GOD: An Autobiography, As Told to a Philosopher - The Podcast

47. Divine Encounters And Enacting The Voice Of God | Interviews: Scott Asks Jerry [Part 2]

November 04, 2021 Jerry L. Martin, Scott Langdon
GOD: An Autobiography, As Told to a Philosopher - The Podcast
47. Divine Encounters And Enacting The Voice Of God | Interviews: Scott Asks Jerry [Part 2]
Show Notes Transcript

"We talk about divine encounters, how the world is primed and ready for new revelations, and what it was like to enact the voice of God."

Join the meaningful discussion of the book God: An Autobiography, As Told To A Philosopher by Jerry L. Martin. Discover more about the book, history, humankind, spirituality, and God through the first of a continuous series of ambitious interviews with insightful guests. 

Part two of host and Creative Director Scott Langdon interviewing Dr. Jerry L. Martin, author of God: An Autobiography, As Told To A Philosopher- the true story of an agnostic philosopher who receives an answer to his prayers from God- in words!

Dr. Jerry L. Martin has served as the head of the National Endowment for the Humanities and the University of Colorado philosophy department, work that has prepared Dr. Martin for his conversations with God and to become a serious reporter documented in his book God: An Autobiography, As Told To A Philosopher.

Dr. Martin is the founding chairman of the Theology Without Walls group at the American Academy of Religion and editor of, Theology Without Walls: The Transreligious Imperative (Routledge 2019).

Please, leave a review of the podcast today. We appreciate your support and enjoy reading comments and learning more about our listeners' and readers' experiences!

Read God: An Autobiography, As Told To A Philosopher.

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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 47. 

Scott Langdon [00:01:16] Hello. I'm Scott Langdon, creative director of God: An Autobiography, The Podcast. Welcome to Episode 47 and the conclusion of my interview with the author of God: An Autobiography, As Told To Philosopher, Dr. Jerry Martin. In this episode, we bring you part two of the discussion I had with Jerry, where we talk about divine encounters, how the world is primed and ready for new revelations, and what it was like to enact the voice of God. I hope you enjoyed listening to this interview as much as I enjoyed making it. 

Scott Langdon [00:02:03] God talks about in the book and talks to you about this being a particular time, that the time is right for this particular type of revelation. And you and I have talked about how technology and where we are now in the world. As we talk about stuff like that, we might say language like the world is getting smaller. 

Dr. Jerry L. Martin [00:02:23] Yes. Yes. 

Scott Langdon [00:02:24] Right? If the pandemic has done anything, it might have accelerated the rate at which we are able to do these things, like have a conversation. You're in Doylestown, I'm in Bristol, Pennsylvania, but we could easily be doing this with someone in Japan. 

Dr. Jerry L. Martin [00:02:39] Yes, yes, yes. 

Scott Langdon [00:02:40] And because that is there, the here is now- why can't we learn from other religions? Why can't we have some-- How could God be, you know, here and not there? I mean, our technology is showing us how connected we are, it just seems to lead into something that makes sense theologically to all be connected. 

Dr. Jerry L. Martin [00:03:00] Yes, it's improbable in our current world. It made a lot of sense in the world where everybody within a horse ride distance had the same faith, same tradition. 

Scott Langdon [00:03:13] Right. Right. 

Dr. Jerry L. Martin [00:03:14] And maybe many horse rides. It might be everybody within a hundreds of miles had the same tradition. And then it would be very natural to think, well, we've got it right and these others we don't even know much about have it wrong. 

Scott Langdon [00:03:30] Yeah. 

Dr. Jerry L. Martin [00:03:32] Or aren't even credible contenders- that would tend to be the thinking. In this world where everybody's down the street, Doylestown has multiple, this little town, has multiple religious traditions represented. People's coworkers and increasingly their husbands, wives and children convert to something, and families are diverse. So, that's the social conditions and I guess communication conditions, a theological breakthrough for a deeper understanding of God or of the divine, the divine reality. In this I understand, as I'm told, has a personal aspect that's intensely personal, but that's not the whole of the divine reality. There are also impersonal aspects, and so there are traditions that emphasize that and make the most of it. Get deep insights of their own by taking that route. So, this is a whole new world in terms of that kind of understanding. Understanding of what is ultimate. Well, what's ultimate in our little village can't be the ultimate, given the big, complex world. And those are the conditions for a great theological breakthrough. 

Scott Langdon [00:05:05] When I first read the book, I did think it was quite dramatic and could really benefit from, you know, exploring that drama in those dialogues. 

Dr. Jerry L. Martin [00:05:14] Yes. 

Scott Langdon [00:05:14] And wanting to have two literal voices about it. 

Dr. Jerry L. Martin [00:05:18] Yes. 

Scott Langdon [00:05:19] One of the other things that I took from the book was not that it was just dramatic, but that I feel like it's a love story. 

Dr. Jerry L. Martin [00:05:30] Okay. Yes. 

Scott Langdon [00:05:31] And we've mentioned this before. I really feel like it's a love story. Someone who hadn't experienced a love like this before. You meet Abigail over the phone. You were developing this relationship, and it feels different than you had ever felt prior to this was what it seemed. And then that love and knowing the two of you and having visited with you both and seeing you and experiencing this whole year and a half with you, I can see that love being such a transformative thing. Can you talk a little bit about how you knew that this was different, what that felt like, what it motivated you to do- to see the world differently? 

Dr. Jerry L. Martin [00:06:14] You're talking about my love of Abigail?

Scott Langdon [00:06:18] Yeah, when you find that you were-- 

Dr. Jerry L. Martin [00:06:19] When I first discovered- gee, this is really different. No, I was-- I didn't believe in love. Not in romantic love. I thought I was looking for compatibility. I even had a Myers-Briggs personality profile and was looking for someone with these four traits, and this wasn't like that. One way it felt to me was that it was different, a compatibility is just two people bouncing along who share common interests, lifestyles, values or so forth, and interact well personally, connect for personality. But this was a quantum leap beyond that, it was like an ontological relation. It literally felt as if there was almost like a big cable connecting me, I was in Washington, D.C., to her in New York City, as if. And I said to her, and I think I report this in the book, "I feel as if I've loved you forever." And I thought, that doesn't make sense. But that's what felt true to say. So that describes the experience is that it was oncological, it was transformative. I read relationship books and they just give warning signals, warning signals all the time. You think the other person's perfect. No, I didn't think she was perfect. I didn't think I was perfect. It didn't have anything to do with the person being perfect, matching some ideal template that I brought to the relationship. It was way deeper than that, and I think that's what prepared me to listen to God. Part of it was I felt great gratitude, and as the book reports, I prayed even though I was agnostic and didn't think there's anything higher than the ceiling, I nevertheless fell to my knees and prayed an earnest prayer of thanks. And I didn't believe anything, but I thought, well, that shouldn't stop me from expressing an authentic feeling. And so, I did that. And so, coming to believe in love, opened my heart in multiple ways. In fact, it was almost challenging for my visceral system, as if I had to create new conduits to let all of this in, rather than going around kind of in my armor, holding the world at bay. Whoa! Gotta let this in- all my viscera and the big veins and the little veins and so forth. And so that was for me, if I talk about a conversion experience, it wasn't the God experience that was a change of belief, but this was a conversion in the sense of total transformation of my sense of the world and of myself, for which I was understandably grateful. 

Scott Langdon [00:09:24] Yes, for sure. And that's so interesting that you talk about it like that, because you eventually were able to completely surrender to what God wanted you to do on this. 

Dr. Jerry L. Martin [00:09:37] Yes. 

Scott Langdon [00:09:38] And there are times when, you know, you kind of push back a little bit and you don't understand. You know, I think that story is very compelling. And we go through that in the podcast, and we bring it to life in that way. And as I was working on it, I could feel that desire to push back. But to get that far in, in order to get that far in, you have to begin. And I feel like in order to begin, there was a certain element of surrender. And I wonder if that element of surrender would not have even been able to be on the table had it not been for being able to be in love, recognized love first. Because it sounds like you surrendered to love. 

Dr. Jerry L. Martin [00:10:13] Yes. Yes. 

Scott Langdon [00:10:14] And surrendering to love allowed you to surrender, to receive that personhood of God. Surrendering to love first. Would that be accurate? 

Dr. Jerry L. Martin [00:10:23] That would certainly be true. Love- I think at the heart of love is a kind of surrender. Your surrendering self and ego and previous preoccupations, your changing, your notion. You know, we live life in terms of what's good for number one. But once you're in love, I'm not exactly number one anymore, I become number two. And of course, once you believe in God, maybe I'm number three. But for the love person, you just want everything you can do for that person. And so, you start to set aside some of your own, I don't know, territorial imperatives and who knows what? Crabbiness. Impatience. Things all have to be done one way, my way. You just surrender that, and that's a lot of, you might say, the dialectic of love. You discover, well, you can step outside yourself more than you realized, more than you had occasion to, and so there's a lot of self-transcendence in surrender, and that's a rich experience, just humanly as an experience, and it's also a major step in spiritual development. Just to be able to give yourself over to the experience of love is really a huge step, and it's a difficult one. It's a difficult one. It's not just easy, and natural. 

Scott Langdon [00:12:49] You and I both had experiences in our childhood that at the time we may not have thought were significant. And later on, in our later years, me, relatively recently, kind of came to those experiences again. You bring a couple of them forward in the book straight away. One was when you were quite young, you know, a small kid, and you were turning off the water faucet at your childhood home, and in that faucet was a bit of a drip. And in that drip of water, you had this experience of something. And then another time, you talk about being a teenager with some friends waiting outside of a movie theater and had a sort of experience seemed to happen where things changed. When I was, it must have been maybe I was putting this together for this interview, was it 1980 or 81? Maybe I was ten- or 11-years old living where I was living. And I remember standing at the edge of my street and looking down the street to my house on the left and other houses and seeing this neighborhood and seeing it differently, it just looked different. The colors just look different. It just seemed different. And there was a profound bit of peace in it, like, I'm home and this is comfortable. And as a kid, I just remember feeling that, but I didn't make a thing out of it really at all. And then later, through the process of this work and things have come to me, and I remembered that. And you and I talked about our experiences. For me, it was an experience like-- it wasn't-- it was just look at this experience as it is. There was no judgment about the experience, or you should have been doing that or should have been doing this. It was just remembering this, and it was a memory in a way that was different than any other memory. 

Dr. Jerry L. Martin [00:14:42] Yes. 

Scott Langdon [00:14:44] Can you talk about your experiences like that? 

Dr. Jerry L. Martin [00:14:48] Well, those two experiences you mentioned, Scott, came up only because Abigail once again asked had I ever had any religious type of whatever experiences. And I first said no. But then I reflected on it later, and then each of those experiences, which, like yours, I didn't make much of it, just came and went and I wouldn't have known what to make of them- I considered making something of them, they just are there. But I didn't forget them. Once reminded, like your experience, Scott, I didn't forget them, your report reminds me of an experience I had in the course of writing the book. I was told this thing early on, I complained rather peevishly to God, why are You so hidden? Because I'd ask, "is it important to You that people be aware of You?" And I was told, "Human recognition is at the heart of My being.". 

Scott Langdon [00:15:55] Yes. 

Dr. Jerry L. Martin [00:15:57] "Essential to My being." And so, I said, "Well, then why are You so hidden? If you want us to know You, why are You so hidden?" And the response was, "I'm not, you see me everywhere. You see me everywhere." Well, I tried to see God everywhere, and the closest I could come, Martin Buber in I And Thou, talks about saying Thou to nature and my experience with the drop of water was a bit like that. I suddenly realized; you might say it's standing in the community of being with its own integrity. And that's a sort of version of saying Thou to nature, respecting nature as an other and so forth. But I had the experience sitting at a café mulling over this puzzlement- You see Me everywhere. And it then did come to me, almost like a shimmering presence on the surface of things. And this was a very-- it wasn't like a walk in the woods or anything like that, it's just a diner type thing. And yet I could see everything had a kind of shimmer and that one thing necessary, we usually think about everything around us in terms of its, you might say, utility functions. How do we use it? And it was almost like an aesthetic attitude, but not exactly aesthetic either, but it was as if I had to set aside those utility function concerns and just let it show itself. Let it show itself in its own way, you might say. And then it was like a divine presence rippling on the surface of things. I continued to worry over that- see Me everywhere, because it's still true that God is frustratingly elusive, and I come back to that in episode 44, I think, for the final episode of the whole thing. But I think these are important, Scott, your experience and mine. And it's one reason I encourage people to write in and share their experiences on the web page. And there are quite a number of people who've done that because we live in a very secular age, and we worship science, and we worship those utility functions. That makes life more convenient and so forth. And I've encountered this a number of times with people, a colleague at work took a river, a boat ride up the Amazon and was sleepless in the night at one point, and you're just in the middle, there are just some stars above which you can see without cities way more splendiferously than you can than most of us ever do. And of course, just the murmuring sounds of the jungle itself. And, whoa! It was almost like a mystical experience for her. It was like the cosmos had showed its being to her. She's a very modern woman, and so she told this as she experienced it, but I said, "Go write it down. Otherwise, you may well forget it, because people have these experiences. They put them on the shelf in the attic and they forget about them. And yet they're deeply informative about the nature of the reality we live in and of our own lives, our own relation to that reality." I always feel it's empowering to other people to have their experiences, take them seriously, think, what does this mean for my life that I've had this experience, you know, how should this affect my attitudes, my behavior, my life, whatever, my relationship to whatever in my conception is the highest, and I take those to heart. 

Scott Langdon [00:20:08] We talk about Martin Buber and the I Thou with nature. 

Dr. Jerry L. Martin [00:20:12] Yes. 

Scott Langdon [00:20:12] And you see nature and God and nature in everything around. Has this new experience, having talked with God and having written this book and now going through the podcast and everything, has changed the way that you see other human beings? Do you see God in other human beings in a way that you never did before or in a different way as a result of all of this? 

Dr. Jerry L. Martin [00:20:42] Yeah, because the part of it is getting less self-preoccupied. You can realize other people's story is just as important as your own and their future fate or destiny is just as important as one's own. And my view is that the sense I take from the book, I don't know if I'm told this in the book, but the sense I take is people need to take the book in their own way. And so, I've told people, if you find parts that are off putting to you, just skip those, just ignore them. If you see if there's any part that does speak to you and then take that to heart. So, you need to find out what your own journey is and how this book can help you. Or maybe it can't, you know, maybe something else can, and this can't, you give it a try and think, no that's not for me, that's fine. Although that itself would be one of the implications, I think of the book. And it's fine for you move on a different way. In general, you know, people have sometimes said, well, did this change you in any way? I would first say no. Nothing would come to mind. I'm the same old Jerry Martin, you might say. But talking to Abigail, "Absolutely, yes you have." There's a certain male willfulness, kind of stubbornness, kind of regimentation or something, but there's a lot less of that now, that has evaporated a lot and just willing to-- and that affects an awful lot of me. The only way I noticed a change was I'm nicer in traffic. That's a very modest outcome but I don't have to be the first one there. I'm more quickly willing to let someone else in or whatever it might be in traffic, and just be kind of nice to people and try to help them along. And I guess the main thing is being more appreciative of each person having live out their own drama. They start a different place, they may end a different place, but as long as they're kind of pursuing the highest in their own vision, the highest they can see and find, then I think, "Good for you. Good for you. Let me know how I can help." It's painful to see people's pain, and sometimes you see pain that they don't even know they have because their cramped personalities are covering up the pain, but the kind of personality is just a bad symptom, like having a symptom, like having a back that's twisted or something. This is a symptom of some deep inner stress. And I guess I'm more sensitive. I find watching movies, I have to switch away when the difficult part comes, I'll switch back later, take a deep breath and whatever. But one of the one of the things you always have to realize in life, in fact, health care workers and other workers like that learn this lesson, that you can't-- if you go around experiencing everybody's pain, you're going to disable yourself. You're not going to go to help them, and they kind of make certain distinctions that you need to be empathic enough to understand what they're going through, but not so much that you're just merging with their pain and attitudes, so you keep a professional distance also. And so, all of these things are complicated. You started our discussion with love and my own love story, and a lot of the theme of the whole book is love. And at one point I even objected, "Just love, love, love?" Well, yeah. That about sums it up. But from my life experience, like this last example of the care one has to take with empathy, love is not just a feeling and there's a tendency to kind of make it into a Hollywood trailer or a Hallmark card or something, is that it's just very warm feelings. But no, love is the challenge of dealing with a whole person, of understanding a whole person of you living in a constructive, healthy relationship with that person. There are all kinds of challenges to the loving life. 

Scott Langdon [00:26:18] I do have one more question and we can wrap it up on this thought if you'd like. And it's been a wonderful conversation, I'm so glad to have spent this time with you. The book is a wonderful read, and anyone who gets their hands on it, it's a beautiful story. It's a wonderfully structured piece of writing, and it's just a great thing to experience. And when I came on board, you know, I think initially because I had answered an ad for a social media person. And my thing was, I was, you know, you and your wife, Abigail, both retired philosophy professors, and you were the former director of humanities, the National Endowment for the Humanities. And I had taught humanities course in high school for a few years and really loved that subject. And I thought, well, I can, you know, sit at the feet of, you know, a couple of professors and learn some things. But then when we got involved with the actual project, we thought, okay, it's dramatic. What can we do with it? We decided on a podcast, we thought an episodic podcast, a dramatic adaptation of the book. And so, it's sort of, what's come out is a sort of radio drama like you might think most days of old, and it plays like that often, and it was fun to work on. My question here and we'll go out on this is what do you think would be the benefits of the podcast? So, for somebody that's approaching this work and they find it by way of the podcast first and you know, you want to go to the source material and read the book for sure. But do you think that there are specific benefits to hearing this that one might get as opposed to maybe finding it from the book itself first? 

Dr. Jerry L. Martin [00:28:05] Yeah, it's one reason I just finished To Kill a Mockingbird, the novel. I'd never read before, and it's a very good novel, and it was surprising to me what kind of novel exactly it is, and so then what did I do? I ordered the Netflix movie. A kind of classic movie, Gregory Peck as the Atticus Finch character. And we just started it last night, and it's just beautifully done. Well, why do I do that? I've read the whole book. The movie never captures everything in the book. The podcast doesn't capture everything. So, though I think we've done a very good job of bringing out the most important parts. But why do I do that? Well, here, even more than a good movie about a good book, it brings it to life. And what Abigail has said, she's heard me give talks where I say I ask God and God answered this, but I'm remembering it. This is a report of a memory. Yeah. I remember asking this and I remember God saying such and such. In the podcast you are enacting Jerry Martin, and you are at that moment having those questions in a live way right now, you know, before your eyes and ears and in the case of the podcast. You're enacting it now, and many people, I think it's one of the nicest things I hear about the book is that I asked the question that they were going to ask. And so, they're following right with me, they're kind of agnostic at the beginning and they have these questions, and then we go on through about all these other kinds of questions about ego and salvation. And, from my side as God, I'm not just reporting in the podcast a memory of what God said. I am also, before I do these, I not only have the memory of what God said and how he sounded, and so I approximate that. But I don't have great talents in that area, I just do the best I can. But I also pray and ask. So, it's a bit live. God coming to you through Jerry as best I can achieve it. You know, I try to get into this prayerful mode. I pray often to ask God, speak through me. And so, it's being enacted right there. You're enacting Jerry's questions, which often are your own question, often Scott's questions, and I'm giving God's actual answer in life, you might say, by bringing you in that mode. God talking through Jerry to you, to whoever is listening. 

Scott Langdon [00:30:56] It gives it sort of that place where the listener can sort of feel like they're observing something, even if it's auditorily. They're in a place where they're sort of you know, they're listening to this conversation back and forth in sort of the third person in the room. 

Dr. Jerry L. Martin [00:31:14] They're in the scene. They're in the scene.  

Scott Langdon [00:31:15] Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's been wonderful fun to put it all together. It's been challenging, there's been tears, there's been a lot of laughter. There's this-- So episodes one through 44 where we episodically take your book apart. It's been one of the great jobs I've ever been on during this pandemic as an artist, as a creator, and as a person who has a lot of theological background and baggage too. It was a challenge, but one that I really loved and I'm glad we did it. And now going forward with these following episodes in season four here, as we have some more interviews next week, I'm looking forward to you flipping things around with me and asking me some questions. That'll be a lot of fun. We'll hear from Abigail coming up and some others, and it's going to be an exciting season. So, thank you for taking this time with me today, Jerry, and I can't wait to get into this. 

Dr. Jerry L. Martin [00:32:17] Well, thank you, Scott. This has been great. 

Scott Langdon [00:32:34] 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.