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

167. What's On Our Mind: Reflections on Love, Encounters, and Relationships

• Jerry L. Martin, Scott Langdon

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Join Scott Langdon and Dr. Jerry L. Martin as they share touching anecdotes about life's journey and divine guidance.

Scott recounts a moment of social anxiety and purpose during an audition in Manhattan. What roles do we play in others' lives? Jerry shares a heartwarming story about the importance of cherishing love, with a relatable twist. From Jerry's heartfelt advice to a couple (while leaving his love waiting), to Scott's comforting exchange with Andy, these narratives resonate with authenticity and emotion, and remind us to appreciate the love that surrounds us every day.

Together, they explore how setbacks can lead to breakthroughs, highlighting the interconnectedness of human experiences. More than just personal anecdotes, this episode celebrates the human spirit and the central role of love in our lives.

Tune in for stories that bring both tears and laughter, explore the themes of love and the human experience, and join us on a journey of reflection and connection where love takes center stage, and the story of our lives unfolds with warmth and sincerity.

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Scott Landon 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 166 Welcome to God: An Autobiography, The Podcast. 

01:05: Hello and welcome to episode 167 of God: Autobiography, The Podcast. I'm your host, Scott Langdon, and this week, Jerry and I talk about what's on our mind. In this 22nd edition of our What's on Our Mind series, Jerry and I take the discussion down a more personal road, as we share with one another and with you stories of our own recent encounters with God on each of our recent travels. We talk about what role we might be playing in someone else's story and how God's direction can keep our ego grounded as we try to be available to those around us along our way. If you'd like to share your story of God or ask a question, please drop us an email at questions@godandautobiographycom. We always love hearing from you.

Scott Landon 01:55: Thanks for spending this time with us. I hope you enjoy the episode. Welcome back, everybody, to another edition of What's on Our Mind. I'm Scott Langdon, I'm here with Jerry Martin and we are really excited to share with you some of the ways that God has interacted with us in our lives this week. We've been talking. Our last episode was a What's On Your Mind, where we had two wonderful emails come in and we talked about those. We've talked about stories that people have about how God interacts with their lives and paying attention to that and thinking about that, I often realize, hey, I've got these interactions going on in my own life and I love talking to Jerry about it. So this is a great opportunity to share these things, Jerry, I'm glad you're here.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 02:43: Well, yeah, it's interesting, Scott, because we both had trips out of town you might say. You to, I guess New York, and Abigail and me in Riverside, California for her neuropathy treatments and it happened that we both had interesting occasions. Maybe every day has interesting occasions, but some more stand out. We each had some of those experiences that really struck us. It's good to pay attention to those and helpful then to talk about them with one another and with our listeners.

Scott Langdon 03:15: We started talking about these things on Tuesday in our regular meeting with the team. I get a lot of my real, I don't know… my tank gets full, my heart gets full every week at those meetings because we come together you, Laura, Mandi, and I and share how our weekend was, how our trips were, how our things were going on. It's interesting when we tell each other our stories, how connected we can feel, whether it's a podcast, whether it's a Zoom call or whether it's in person, there are these different levels of connection that we're talking about, but there is always this level of connection that often centers and I think it always really centers around story. What's been going on with your life, how are you? are questions we ask and we come back with what the story is from our perspective.

04:10: Yeah, this week I had a really interesting experience. I had an audition, which is not an unusual thing. To go here from Bristol, PA, up to Manhattan for an audition, and Wednesday was one of those days. It's about an hour 20-minute train ride and I get off the train and I walk about six blocks up 8th Avenue to the studio, go up to the fourth floor, walk in and do an audition, and that happens often. Well, it's also a place that can cause me a good amount of anxiety.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 04:49: I would think so. You’re auditioning for a new part, a new opportunity.

Scott Langdon 04:55: Right. Right, it's interesting because it's not the work that gives me the anxiety it used to. Earlier on in my career, I was like, oh, am I good enough, am I not good enough? I mean, I've been doing this for a really long time and I know now what I do and the tools and each audition practices, so I know what it is that I'm doing. What gives me the anxiety is the social interactions with other people and other actors. I have social anxiety that comes as part of my bipolar disorder and what I deal with.

05:29: We've talked about that a bit before and that can get in the way. My wife, on the other hand, is amazing at it. We can go to auditions together and she'll talk to people, “Oh hi, friends, and over there,” and then just walk right into the room and give a great audition. I have to just be focused and I oh, what are they thinking of me? It's a whole, oh, stop thinking that– it's a whole thing. Right, but I have recently gotten much better about that and this particular role that I was called in for. I really prepared for it and I've been called in for it. This is my fifth time being called in for it over the last 12 years. The first time was the first national tour. It's a musical called Once and the character is the father of the main boy and I was probably too young for it the first time I went in, but now I'm just right. The son in the musical is about the same age as my own son, like all of these things, and I just know this guy.

06:33: And I walk in to the audition building and I go up to the fourth floor and I get to where I'm going. I'm about 20 minutes early. I get my mandolin out, I need to play the mandolin for this and tuning up and I get ready and I'm fine and breathing and God and I are talking. I'm like you know, I'm prepared, I'm going over my script. A young man comes out from the room and he says, “Scott Langdon?” I said, “Yeah, that's me.” “Can I have your headshot and resume?” I give it to him. He says, “OK, you're next, are you ready?” And I say, “I'm great, I'm ready.” And I walk in the room and he introduces me and there's people behind the table and all of a sudden I just feel like a complete amateur. I just.

07:17: I just I get this feeling like I've never done this before. And what am I even doing here? And I do the audition and it's– I get through it, it's fine, but I just walk out and that has been my, that's been the case with this role for the last four times and I don't know why. And I think it has a lot to do with identity, I think it has to do with maybe a bunch of things.

07:45: But I walk out of the room and there's nobody in the hallway and I put my mandolin back in the case and I take the case and I'm holding the mandolin and I turn around and there's this guy standing there and he's probably, I don't know five, six years older than me. I don't know. He's a little older than I am, but he's obviously there for the same role because he also has a mandolin. And I turn around and he's there and I realize I'm going to have to have this encounter with another human being and something inside of me just says, instead of ignoring and just saying hi and bye, I engage him and I say, “Hi, how are you?” And because he was looking at me and he said hi, he said “That's a really nice mandolin,” and I said thank you. I said, “Are you here for this show?” He said “Yeah,” and then he said, "Did you go in?” And I said, “Yeah, I was just in.” And he said, “How was the room?” And I said, “They're really friendly and it's good.” And he said, “That's great. Well, my name's Andy,” and I said, “Hi, Andy, I'm Scott.” He said “It's really nice to meet you.” And I said, “It's nice to meet you.” And then he kind of walked along, I put my mandolin back in the case and I zipped it up and I walked out and I was walking all the way back to the train which I hopped right back on. So I'm only in the city for 40 minutes tops, train ride, boom, come right back.

09:15: And on the train ride back I'm starting to think about oh, you know, I'm terrible. I don't know what happened. Was I prepared enough? What are they thinking about me? Just these sort of usual things that used to pop up before. And then something popped back into my mind, which is I had a really calm and easy and interesting encounter with Andy and that might have been the only objective of that day. 

Dr Jerry L. Martin: Yes, yes.

Scott Langdon 09:44: It might have been, I don't know. But if everything went wrong in that audition, I know how to fix that. I know how to go back and work more on that role. I know how to, as Judy Doenstreich said, get into it. You know, I'm going to get this role. I'm going to get called in again for this role somewhere else and I'm going to do it better. I'm going to get into it. But if I would have spent the whole rest of the day going, that was a failure. There was nothing good about this day. I failed this and I don't even know what I'm doing. But something popped up to say you don't know what this encounter with this guy might yield for him, and if that's the only thing that happened that day, then that would have– that’s, who knows? – that's perfect, you know. So I felt nudged to look at that as opposed to the oh, you failed at this, and I thought that was an interesting nudge.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 10:42: Yeah, it's one of the insights I think of that is, if you focus too narrowly, here I've got an objective to go get this part and so forth, and close out everything else as if nothing else can matter to this day, then you're not paying attention to the whole of life. You know life is a big flow with a lot of parts coming together and people coming together and apart. You know brief encounters, lengthy encounters and we don't know in advance which parts are going to carry the most important message of the day, either for our own stories or for other people's stories. It reminds me of when I gave probably the biggest bomb of a talk I've ever given was when I received an honorary doctorate from a lovely little Catholic liberal arts college and a very small college and a small graduating class and I talked about Joan of Arc was much on my mind in those days and I could tell from the beginning that this was disturbing to this audience and you might say she's the most Protestant of saints because she had her own voice and the trials were all scrutinizing are you gonna listen to your– what God's telling you? Or are you gonna do what the church tells you to do? And she keeps saying well, they're all the same, you know. But anyway, I gave the talk and it was clear from the beginning, made the audience very uncomfortable. I could see Abigail in the audience looking to her right and left. She was feeling it and I thought, well, that's sure a bomb. But as we gave the diplomas out at the end, one young woman receiving a diploma leaned forward to me and said, “Oh, thank you. I did my senior thesis on Joan of Arc against great opposition from the faculty.” So she had fought her way.

12:52: And then here the commencement speaker comes and talks about Joan of Arc. So my failure, her success, and that's what it turns out. Put it in the way you were just putting it, Scott, it turns out maybe that's why I was there, not to expound Joan of Arc for my sake, what was on my mind, but to give heart to this young woman who had discovered in Joan something very meaningful for her spiritual and other development, maybe as a young woman and so forth. And okay, that's fine. And I sometimes feel with God: An Autobiography, for all I know it's written for one person. That's fine, if that's what it's for. I just hope it then finds those people for whom it is written. 

Scott Langdon 13:52: Well, one of the things that I thought about when I was contemplating this trip was something we've talked about a little bit before in terms of being the main character in your story. Right? So, everyone is the main character in their own play, this life that they're in, and you never see your own eyes. It's always the point of view from I, from myself, and everyone says that. What we often, well, I often, don't think about or contemplate in this way until I have recently done this a lot is the idea that I am also the main character of my own story and a supporting character in everyone else's story. And I might be, you know, if you talk about it in the terms of my business, you know, a day player, where you just come on and maybe you're background in a scene. You don't say anything, nobody really notices you, but you're there, you're in the world of it. Or maybe it's somebody at the convenience store that I see, I will never see again, or I see them once a week or every day. And then there's my more immediate family, my wife, you know. Then there's you, you know.

15:42: So when I think about being a supporting character in someone else's play, and I started to think well, everybody else, who's having their own story and what's going on in their heads, Oh, what are they thinking of me? Oh, am I good enough in this audition? Oh, am I prepared enough? Oh, am I whatever? I'm walking by as background, or I'm a day player, or I'm just, you know, I have a moment with them as a supporting character.

16:10: And then I wonder am I available to be what they might be needing today? Am I awake enough to be able to be an instrument of what they might need in their story? And when I thought again, if this guy, Andy, if we were, you know, I don't know if we were supposed to run into each other, it doesn't matter, we did, and it was a lovely encounter that hopefully, we both thought about later. I know I do, thought about it pleasantly. Maybe he does too, but you just don't know what kind of role you might play for someone else. Which leads me right into the story that you were talking about on Tuesday, about what happened to you and Abigail in California.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 16:55: Yeah, yeah, we do live these dramas and so it's very interesting. You, as an actor, you know act parts, and so we become more self-conscious in our discussions of my role. I was thinking as you were talking, Scott, sometimes one is the protagonist, sometimes one is what do you call the negative figure, antagonist? The antagonist is the challenging figure, because that's a role too that makes the wheels of life turn. And anyway, we have these various roles and you're right, sometimes we're just in the background, you know, part of the crowd or whatever. Or one passing moment, a kind of comment from the background.

17:41: And what happened to Abigail and me on Riverside, when we always eat at a beautiful building, Mission Inn, it's like out of medieval Spain, but built by an American with infinitely good taste and enough money to bring a lot of artifacts over. So it is a very interesting place to visit, even, and it has an inner courtyard where we always eat and have our dinner. And I had come out of the men's room after we finished. We stopped by the men's and ladies' rooms and I was coming out waiting for Abigail to emerge, with a big pillar there, just near the entrance to the bathrooms. And while I'm waiting, some guy comes around the corner. I didn't remember having ever noticed him, seen him before. But he said, “Could I ask how long have you been married to that lovely lady?” Well, I told him, you know, 25 years roughly. It's a second marriage for both of us. And somehow he seemed very interested and so I went on and said you know, a second marriage for both of us, the first marriage, well, it's often kind of a trial marriage for people. You know, you learn things, you get married young before you really know yourself and at the end of that marriage it wasn't the right one for either one of us, we were right to move on.

19:14: But I felt that I did love her in my own ways. As I said to her afterwards, “We loved each other as best we were capable of at that time,” that young, unformed, immature, rough-edged age. But I thought I'd never really expressed to her that I loved her adequately. And when I thought to myself, this is I can remember thinking about it, almost the moment of thinking about it, “If I'm ever lucky enough to find another woman who loves me, whom I love, let me let her know every day, and ideally every minute of every day, that I love her.” Well, this had an impact on him such that he then kind of repeated the point and I said, “Yes, that's right,” but he asked me to repeat it exactly in the words I just said it because somehow he was just taking it in.

20:18: And then, shortly, the woman he was interested in now, he had had an earlier marriage but their eyes had connected across the room in a bar or restaurant or something and so they were kind of becoming an item but yet exploratory, but feeling hey, this for each of them, clearly feeling hey, this may be the right person to live the rest of my life with. Her name was Kathy, I didn't quite catch his name, and he had me repeat the same thing to her word for word, you know, to take it in. And I was saying, as I said at our meeting Tuesday, I hope people, you know we have a wonderful team that includes Laura Buck and Amanda Horgan and if people didn't hear we did a little, maybe it can be linked when this is run, maybe Amanda does these wonderful links to the episode where the team talks and shares some of the stories how we first came together and that was very interesting to me and surprising- learned things I didn't know before. We had that discussion. Anyway, people can see why I think it's just a great blessing in my life and in our work that we have such a great, great team.

21:54: But these two women are also remarkable women and I thought, and I was saying on Tuesday, the guy who's lucky enough to be with either of them should be worshiping the ground they walk on and letting them know that. And yet I know how guys are. They tend to take their women for granted and you know, hi, honey, what's for dinner? You know, this kind of is the life, as if all of life is simply routine, but very little of life, if any, is simply routine. It all has some kind of meaning and you're building meanings and plumbing the depths of meanings, or you're not, or you're just passing through your own life.

22:39: You know, I had a senior colleague who commented one day, “Somehow I feel I just kind of frittered my life away.” Well, that's awfully sad and I've always felt, I mean even long before I heard a God voice, that you should be spending every moment of your life doing whatever you think is most important for you to do right then at that stage and that might be anything you know, different things for different people. Obviously, everybody's got their own journey and their own things they should be attending to at a given point in their lives, and so that's something. But for them to do that, they really have to learn what I always just called paying attention, which means back to your story, Scott. Don't have too narrow a focus, as though the whole meaning of this experience is going to be in terms of this one objective. Like throwing the dart so it hits the bullseye. Well, even in a pub where you're throwing darts, there's a lot more going on in terms of human interaction and meaning than whether the dart hits the target. So, anyway, that was the story, and we went on talking, and since he seemed to be all ears, I just gave him some of my sense of the importance of love in life and how you have to enact it.

24:06: I don't quite like the feeling… The way love is often talked about is as though it's an inner palpitation or pitter-patter or something. But in my experience, when I fell in love with Abigail, it's ontological. It's a relation to a whole, nother real person, and engaging that person is not subjective in the sense of just something going on in you. That's half of love. Love is a two-way street, it's an interaction, and so you've got to look at it as a reality in one sense, independent of each of the parties in that reality. It's not just subjective in me, it's not just subjective in Abigail, it's a reality of our lived life together. So anyway, those were among the thoughts that came out of this very soon.

24:57: Now I was going to warn early that at the end of the story there's a deep irony, a kind of quick-plash irony. So, I'm holding forth on the nature of love and giving him my particular, you know, insights and little lessons that the to do's and the to don'ts list, and he's very listening, as though this is the fount of wisdom about love, because he obviously had been looking at us together and probably thinking, “Look, this couple is at an advanced age and yet so obviously in love still, how do you do that? So I was holding forth.” Well, Abigail then finally shows up, had been taking a long time and I was puzzled about that and she comes kind of around the pillar and I didn't see her come out of the ladies room and she sort of steamed and I’m, “What's wrong?”

25:57: Well, I had completely blanked out. I had completely blanked out that we had finished dinner and because we're walking handicapped, it's a little slow when I have to take her out and I needed to visit the bathroom quickly. So I said, well, I'll go to the men's room and then I'll come back and then walk you to the exit. Makes sense. But I completely, completely forgot that I had left her at the table.

26:28: So, some great lover, I left her at the table. She finally gave up waiting and laboriously, with difficultly, made her own way, with her walking being insecure and maybe could fall over and so forth, trying to hold on to chairs and whatever she could find as she came. And then, what on earth is Jerry doing out here? Well, I was into this conversation and called her over and oh, this is Kathy and this is so forth, and she was just irritated. Then I learned why, and she had every right to be irritated. And so, anyway, life has those things too, that sometimes you've got your mind on one ball and another hits you by the side of the head. That's what happened here, and you can be completely forgetful or whatever, neglectful of some important aspect of your situation.

Scott Langdon 27:30: So simple and it's so complicated, love.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 27:33: Yeah, and in many of life’s situations there are ones where, oh, there isn't an answer, actually, you know. It was better in some ways that I'm talking about love than her, my love for her in that context, and worse in some ways because I'm talking about love and neglecting the reality of love. And there's something that disturbs me a lot, people don't take love seriously enough. They carry on about it, they rhapsodize about love. But love is a concrete reality and so you've got to pay attention to it in real life and real time and real factors.

28:15: I know, when I first met Abigail, she was in New York, I was in Washington DC. We would have these- she was teaching full time then - we would have these weekends together. Well, very romantic. But I said, wait, we've got to come, not have dinner Friday nights, a romantic dinner. We got to get together daytime. And so I went to New York and we spent the day together, because this has to be a real relationship, not a kind of fantasy romance which is easy to have with candlelight dinners. No, this has to, we got to put ground under this relationship that we can walk on and live on.

28:58: And so I think people don't take seriously enough the concrete demands of love and it's well, it's rough edges. That love isn't just oooh, I'm going to swoon off. You know, Hollywood movies give you that and so on. Okay, you swoon off together into the sunset. There's the one where I think it's Richard Burton and Gene Simmons or somebody. It's one of these Christian movies where at the end they walk off into the sky. Well, it's not like that. You know, just live on your two feet and on solid ground, and it's got to make sense in those terms, not just in terms of swooning.

Scott Langdon 29:47: There's something to the swoon in that, there's something significant about the reason that you're attracted to the one that you're attracted to. They make you feel good, they make you feel easy, at peace, which can be distinguishable very easily if you turn and think about it. I really want this person. I decide this person. I want to be… where that becomes your desire, it overtakes other things that are important. But the kind of love that's real is this person you want to be around them, because they enhance your world. They make you want to be a better person. You see things more clearly. So that's that initial thing.

30:35: As relationships move and grow and you start to, is this a long term thing? Is this based on something real? As you say, instead of candlelight dinners, we need to expose this relationship to the light, as it were, the light of day. How are we going to live together, be together as two seeming opposites? We get the connection part, but what happens with the day to day?

30:59: And that's the sort of the duality of relationships. In that sense, the oneness is easy. Like oh, I know I'm attracted to you, so now let's look at that. Well, love spins around and you go eventually doing something that makes my partner so, my wife Sarah, let's say, if I want to do something, and preemptively even, not to score points or to get something for me, but really because I know this will make her happy, that makes me happy. And when she's happy and I'm happy you know, here's stuff like happy wife, happy life, oh, so what can I do, almost like in a sly way, to almost deceive her into thinking I'm doing? No, it's when your wife is happy, you are happy and she does things for you and you go, and it's just love grows and moves that way. When you intentionally say this is what they like, because they've told me and I'm going to do what they like, there's no chore in that. It’s beautiful.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 32:05: Right. So you start enjoying their own enjoyment. You know that you start caring about the things they care about and you're talking about oh, somebody I guess a person or a spouse or somebody says how they are and I was thinking I can't remember your examples but they said how are you, okay- how are you really? Sometimes you can tell from the okay, but this is the cover story for how they really are. And then you want to know that. You know if there's something else going on, something troubling, and I always worry is it something I did that's bothering you? Sometimes it is, but often, no, it's just something on her mind or some other event or other venue, some other situation that is bothering her. And okay, well then that's great, let's talk it out.

33:08: I also remember a psychotherapist who he and his wife do a lot of couples therapy and he said he concluded that conflict is the cutting edge of a relationship, meaning it's those moments where you've kind of fight something out or hassle something out, something difficult, and you come through that and you realize, oh well, maybe we said some angry words, but I still love her, she still loves me, and that's a good feeling. You know that this relationship is bigger and sounder than momentary you know you're frustrating me or you got your foot on my toe, kind of moments that happen in life. So I think the complexities of love and of relationship are profoundly interesting and important and multifaceted and, as you put it earlier, Scott, we have many different roles in other people's lives- protagonist, antagonist, background character, comic relief, all kinds of crucial supporting characters. That's a key role. That's why there are Oscars for best supporting actor, I suppose, because often the supporting actor is absolutely crucial to the whole production. And it certainly is in our lives. 

Scott Langdon 34:45: Thank you for listening to God: An Autobiography, The Podcast. Subscribe for free today wherever you listen to your podcasts and hear a new episode every week. You can hear the complete dramatic adaptation of God: An Autobiography, As Told To A Philosopher by Jerry L. Martin by beginning with episode one of our podcast and listening through its conclusion with Episode 44. You can read the original true story in the book from which this podcast is adapted, God: An Autobiography, As Told to a Philosopher, available now at amazon.com, and always at godanautobiography.com. Pick up your own copy today. If you have any questions about this or any other episode, please email us at questions@godanautobiography.com, and experience the world from God's perspective as it was told to a philosopher. This is Scott Langdon. I'll see you next time.