GOD: An Autobiography, As Told to a Philosopher - The Podcast
GOD: An Autobiography, As Told to a Philosopher - The Podcast
257. What's Your Spiritual Story: Dr. Richard Oxenberg on his Spiritual Journey and the Peace That Passeth Understanding
In this deeply moving episode of God: An Autobiography, The Podcast, philosopher Richard Oxenberg—co-author of Two Philosophers Wrestle With God—shares his full spiritual story for the first time.
His journey begins with childhood tragedy: witnessing the sudden death of his seven-year-old sister. The shock shattered his early understanding of God, safety, and reality. From that moment, Richard became a lifelong seeker.
He describes moving through secular Judaism, atheism, and years of intellectual searching. Zen Buddhism, Hindu philosophy, and the symbolic theology of Paul Tillich each opened new doors, yet none fulfilled his deeper longing for spiritual connection.
Everything changed when he encountered an Indian guru and experienced overwhelming energetic phenomena—experiences that were both exhilarating and terrifying. This crisis pushed him toward Christianity, where a transformative encounter at a monastery in Conyers, Georgia offered unexpected peace.
Richard speaks honestly about trauma, mystical experience, fear, grace, and the long struggle to discern truth. He explores the difference between understanding God intellectually and encountering the divine directly.
Through reflections on samsara, the ground of being, baptism, communion, and the “peace that passeth understanding,” Richard reveals how faith finally took shape in him as trust in the ultimate goodness of reality.
This episode is a profound look at doubt, longing, spiritual awakening, and the human search for meaning—and at a God who meets us through every question.
Other Series:
The podcast began with the Dramatic Adaptation of the book and now has several series:
The Life Wisdom Project – Spiritual insights on living a wiser, more meaningful life.
From God to Jerry to You – Divine messages and breakthroughs for seekers.
Two Philosophers Wrestle With God – A dialogue on God, truth, and reason.
Jerry & Abigail: An Intimate Dialogue – Love, faith, and divine presence in partnership.
What’s Your Spiritual Story – Real stories of people changed by encounters with God.
What’s On Our Mind – Reflections from Jerry and Scott on recent episodes.
What’s On Your Mind – Listener questions, divine answers, and open dialogue.
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Scott Langdon [ 00:00:17,220 ] 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.
Scott Langdon [ 00:01:15,040 ] Welcome to God: An Autobiography, The Podcast. I'm Scott Langdon, and on this week's episode, we wanted to take a brief step out of the familiar pattern and bring you something very special. If you're a regular listener to the program, first of all, thank you from the bottom of our hearts for being out there and taking us in. And second of all, the name Richard Oxenberg will probably be quite familiar to you.
Scott Langdon [ 00:01:38,300 ] Jerry and Richard teamed up for our very popular series, Two Philosophers Wrestle With God. You can find the audio version right here on this podcast or the book version on Amazon. Com. On today's episode, Richard tells us his spiritual story, which is both heartbreaking and illuminating, and ultimately a story of hope, love, and a God who is always in pursuit of our whole heart. Here's Jerry to begin the conversation. I hope you enjoy the episode.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin [ 00:02:20,160 ] Thank you, Richard Oxenberg, for joining me and your willingness to tell your spiritual story. Most people's stories start, of course, in childhood. And the kind of religious story, if you frame it that way, starts with… Were you raised in a religion? What were your parents like? Were they religious or spiritual or seekers or finders?
Dr. Richard Oxenberg [ 00:02:49,140 ] Yes. Well, so I was raised in a, I guess what you generally call a secular Jewish family. I don't know if you're familiar with them. They're very common. But yeah, so my parents were not particularly religious or observant. But we identified, of course, as Jews. We belonged to the local Reformed temple. We celebrated Passover every year. And on Yom Kippur, we would generally make a presence in the temple. We would show up for, you know, Yom Kippur can go on for long periods of time. But we generally try to make some sort of appearance there.
Dr. Richard Oxenberg [ 00:03:37,430 ] My grandparents, especially on my mother's side, were Orthodox Jews. So my parents were sort of straying away from that. And I do remember as a young child, my mother buying me this big golden book Bible. And with all these very colored pictures of, you know, Joseph and his many colored coats. Adam and Eve with their sort of skins, fur.
Dr. Richard Oxenberg [ 00:04:14,980 ] You know, draping their bodies. So I remember that. I remember enjoying that, enjoying reading. I don't think in those days I asked myself whether the stories were true or not true. The question didn't even occur to me. And then, you know, I mean, just to go into it, if we're going to get into the story, really, my story kind of begins with a traumatic event that occurred in my childhood. When I was eight years old, my seven-year-old sister was hit by a car right in front of me. I was on the sidewalk and she was hit by a car and killed.
Dr. Richard Oxenberg [ 00:05:03,960 ] I do not have a recollection of seeing the impact. So I don't know, I may have been looking away or something. But what I still have a very vivid memory of is standing over her body in the street. And watching, there was blood gushing out of her nose, which I remember thinking, I didn't think people bled that way. And screaming, and I screamed. I've often remembered that to be the most spontaneous thing that I've ever done.
Dr. Richard Oxenberg [ 00:05:43,620 ] It just came out. It just came out. It's like I was aware of the scream after I began screaming. And then that was, you know, that was quite, so she was killed. I mean, I remember going that night. It was a Friday evening. And so the street got crowded with people looking at the scene. The fire trucks came. I don't know what the fire trucks were intending to do. But they shut the street down. And I spent the night sort of wandering up and down the street.
Dr. Richard Oxenberg [ 00:06:26,100 ] And I remember one point I went into my backyard and prayed to God. I offered to sacrifice all my toys. If He would let my sister live. But He didn't take me up on the offer. I guess He had all the toys he needed. And so, yeah, so it was quite a shaking event.
Dr. Richard Oxenberg [ 00:06:53,000 ] Both from a religious point of view, but also just from a life point of view, you know, trying to understand what this life is all about. And sort of all of a sudden you feel like the guardrails are off. Anything can happen and anything might happen.
Dr. Richard Oxenberg [ 00:07:14,420 ] Especially with this, it was so sudden. We were out playing together one moment and the next moment she's dead. And the reason this is really very much a part of my story is because the question at that point for me was you know who's in charge here? And what could this you know if there's a god in charge what's He doing and why is He doing it. And so it just shook my whole sense of what was true and false, good and bad. I remember sitting at Passover ceremonies after that for the next number of years. We still had Passover. And, you know, Passover Seder is all about how God liberates the Israelite slaves.
Dr. Richard Oxenberg [ 00:08:24,170 ] from Egypt with a great suite of miracles and signs and wonders and so forth. And I would just sit there saying to myself, really? I mean, has anybody really noticed what's going on around here? You know, it just... It just seemed like this massive cover-up. You know, at one point in the Passover Seder, you read this thing about how God is, and then you almost have to get a thesaurus. You know, to praise, you praise God in all these ways. He's magnificent. He's merciful. He's kind. He's compassionate. He's all-seeing. He's all-knowing. It just goes on and on. And I'm just sitting there saying, well, you know, where was He? Right? Where was He on that night? And how can we be reading all of this without asking this question?
Dr. Richard Oxenberg [ 00:09:23,940 ] So ultimately, I think what that led me to was, you know, I mean, I think Stendhal— the French novelist Stendhal— I later learned many years later, is reputed to have quipped, 'God's only excuse is that he doesn't exist.' And, you know, there's some... I think there's some spiritual truth in a sense to that. Because if you, I mean, if God does exist and God is allowing and could prevent all these horrors. And of course, you know, I became aware that this was not the only horrible thing that ever happened to anyone.
Dr. Richard Oxenberg [ 00:10:11,970 ] If God exists and can prevent all these horrors and just doesn't, then that, you know, doesn't make for a very positive idea of God. And so one of the questions I guess you can ask—is it better, even from a spiritual point of view, to believe in a cruel God or no God at all? I mean, which is actually, which is going to make the heart more at peace?
Dr. Richard Oxenberg [ 00:10:48,830 ] And I think the answer to that one is no God at all is better than a cruel God. And I think that's when I finally concluded that there wasn't a whole lot of evidence for God. God never knocked on my door. Said anything to me. I know you've had some experiences. And so I gave up. So I, you know, I decided I was an atheist and that that was the most reasonable thing to be.
Dr. Richard Oxenberg [ 00:11:23,080 ] But, and now, you know, in retrospect, and also even at the time, even though I guess no god at all is better than a cruel god, it's still not what you actually want, right? It doesn't actually satisfy one's spiritual longing.
Dr. Richard Oxenberg [ 00:11:43,190 ] And I still had this great deal of spiritual longing within me, you know, that just had nowhere to go. And so that, for me, began really a long period of searching of what could possibly satisfy this longing? And fast forward a little bit to, I think it was my early days as an undergraduate. I'm still...
Dr. Richard Oxenberg [ 00:12:22,090 ] looking for something or and I was visiting a friend who was a student at SUNY Binghamton and he was renting out a house for the summer and he invited me to stay for a couple of weeks and on the shelf of his house, it wasn't his book, it was the book of whoever he was renting the house from, was a copy of Philip Kapleau's The Three Pillars of Zen.
Dr. Richard Oxenberg [ 00:12:54,930 ] And I pulled it out and started reading it, and I just became mesmerized with it. I remember I read it through. It's like a 500-page book. I read it through in two days. I couldn't put it down. And what captured me about it was the idea that there was some supernal state of mind that you could arrive at, that would allow you to be at peace with the nature of existence, right? It wasn't a god in the sense of a person, but it was God in the sense of some sort of ultimate. The ultimate state of realization that would reconcile you to life and that really intrigued me and so I started at that point reading a lot of books on Eastern religions.
Dr. Richard Oxenberg [ 00:14:07,170 ] D . T. Suzuki, his essays on Zen, and of course, Alan Watts at that time was very popular as a popularizer of Eastern religion. And I tried meditation, not very successfully, because I just found it boring. And I think that was the principal problem. I would sit there and say, 'Okay, you know, I'm waiting for something to happen here.' And nothing much ever happened.
Dr. Richard Oxenberg [ 00:14:43,719 ] And it just sort of made me foggy-headed. I mean, that's kind of... Oh, that's not good. It's supposed to be the opposite. That's not what I was supposed to do. You know, it made me foggy-headed, and one of my legs would often fall asleep. I remember one time I went to a Zen center and I was sitting there at the Zen center, and my right leg had fallen asleep, and my head was feeling foggy-headed. And we then get up and do the sort of walk around meditation. But I couldn't quite walk around because one of my legs was totally numb.
Dr. Richard Oxenberg [ 00:15:15,500 ] Anyway, it didn't seem to be leading to enlightenment. So I gave up on that.
Dr. Richard Oxenberg [ 00:15:55,500 ] And I guess the next big moment for me that sort of pushed me forward was, again, as an undergraduate, I decided to take an intro to philosophy class. But it was closed out. And so they steered me into a class called 20th Century Theologians. And in that class, we were assigned the book, The Dynamics of Faith by Paul Tillich.
Dr. Richard Oxenberg [ 00:16:27,890 ] And I ended up, I mean, I think I read it, the first time I read it, I think it kind of went over my head. But sometime later, I read it again. And once again, I was mesmerized by a book. Because what Tillich was saying, as I came to understand it, is that the Dynamics of Faith is all about how religion expresses itself through symbol, metaphor, and myth. And you have to sort of, I think, Tillich speaks of it as breaking the myth, to see through the mythological surface of it to the inner, deeper truth that it's trying to express. And I suddenly got the... I came to the...
Dr. Richard Oxenberg [ 00:17:22,920 ] I don't know if I say it came to the realization or it occurred to me that this was a way of reading the Bible. I mean, well, Tillich was saying that, but that by reading the Bible in this way I could understand the Bible to be saying something very similar to what the Eastern religions would say. That the God of the Bible, who was represented in the Bible as this sort of austere... person who tended to command people of things. And when Job complained to Him, he sort of berated him.
Dr. Richard Oxenberg [ 00:18:02,060 ] That if you read it mythologically, if you read it symbolically, at least I could see this God figure in the Bible as, in some sense, representing this ultimate state of being, what Tillich called the ground of being. This ultimate state of being, if you could somehow get in touch with, would be salutary, would be spiritually fulfilling, satisfying, and bring you to peace. And so, that then opened me up to having a much more favorable view of Western religion.
Dr. Richard Oxenberg [ 00:18:54,180 ] Instead of seeing God, the God of Western religion, as just this sort of overweening authority figure who's a little bit full of Himself, I began to see that, well, this is just a way of expressing this deeper truth. And I think that's the point at which I started saying, 'Well, maybe I'll call myself an agnostic from now on, rather than an atheist.'
Dr. Jerry L. Martin: Agnostic is someone who just doesn't come down on either side.
Dr. Richard Oxenberg: Well, the thing is that I had this deep longing for some sort of spiritual connection.
Dr. Richard Oxenberg [ 00:19:45,340 ] That was unfulfilled. It was unfulfilled. And even, you know, so reading books about Zen and reading books later on about Hinduism and Brahman and so forth, and reading Tillich, and I eventually went on to read... most of Tillich. It was fascinating to me at an intellectual level, and it was compelling to me at an intellectual level. I couldn't put it down in a way. But it didn't penetrate. It didn't penetrate. It didn't get me to that place of feeling that I was spiritually connected to anything.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin [ 00:20:27,370 ] That's fascinating, Richard. Just having a big intellectual explanation doesn't necessarily do it.
Dr. Richard Oxenberg [ 00:20:35,400 ] Yeah, you know, what I've come to realize about my whole intellectual life, in many ways, is that the intellect, for me, is a little like sight, in the sense that you can see something that is way down the road.
Dr. Richard Oxenberg [ 00:20:55,280 ] But you're not there yet. I mean, you can see it, but that doesn't mean that you're there. The fact that you see it. So I could see it as a possibility. I could see God as a possibility, but it wasn't a possibility that I was at. And I didn't really know how to get to it. If I went to a synagogue service or a church service, at this point because Tillich of course is a Christian theologian so I started thinking in terms of Christian ideas, if I went to a church service or a synagogue service just didn't do anything for me. It, once again, I just sat there feeling kind of bored and so the next thing that happened just to continue the story is I got a BA in psychology but I didn't pursue that.
Dr. Richard Oxenberg [ 00:21:56,260 ] I ended up going and getting a four-month certificate in computer programming and got a job as a software developer. I started working for a company in New York. I grew up in New York. That then moved to Atlanta, Georgia. And so I moved with them to Atlanta. And in Atlanta, I started attending a Unitarian church, basically just for the social interaction.
Dr. Richard Oxenberg [ 00:22:25,560 ] And at the church, I had a conversation with the minister. And I told the minister about my interest in Tillich's theology. And she suggested that I put together a lecture course on Tillich's theology and present it to people at the church. So I did. I put together a little lecture course, and we did a little class at the Unitarian Church on Tillich's theology.
Dr. Richard Oxenberg [ 00:22:52,170 ] And it went over nicely. And I was then invited to give the same lecture course at some other churches in Atlanta, Presbyterian Church, and then at an Episcopalian Church. I used to joke to myself, you know, here I am, a Jewish atheist, teaching Christian theology in Christian Sunday schools. You know, it was... So I did that. And then...
Dr. Richard Oxenberg [ 00:23:30,480 ] I had a friend who I worked with at my software company who was a devotee of Sri Aurobindo, the Hindu sage, Sri Aurobindo. He would go, my friend would go every year to Pondicherry, India, where there's an Aurobindo ashram and do a retreat with Aurobindo. Not with Aurobindo. Aurobindo is no longer with us in body, as he once corrected me.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin [ 00:24:02,000 ] But he is a 20th century thinker. He's a 20th century sage?
Dr. Richard Oxenberg [ 00:24:07,080 ] Right. And anyway, I used to get into these long conversations with my friend about Aurobindo's ideas. And he suggested that I read this, Aurobindo had this big tome called The Life Divine. It's about 1,100 pages. And I read that with great fascination. Because I was just searching. You know, I was just, I couldn't put down the search.
Dr. Richard Oxenberg [ 00:24:36,450 ] And finally, after reading that, I said to myself, you know, I should do something. Rather than just read books and think about it, maybe I should do something. And so I decided that I would once again try some sort of meditational practice. And I want to do a yoga kind of meditational practice because that... I couldn't find an Aurobindo group, but I was looking for some group that did yogic meditation in Atlanta, and I found one. And I started attending in a very haphazard way, because that's the way I tended to do things.
Dr. Richard Oxenberg [ 00:25:13,240 ] I didn't do it in the disciplined way that I was supposed to. And then it took me a little while to realize that they were connected to a larger network of people who were followers of this Indian guru. And this was during the summer, I think this was the summer of 1994. And the preceptor of my group said that this guru was coming to town. They had an ashram in Molena, Georgia, which was about an hour south of Atlanta.
Dr. Richard Oxenberg [ 00:26:04,080 ] And the guru was going to come to town and run a retreat over the Labor Day weekend at this ashram, and he encouraged me to attend. And I thought, well, great, you know, it'd be interesting to see this enlightened guru. And so I was sort of excited about it and I went to the ashram. They were renting out tents. They had tents you could rent them out for like five dollars a day for people who were participating in the retreat. And once again, I did some meditation. Oh, and they talked. Now, here's where this whole story starts to get a little strange.
Dr. Richard Oxenberg [ 00:26:49,480 ] They talked, this group talked about how the master was able to transmit energy to the people who were meditating. I didn't. I didn't believe it. You know, I still had my very materialist Western metaphysics. So, you know, okay, you feel like that, but that's okay. You know, but nevertheless, maybe there's something that I could gain from doing the meditation.
Dr. Richard Oxenberg[ 00:27:16,130 ] So I went to the ashram and on the second evening of the ashram, the master was giving a talk. And I really wanted to get in and hear his talk because I wanted to see what an enlightened person would look like. And I sort of wedged myself into this crowded room. And at the end of his talk, there was a question and answer session. And I raised my hand. I think this falls under the category of those who, the fools rush in where angels fear to tread.
Dr. Richard Oxenberg [ 00:27:51,000 ] And I asked him, because he was talking a great deal about love. And one of the things that I had felt in this meditation group that I'd been attending was that there wasn't a lot of interpersonal reaction going on. People would come, they'd talk a little bit to one another, they'd meditate, and then they'd sort of disperse. And it was very impersonal.
Dr. Richard Oxenberg [ 00:28:19,530 ] And so I asked him, he was saying, he's talking about love. And I said, you know, you talk a lot about love and about the self. And I take it, when you speak of the self, you don't mean the personal self, right? The ego. And he said, 'Oh, no, no, the self is eternal.' And I said, the reason I ask is because you're talking a lot about love. So when you say love, do you mean something personal or something impersonal? And he says, 'Oh, impersonal.' And I said, well, you know, can love be impersonal?
Dr. Richard Oxenberg [ 00:28:57,170 ] And he said, 'Oh, the other is just attachment.' And then what happened is that our eyes locked. And I felt this. I don't even know how to describe it, this sort of beam of energy pounding me in the chest. I mean, it was not subtle. It was not at all subtle. It was like being hit, like being slapped in the chest by someone. Totally unlike anything I'd ever experienced before. And the session ended and I went out. I went back to my tent. It was night. And it was as if there was this globe of white energy in my chest region radiating throughout my body. It was really...
Dr. Richard Oxenberg [ 00:29:59,190 ] And, and I'm thinking, well, okay, you know, that didn't feel bad. Maybe, you know, maybe I'm about to become enlightened. I've gone through all these years looking to be enlightened, maybe this is gonna be it. And I didn't get any sleep that night.
Dr. Richard Oxenberg [ 00:30:17,920 ] And the next morning, I went into, they had this big, big meditation tent where everybody came to meditate. So I went to morning meditation. And now I was meditating, and it was not boring anymore. I felt like... There was a sense I was hovering above my body in a state of what I would call bliss.
Dr. Richard Oxenberg [ 00:30:43,770 ] And that was quite wonderful. And I thought, you know, I'm at least, you know, couldn't be more than two or three seconds from enlightenment. You're really getting close. Yeah, you know, I've got to be right at the cusp, you know. And then I felt this energy starting to concentrate in my forehead. And what I think in Hinduism, they call the third eye.
Dr. Richard Oxenberg [ 00:31:11,750 ] And it was as if I was being asked whether I wanted it to be opened or not. And I said, well, sure, you know, I'm about to be enlightened. And I did feel this opening in my forehead. And then I felt this intense inrush of energy that absolutely terrified me. I mean, the reaction was no longer, it was no longer fun. It was now I was terrified because this was too much. It was completely overwhelming.
Dr. Richard Oxenberg [ 00:31:50,040 ] It was not blissful or peaceful energy; it was energy and like an electric kind of energy. And I had my eyes closed and I began under my eyelids, I began seeing these weird faces and it was just terrifying. So I stopped the meditation and began to think, 'Oh, my God, what is going on here? Who is this master? What is he doing?
Dr. Richard Oxenberg [ 00:32:22,780 ] And I ended up wandering around the ashram for most of the day, trying to figure out what was going on. I ran into my preceptor, and he was busy with other people, couldn't talk to me. And at one point, I ran into the master again. Now, the master was not easy to talk to, because whenever he'd be on the grounds, he'd be surrounded by a great throng of people. So you couldn't get close to him. But as it happened, he and his throng were walking down one side of a building, and I was walking down the other side of a building, the same building. We met at the corner. And there I was. Yeah, there I was, you know, right in front of him.
Dr. Richard Oxenberg [ 00:33:07,880 ] And so I said, Master, can I ask you a question? And he said, certainly. And then I didn't know what to say. Because what I wanted to ask him was about, you know, what was going on with me. But we were surrounded by this throng of people. And I didn't, you know, I was embarrassed to, you know. So I said, “I've been having these very intense meditations,” is the way that I put it. And he said, well, that's what we're here for. And I just, you know, I mean, because people had talked about him as if he could just look at you and see your spiritual state. So I was just waiting for him to see what was going on with me. But apparently he didn't. In any event, I said, 'Yeah, I know that's what we're here for.' And then he said, 'Real life is when you don't know you're living it.'
Dr. Richard Oxenberg [ 00:34:03,140 ] Which, to this day, I'm not sure what he meant exactly by that. But it wasn't comforting because I had always wanted to know that I was living my life, you know. You know, I mean, it was people who didn't know they were living their life that I would have defined that as real death, not real life. So I said, 'I don't know what that means.' And he said, 'Well, think about it.' And then he sort of walked away. So all this was incredibly disturbing. And I finally decided that I had to leave the ashram. And I did. And I was still feeling this energy going through my body.
Dr. Richard Oxenberg [ 00:35:31,870 ] From my reading of Tillich and from other things, from watching It's a Wonderful Life, and Miracle on 34th Street, and going to sit on Santa Claus's lap. My mother, even though we were Jewish, she used to take me to sit on Santa Claus's lap at Christmas time. I had these positive associations with Christianity and with Jesus. And years ago, a friend of mine in Atlanta had introduced me to this chapel in Atlanta.
Dr. Richard Oxenberg [ 00:36:12,800 ] Where there was a 24, a Catholic chapel, where there was a 24-hour adoration of the Holy Host. Then, I don't know if you're familiar with that sort of thing, but it was Christ the King Church on Peachtree Street in Atlanta. I'm sure it's still there. And they had, I don't know if they still have this, they had a little chapel and it was open 24 hours a day and they always had somebody manning it. And you could go there and pray.
Dr. Richard Oxenberg[ 00:36:45,150 ] They had a consecrated wafer, which was the holy host. And you could sort of kneel before the consecrated wafer and pray. And any time of the day or night. And so when I got back from the ashram. And I was feeling like I was being accosted by something evil. In my mind, that's what I was feeling. So I wanted something good. You need something good to counteract something evil. And somehow in my mind, Jesus was good. So I went to this chapel and I started praying there. And even there, I started feeling a sort of energy sort of emanating. I was very weird. I never felt anything quite like this, anything like this in my life.
Dr. Richard Oxenberg [ 00:37:31,360 ] But I had a sense of comfort there. I remember there was a base relief of Jesus being baptized. And he had such a wonderfully peaceful expression on his face. And I just kept thinking, that's what I want. Not all this energy. I left that. Meanwhile, I still hadn't gotten any sleep for like now a couple of days. I called my friend Monzer, who was in the religious studies program at the University of Georgia at that time.
Dr. Richard Oxenberg [ 00:38:10,340 ] And started talking to him about some of the stuff that had been going on. He and I had many conversations about religious philosophy over the years. And at that point, I decided I needed to be baptized. Oh, really? At that point? Yeah, that somehow that would, you know, that would be a kind of...protections against whatever was going on um and um and so I asked him. He had a priest, Monzer, had somebody who he admired a priest and Monzer gave me his name and I called the priest up. And he talked to me a little while and probably said to himself, you know, I don't know.
Dr. Richard Oxenberg [ 00:38:55,420 ] He advised me to go to this monastery in Conyers, Georgia. The monastery, I believe, is still there. It's the Cistercian Monastery. And he said that there are probably some monks there who would be familiar with mystical experiences. And maybe somebody there could help you because, you know, just sort of over my head. So that's what I did. I went up to, I drove up with my friend Monzer, I drove up to the monastery in Conyers. And the first person I ran into there was a nun.
Dr. Richard Oxenberg [ 00:39:33,810 ] And I ended up spending most of the day with her. We walked around the grounds. I'd been to the monastery before. An ex-girlfriend of mine had introduced me to it years ago. And I used to go up there and I just stood in the grounds and read a book because it was incredibly peaceful. You know, they had a gate that led into the monastery and it was, I remember, that you'd walk through the gate and it's like the whole atmosphere would change.
Dr. Richard Oxenberg [ 00:40:04,820 ] From an ordinary atmosphere, suddenly you'd be in this place of peace. Anyway, the nun and I wandered around. I told her, started telling my whole story about my sister's death and my struggles with God and with religion. Remember, she said to me, 'Richard, God has been chasing you like a hound.' Yes. I said, 'Well, I hope He finds me, you know.' And she said, 'There is a monk that she would like to see if he will see me because he has some experience with mystical kinds of things.' And so she led me and Monzer into the guest house of the monastery, went off to find the monk.
Dr. Richard Oxenberg [ 00:40:55,380 ] And a little later, not long after that, this monk walked in, named Pablo Maria. And he had this wonderfully kind face and a Spanish man. And he walked in, and he took my hand, and he looked me in the eyes, and he said, 'Calm down.' You know, it's going to be all right. And it was, you know, his whole demeanor was incredibly calming. And I said to him, you know, I'd like to be baptized. And he said, well, we can't do that. You have to apparently in the Catholic Church, you have to go through a period of religious education, Catholic education before they'll baptize you. So I wasn't eligible to be baptized.
Dr. Richard Oxenberg [ 00:41:50,620 ] But he said, would you like to receive the Holy Spirit? And I said, well, sure. Now, who wouldn't want to receive the Holy Spirit? And so he did. He said a prayer. He was holding my hand. And at the conclusion of the prayer. I felt this wave of vibratory energy pass from his hand into mine and then go through my body in three successive waves. But this now I thought was good energy.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin [ 00:42:26,970 ] Yes, yes, it feels different, right?
Dr. Richard Oxenberg [ 00:42:28,690 ] It felt different and it felt good. And now I figured the good energy is going to tackle the bad energy or whatever. I mean, all of this, you have to understand, Jerry, that I didn't believe that any of this was possible. I mean, so it was completely startling and upending of my basic conception of reality. You know, energy passing between people.
Dr. Richard Oxenberg [ 00:43:01,230 ] But… Afterwards, he gave me this big hug and said to me, there's no evil in you, Richard, which was very comforting. There's no evil in you. Whatever it is you're going through, it's not, you know. And then he said he was going to go in and I guess it was time for mass. And he was going to say a mass for me.
Dr. Richard Oxenberg [ 00:43:29,900 ] And to this day, I still don't know. I need to go talk to some Catholic person to understand what that means. I don't know what it means to say a mass for somebody. But he went in and he did the mass and then he came out. And he gave me another big hug. And he said he got a message for me. And the message was that God was already within me and working within me. That was a nice message.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin[ 00:43:55,370 ] Amazing. Yes, and it sounds like a truthful message. I would say, from my perspective, it's a truthful message.
Dr. Richard Oxenberg [ 00:44:04,730 ] I think it's probably true for all of us, but maybe at different times we come to moments of crisis where it becomes more true or more relevantly true. I stayed the night at the monastery. He gave me permission to stay overnight in the guest house. But the energy was still going on. And at this point, I was intellectually, you know, I've always had a philosophical bent.
Dr. Richard Oxenberg [ 00:44:40,900 ] And so intellectually, I'm totally confused right now. I don't know what's true. I don't know up from down or right from wrong or evil from good. I don't know what is going on. I mean, some things feel good, some things don't feel good, but I don't know. Was the master at the ashram, was he a bad guy or was he a good guy who was with this energy, bad energy, was it good energy? Was the energy I felt at the ashram the same as the energy I felt at the monastery?
Dr. Richard Oxenberg [ 00:45:10,690 ] Who knew, right? And there was nobody there to explain it to me.I went home and I would go through these moments of thinking that, well, okay, things are going to be great. And who knows, maybe I won't be enlightened. Maybe I'll, you know, I don't know, have some sort of westernized or Christianized version of... something, but I was still going through these ups and downs of experience, and I got home and I was still feeling all this energy coming through me.
Dr. Richard Oxenberg [ 00:45:54,680 ] And somehow I got it into my mind that if the energy hit my heart, that I might have a heart attack. And I called my ex-girlfriend and asked her. She's a sweetheart. She's somebody. She's still a very good friend of mine. And told her sort of a little bit of what was going on and asked her if she would drive me to the emergency room. She drove me to the emergency room. I said, maybe I'm having a heart attack. They wheeled me in. They did an EKG. Nothing was wrong with my heart. And I said once again that I wanted to be baptized.
Dr. Richard Oxenberg [ 00:46:29,820 ] And this time... They had a Methodist minister who was the chaplain in the hospital. And he didn't have any scruples about baptizing me. And so he came in and he baptized me, you know, in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.
Dr. Richard Oxenberg [ 00:46:49,220 ] I took some baptismal water and tapped my forehead. He tapped it right in this area that had been open. And once again, I started feeling this vibratory energy going through me. My friend Vicky, who was there, said that my face went from a state of... fear to a state of peace and it sort of stayed that way for about half an hour. And so I was baptized.
Dr. Richard Oxenberg [ 00:47:21,160 ] And the story goes on. I won't go through all the details of it because it could go through a long story. I spent years after that trying to sort through what was going on intellectually. At some point… I had been taking night classes at Georgia State University in philosophy just out of my own interest. And at some point in the middle of all this.
Dr. Richard Oxenberg [ 00:47:55,940 ] A woman who I knew from Georgia State called me up and asked me for coffee. And we went and had coffee. And she said that she was applying to the graduate program in women's studies at Emory University. And she said, I happen to have an extra application, Richard. Why don't you apply for the philosophy program?
Dr. Richard Oxenberg [ 00:48:24,510 ] And I said, well, you know, I'm not going to get into the philosophy program. And she said, go ahead. Why don't you apply? What do you have to lose? So she handed me the extra application. And I went home. And I was also still going through tremendous anxiety over everything.
Dr. Richard Oxenberg [ 00:48:41,529 ] And really, in order to distract my mind from all the anxiety, I decided to fill out the application. And I did. I filled it out. I went to Georgia State and got some recommendations from some of the professors that I'd been taking these classes with. And they gave me some nice recommendations. And lo and behold, I got admitted to Emory University. Into the PhD program.
Dr. Richard Oxenberg [ 00:49:03,350 ] And I went, I started attending. I worked out an arrangement with my software company that would allow me to work part-time there while I was getting my PhD. At some point, I met a woman— just tell it very quickly now, I know it's going on and on— from an evangelical church. She was in the theology program at Emory, and she invited me to attend a play that they were doing at her evangelical church. They were doing... a production of Edward Albee's The Zoo Story, which is just not the sort of play you would expect to find at an evangelical church.
Dr. Richard Oxenberg [ 00:49:49,550 ] But afterwards, I spoke to the pastor who was very involved in the theater community in Atlanta and asked him about it. And he said, his belief was that Christianity should be responding to the existential ills, the existential despair of people. And so, therefore, these plays— that illustrated these existential ills were highly relevant to Christianity. And I was impressed with that. And I started attending that church. And I eventually got my PhD.
Dr. Richard Oxenberg [ 00:50:35,870 ] I got a job, never a tenure track job, but a job teaching at Boston University in their core curriculum program. I moved up to Boston have since been writing a lot of, and I guess, you know, to sort of wrap this up, at this point, I would say that I have arrived at what I would call faith. And I've sort of given up on the idea of having this explosive enlightenment experience. That in effect, that's not what...
Dr. Richard Oxenberg [ 00:51:26,680 ] being connected to God is ultimately about feeling a sense of being able to trust that existence is ultimately benign and ultimately loving in some sense. And to me, faith is having that trust, is experiencing that sense of trust at a deep level.
Dr. Richard Oxenberg [ 00:52:06,270 ] And, you know, Jerry, it took me, I mean, we could do a whole other session, I guess, on my intellectual musings. It took me a lot of intellectual wrestling to come up with a story about God that I could tell myself that would allow for the horrors that occur, like my sister's death, without negating the ultimate goodness of reality and being. And I guess I have finally arrived at that for myself.
Dr. Richard Oxenberg [ 00:52:45,910 ] And I'm, you know, I've come to a place, I mean, the journey continues. It never, it's never, you know, it's never completely completed. But I've come to a place of peace, you know, basic sense of peace, a sense of being connected with the eternal. I mean, I think the way that it ultimately has to work, and I think you find this in virtually all the religions, is that there is that part of us that is connected to the ups and downs of this world.
Dr. Richard Oxenberg [ 00:53:22,970 ] What in the Eastern religions is called samsara. And samsara is always up and down, right? You win some, you lose some. And samsara is, you can't be truly at peace in samsara because samsara is always taking away with one hand what it gives with the other.
Dr. Richard Oxenberg [ 00:53:43,910 ] But underneath the samsara is, I mean, you can think of it as the metaphor being like the ocean. On the surface of the ocean are all these waves, and the waves are crashing against each other and knocking against each other. But if you go down beneath the waves, you get to a place of stillness. and a place of peace where the ocean is at peace. And that's what I've come to believe and experience in some ways. That, yeah, on the surface, there's life and death and good and bad and love relationships and the breakup of love relationships.
Dr. Richard Oxenberg [ 00:54:22,800 ] And it's like the surface of the waves. But down below that, there is this— the ground of being, to use Tillich's phrase. Is peace, is a state of peace, a state of belonging, a state of embrace in some sense. And if you can somehow connect to that place.
Dr. Richard Oxenberg [ 00:54:56,390 ] To me, that's what faith is. Faith is experiencing. Maybe at one level it's just believing in, but ultimately, fulfilled faith is the experience of that place. And it's not going to stop you from getting sick, and it's not going to stop you from dying. It's not going to stop you from having loved ones that die. But it is going to make all those things penultimate rather than ultimate.
Dr. Richard Oxenberg [ 00:55:28,810 ] And so there is an ultimate peace that underlies all of that. And that ultimate peace, expressed outward, right, expressed inwardly, it's a state of peace. Expressed outwardly, it's a... It's a state of love and compassion for others, the desire that there be peace for others. And then that turns into a desire for justice in the world and such things as that. And I guess that's where I've come to today.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin [ 00:56:06,640 ] A wonderfully engaged life. And the phrase that came to my mind as you were concluding was that, I guess, Christian phrase, the peace that passeth understanding. The peace that passeth understanding.
Dr. Richard Oxenberg [ 00:56:27,400 ] Absolutely, and that's a phrase that I've often appealed to or thought about in exactly the sense in which I was talking, that the reason it passes understanding is because it's not... Contingent on what's happening in the world, there's all sorts of we generally think that to be at peace, everything has to be going well for you in the world. But the peace that passes the understanding is the peace that comes from something more deep, something more fundamental than the ups and downs of the world. I want to just add one other thing.
Dr. Richard Oxenberg [ 00:57:15,720 ] I was baptized. I do go to church every now and then, although I still sometimes find that the service is boring. But what I do love in going to church is taking communion, the ritual of communion. Has always been deeply meaningful to me because it's a sense of ingesting the divine within you. And there's something very beautiful to me about that.
Dr. Richard Oxenberg [ 00:57:48,740 ] I still regard myself as Jewish. I've never felt that in becoming baptized, I was converting away from Judaism. I just was, you know, it was like that line that you're… You're not losing a daughter, you're gaining a son. It was, you know, I wasn't losing Judaism, I was gaining Christianity. And of course, because of my involvement and reading about Eastern religions and so forth.
Dr. Richard Oxenberg [ 00:58:23,660 ] I continue to see all of the religions as, in their different ways, pointing to this deeper spiritual truth. And of course, that's part of why I was attracted to the Theology Without Walls project. That you are, that you head. And that's how I see myself now. It's not, I have my own version of Christianity, I guess, you know, that is compatible in many ways with Judaism and with certain ways of reading Buddhism and certain ways of reading Hinduism.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin [ 00:59:06,540 ] Oh, that's interesting. Well, I want to thank you very much. This has been fascinating, Richard, and fascinating because… It's a real experience that you're reporting of someone always searching. And thinking about it is the thinking adds this articulate level, so you can share it and what you're going through. And it's wonderful that you came out in a place of peace. Yeah. So, until next time.
Dr. Richard Oxenberg [ 00:59:41,380 ] Well, thank you, Jerry. It's been good to express it, and I appreciate the opportunity. Oh, that's great. That's great.
Scott Langdon [ 01:00:29,880 ] 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 1 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.