Every book, even one that presents an easily understood theology, has its origins somewhere in the author’s life. At least this one does for me. This one has its earliest origins when I was age 5 and had to use crayons to color in a picture of Abraham with a knife over his head to sacrifice his son. I questioned the Sunday school teacher about that, but she didn’t have a good answer. It happened again at Easter when we had to color in a picture of Jesus on the cross between the two robbers. Again, neither the teacher nor my mother had any answer why God would require a father to kill his own son. I was deeply disturbed as my Grandma Dorothy had always told us that God was a God of love, and had only good for us in our lives. It would be another 42 years before I was able to begin the processes of discovery that would prove that God is truly a God of Love.
———
The material that provides the kernel around which most of this book is written had its origins circa 1990 through 1992, during the immediate time of recovery from a traumatic brain injury incurred in late August 1990. I had fallen head first from a six foot step ladder onto a concrete floor and was unconscious for several hours. When I later reflected on the details of the accident and what followed, I realized the accident also involved a near death experience, but not quite like the type where the person is in a tunnel of light. Rather, I was standing outside of my body in the company of my Guardian Angel and in a wordless exchange I was given the choice of crossing over or remaining here to complete the destiny of my life. I chose to remain here.
Over the months and following several years of my recovery I became aware of far more than just the presence of my Guardian Angel. I also recall that the period of being unconscious gave me an unlikely opportunity. Like a child peeking under the tent of a carnival that had stopped in town in the 1940s to see a man manipulating the wires and switches with his foot which the audience could not see under his table, he would magically turn on the lights wherever his hand hovered above them. Similarly, for me in my unconsciousness, I was given the opportunity of “seeing the wiring under the board” of the universe. What I “saw” was presented matter-of-factly for me to understand just how the universe works — the dimensions of the universe we do not see. Later, I surmised the accident had thinned my veil of consciousness from a thick, heavy wall tapestry to a thin gauze that I could see through. As consciousness is neither bound temporally or dimensionally, that view offers many opportunities for my understanding what is going on around me.
Later, I became aware that when I met people I “knew” what they were about, and could “see” into their lives and know as they did the many details of their lives, particularly their relationships. This also included important eras of their lives that had not yet occurred. And, that ability was not limited to just people but the larger dimensions of the world. Today, I view all of this as a distraction to my work involving the social, political, and economics dimensions of social sustainability, though I can clearly see the necessity of social sustainability to help our world recover from the events that will traumatize the world in the next decades.
In 1990, my life’s circumstances had made it possible to move to my mother’s home in Salem, Oregon as a retreat for recovery. The accident had caused some cognitive damage, and also left me with a shattered and dislocated left elbow that had been repaired. Time to heal left me bored, so with one arm in a cast, I used the other to assemble a word processing center in my small bedroom. There I began the task of figuring out what to do with the rest of my life, particularly the next day, weeks, and months.
The “thin as gauze” consciousness provided an unexpected and unrecognized relationship with a grand and magnificent spiritual presence in me. It would be almost fifteen more years before I recognized this presence as what Jesus called the “kingdom of God,” while others call it a “Fragment of God,” and still others call it the “Presence of God.” This too gave way to daily wordless “conversations” that seemed more like evolved states of contemplation, but always provided an “urge” to proceed in a particular direction, to do some particular thing. At the time, I usually thought it was “just my own thinking” and not from the Source within me.
As you will see from my BIO, the first urge during my recovery resulted in a stapled book of 142 pages, entitled, “Developing A Personal, Loving God Theology,” that I self-published in 1992. What was not published then was a manuscript entitled, “I am Who I am.” This was created during semi-lucid states of meditation at the keyboard that echoed many of the thoughts and language that was used in the “Conversations with God” books by Neale Donald Walsh. I was about to submit the manuscript to a publisher when Donald’s book appeared in bookstores. I did not proceed. As I do not have a competitive bone in my body, I did not try to submit my work to another publisher, but over the years kept the manuscript and my thoughts to myself.
Five years later I wrote dissertations for master and doctoral degrees in spiritual metaphysics using the two theologies that are provided in the following chapters. It wasn’t until ten years later (2007) as I began to get increasingly immersed in “social sustainability” that I was able to see that God-centered beliefs offer a basis for hope to those who live in societies and conditions which create personal suffering and social dis-ease. Now it is 2017 when God-centered religions seem to be causing as much difficulty for believers and nations as autocratic regimes. It seems way past time for me to engage the spectrum of topics in this work: a loving God, God-centered religions, Jesus, Christianity, Christian churches, and their survival to become contributors to the social sustainability of societies, communities, families, and children.
1 Jaworski, Joseph 2011 Synchronicity, The Inner Path of Leadership