial hair as well as pattern baldness also clearly differentiate men from children, while the absence
of those characteristics in women preserves their more child-like appearance.
Finally, a very common position of
sexual intercourse is with the man on top of the woman. Such physical configuration of the sex act reinforces the psychological
message of male domination and female submission.
Given the weight of the physical evidence for male domination/female
submission it would be surprising if there were not comparable psychological evidence as well. Psychological evidence indeed
exists, but because people are so variable it is less obvious and more open to dispute than the physical evidence. To deal
with the slippery slope of addressing the psychological differences between men and women, I call in outside help.
As
a birthday present my wife gave me psychologist John Gray’s book, Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus, which the author
describes as addressing the need for a “definitive guide...for understanding how healthy men and women are different.” Gray’s
thesis is that men are psychologically so different from women it is as if they came from a different planet. A large part
of the cure for marital conflicts, then, he says, begins with the acknowledgment and acceptance of the differences. The book
is based partly on questioning “more than 25,000 participants in [Gray’s] relationship seminar,” and “all the principles in
[his] book have been tested.”
In Chapter 8 Gray encapsulates the psychological needs of men and women in lists containing
six items each. From their wives men need “trust, acceptance, appreciation, admiration, approval and encouragement.” From
their husbands women need “caring, understanding, respect, devotion, validation and reassurance.” Almost all the man’s needs
are related to support for his ego. Gray’s comments suggest we might summarize by saying that the man needs his wife to accept
him as a capable person without trying to change him, and to bolster his ego in practically every way possible. A man’s ego,
according to a common stereotype, is notoriously tender and typically thrives only if it receives a kind of attention that
borders on worship.
A woman characteristically needs little of that kind of attention but needs to know her husband
puts her and the satisfaction of her needs above any other interest or activity. She needs assurance that she is his and
will get the support he can provide.
Thus psychologically women are very different from men, and the differences
are consistent with the scheme of male domination. A man’s ego typically demands that his wife look up to him. Just as God
needs trust and worship from his wives in order to be at his best, so a man needs trust and something akin to worship from
his wife to be at his best. As for the wife, she needs to know that she is important to her husband and that she can count
on her husband’s support. As Gray points out, the needed support is often no more onerous to the male than making himself
available and, when his wife talks to him, truly listening to what she says.
•
Having now explored sex and
worship in some depth we can apply the principles to questions that may initially seem somewhat academic but are nevertheless
sure to arise at some point. If worship is sexual, has Jesus worshiped God? Do angels worship God?
The Bible and
Church tradition testify that Jesus as a human was sinless, never separated from God. Hence he could not have truly worshiped
God because there was never a need or an opportunity for him to redefine himself. As all humans, however, he had to go through
processes of defining himself as he grew up and therefore may have participated in forms of worship akin to hero worship.
I’d guess his heroes, if any, were more likely prophets of old than contemporary figures.
Angels, as far as we know,
are capable of existing only in two states, either in submission to God or in rebellion against him. It would thus seem,
as long as they remain submissive to God, that they have no possibility either of defining themselves or redefining themselves
and hence cannot worship God in the sense considered here. Angels praise, thank and cheer, but so do fans at a football game;
and that’s not worship.
•
Part of the pleasure of human sexual intercourse seems to come just because the
genitals find suitable companions. But
the erotic thrill and excitement is more spiritual. For the man in a marriage
relationship this spiritual pleasure comes because his wife fills his need for a kind of attention that borders on worship.
For the woman in a marriage relationship, and for the worshiper, it is the psychological process of redefining oneself
that gives rise to the feelings of erotic thrill and excitement. The excitement comes from surrendering one identity and
by intimate interaction with another person taking on a new identity. God and demons can participate in such feelings because
they feel what those who worship them feel.
The intensity of such erotic feeling eventually diminishes as the process
of redefining goes to completion. Once redefined, one cannot be redefined again in exactly the same way. Sex or worship
with the same person nevertheless can continue to generate erotic feelings over an extended period because the process of
redefining continually evolves. The process goes to deeper and deeper levels of the psyche. The partners expose different
levels and aspects of themselves to one another, so that sex and worship late in a marriage are quite different in character
from what they were early in the marriage.
At some point the spiritual aspect of the thrill necessarily diminishes
and then vanishes altogether. This can be natural, and the partners should not conclude that the relationship has failed
just because the erotic thrill has gone. It is possible, however, for a relationship to stagnate simply because the partners
have drawn psychological lines that they refuse to cross; they may simply refuse to open themselves further to one another.
Those who value the erotic thrills and excitement more than the relationship will dabble in rebellion. Such people
will seek new partners for worship or sex just for the thrills, and in that way they worship demons.
In true marriage
the wife is committed to her husband and regards him under God as the only one. In demonic marriage the wife uses her husband
for what she can get out of him and regards him as one of many.
As much as I dislike acknowledging it, there seems
to be also some residual aspect of human sexuality that is merely physical or social, or both, and has little spiritual significance.
A person’s compulsion to masturbate against his or her own wishes is one manifestation. Another manifestation is the sexual
intercourse of long-married couples who have been faithful to one another. I dislike acknowledging such things because I
like to believe everything in one way or another has spiritual significance. I haven’t given up hope yet of eventually finding
it here, also…but so far…not.
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Knowledge of God and the Purpose of Life
God
is a spirit, and those who worship must worship in spirit and truth (John 4:24).
The most elementary fact about
knowledge of God is that God is a spirit, so to know him we must know him in spirit. To be in Jesus’ physical presence, to
talk with him, to see or even touch his body is not necessarily to know him. To know him our spirit must know his spirit.
That is, Jesus is the incarnation of a spiritual God; yet to know Jesus’ body is not to know God. As Jesus himself
said, “The spirit gives life; the flesh is of no benefit” (John 6:63).
Many Christians long to witness miraculous
events, and many believe that people who witness unusual external signs of God’s power are especially favored. Yet true and
profound knowledge of God has nothing to do with seeing signs and wonders with eyes or even seeing visions with eyes or hearing
divine words with ears. Rather, to know God, our spirit, not our senses, must see him. To those who do not know God this
kind of knowledge is not knowledge at all but delusion. Only one who, as a spiritual being, knows him as a spiritual being
can understand what it is to know him.
The fact that God is a spirit causes a persistent difficulty and challenge
for materialistic humans. What is real for materialistic people is what they can know from their five senses. God as a spirit
thus is by their own standards not real for them. But God is real. And whether we are on earth or in heaven we shall never
behold him more clearly than our spirit can behold him. So to know him well we must abandon materialism. To know God we
must be like him.
Vessels made of matter can become worthy of God only when they become spiritual.
Atheists
are fond of saying there is no evidence for God, so unbelief is the only justifiable response. What they mean is there is
no man-made antenna or other device that can detect him. But there is an instrument not made by man that can detect him:
our soul. We vessels made of matter not only detect him, but we know him as a person.
A second elementary fact about
knowledge of God is a consequence of the first fact: Because God is spirit and not matter, knowing him is not an either/or
proposition. With humans we either see them or we do not. With God it is not that we either know him or we do not, but there
are different ways and levels of knowing him. How well we know him at a given moment depends less on whether he is present
with us than on how spiritual we are. Because we are made of matter and are from below, our level of spirituality varies
greatly.
What does it mean for beings made of matter to be spiritual? In part it means that we work to gather all
the components of our body and mind into a unified being, our self, that can then interact as a unit, as a single point of
existence, with spiritual beings outside our self. We do not reject or deny our component parts, but we bring them into submission
so that we become a single point of being. We become a single point not in space but in our own unity.
In fact,
to one who has become spiritual, physical space is no longer limiting, it has ceased to be a constraint. That is why the
presence of God has to do with our level of spirituality and not with God’s location in space.
In addition to unifying
one’s component parts into a point of being, spirituality also requires removing one’s focus from details of the world and
bringing it to bear on a spiritual person outside oneself. One perhaps may be able to accomplish the first step under one’s
own power, but this second step requires the other person’s consent and involvement.
Spiritual beings outside us
can increase our spirituality by drawing us into themselves, by engulfing us, so to speak. God can do this for us, but so
can a demon. To yield to the one and remain free of the other is not always within our power. But we can discriminate between
God and demons; and if we choose God, he will eventually free us from demons. If the spiritual person engulfing us is God,
there will be feelings of permanent commitment and of a unity that pervades all of existence. If the person engulfing us
is a demon, there will be feelings of expediency and of a union that is only one of many possible unions.
The opposite
of being spiritual is being dead, a state in which our component parts disaggregate and decompose. Sleep spiritually speaking
is like death. In sleep we disaggregate and present to the world not a single point of being but a collection of parts that
has relaxed into separate entities loosely joined. When we sleep we stop being spiritual. But this does not necessarily
mean that we stop interacting with God. It means only that, if God continues to interact with us, he as a spirit interacts
with us as a collection of parts rather than as a unified point of being. When we relax in sleep we surrender our parts to
his care.
•
“The time is coming...when I will make a new covenant..., not like the covenant which they broke,
though I was their husband,” says YHWH . “No longer will a man teach...his brother, saying, ‘KnowYHWH ,’ because they will
all know me, from the least of them to the greatest” (Jeremiah 31:31-34).
This is eternal life, that they know you,
the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent (John 17:3).
By this we know that he lives in us, by the Spirit
that he gave us (1 John 3:24).
Knowledge of God. Union with the Spirit. What does it mean?
Knowledge of God
means different things, and there are different levels and ways of knowing God. The most rudimentary kind of knowledge is
shared by all people and all things, because all people and all things are spiritual at some rudimentary level. But this
rudimentary spirituality does not involve conscious awareness of God. That is, miracles are possible only if God can communicate
with and influence matter, but matter generally has no awareness of God as a person. The Bible verses just quoted, in contrast,
indicate that a personal relationship with God involving mutual, conscious awareness is possible. It is this kind of knowledge
that is of greatest interest, because it is the kind of knowledge that transforms religion from a burdensome set of rules
and principles into life’s loftiest reward and most serene pleasure.
Is it overkill to say “conscious awareness”
of God? Wouldn’t “awareness” suffice? Many Christians, myself included, are aware of God much of the time in that, if we
stop to check, we can verify that God is with us, as it were, behind the scenes. “In him we live and move and have our being,”
but in this kind of awareness we become conscious of his presence only if we stop to check for it. Most of the time the awareness
is latent and unconscious. It might be compared to our humming a tune for no apparent reason. Sometimes we can do that at
length but do not become conscious of it until we catch ourselves, and only then do we recognize that it had been going on
for some time.
God is a person, and anyone who wants to know him as a person cannot do so simply by disciplining
himself. By personal discipline one perhaps may reach “elevated states of consciousness” or a higher level of spirituality,
but no such state or level is the same as God. To know God as a person always requires that God actively reveal himself.
And when God does so, he may take the seeker by surprise, the seeker may lose control of himself, his life may change radically.
It is this fear of becoming a fanatic, in fact, that keeps some from fully opening themselves to God. They are aware
that no one loves a fanatic, except maybe God. Yet anyone who truly seeks and is willing to take the risk will find him.
To seek God successfully, it helps to have correct information about him at the start. I often criticized conservative
Lutherans for emphasizing “true doctrines” while giving little weight to the personal relationship. Yet what those Lutherans
were saying is not without merit. A person who harbors misinformation or false beliefs about God is likely to have extra
difficulty maintaining a personal relationship. False beliefs distort our mental image of God and make him into a sort of
person he is not. Then, when he comes close, there is a mismatch between the person himself and our conception of him, so
the relationship suffers.
From time to time I entertain the notion that God’s commitment to us is for this life only
and does not extend beyond death. Merely having such an idea in my head is sufficient to keep God at a distance, and I cannot
get close to him again until I reject that notion. Atheists have a uniquely difficult time seeing God because their ideas
about him are so wrong.
No one has all the true doctrines, yet many people have personal knowledge of God. God can
overpower our misconceptions and ignorance. It is nevertheless important to strive for accurate information about him.
How
does one seek the personal relationship? Christians have long claimed that God comes through his word. By “word” they sometimes
mean Jesus himself, but often they mean the writings of the Bible, and at other times they mean personal witnessing about
God and especially about Jesus. But personal witnessing to those who are not seeking can degrade the word of God. Aggressive
witnessing sometimes makes the word of God repulsive, a thing to distance oneself from, because the words came when the hearers
were not in a receptive frame of mind and perhaps came also in a manner that offended.
God first appeared as a person
to me when I was reading the prophecy of Jeremiah, so I can testify that reading the Bible is useful for seeking God. I was
consciously seeking something, but I did not know what. I understand now that I was not seeking the person I actually found,
as I did not know that it was possible to find such a one. How can you seek a spirit you do not know? How can you tell when
you’ve found him? You can’t, unless he shows himself to you.
Is it really true that I did not know God until that
moment? After all, at the time I was studying to be a Lutheran pastor. Whatever the answer, the person I came to know at
that moment was so much more vividly a person with whom I could interact than any prior knowledge of God that any such prior
knowledge seemed ignorable by comparison.
I became a fanatic partly to cover the inadequacy of my newly found personal
revelation. I had to seek reinforcement for the reality of this person in the outside world. I tried to force the world
to testify about God. But the world would not comply. It was as if the world would not acknowledge his existence. My failed
efforts left me feeling more than a little unstable.
God wanted to pour himself into me, and I wanted to have him,
but I was an unworthy vessel. We both were frustrated in our efforts to know one another better. Why was I unworthy? It
can only have been that my ties to the world were too strong, and the world was not of God. It was only after I had given
up everything—career plans, status, school, family, friends, food and all conveniences of modern life—and was prepared to
yield even life itself—that God was able to pour himself in satisfactorily.
I knew God from the first, but the knowledge
was fleeting and unsatisfactory. Then I drank deeply of him, and he satisfied me. Today I know him still. But what does
it mean to know him? Are we inseparable companions, constantly beholding one another as we used to do in the dry hills and
the green orchards of southwest Idaho? Those times are gone. I remember them fondly but do not regret their passing. One
cannot be a professional scientist and raise a family and still be perpetually entwined in love with God. At some point the
relationship changes, and one must go forward to work in the world. But what does the relationship become, and what does
knowledge of God mean now?
(Chapter continued on next page)
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