Daily Excerpt: An Afternoon's Dictation (Greenebaum) - The Call to Interfaith
Today's book excerpt comes from An Afternoon's Dictation by Steven Greenebaum.
PART ONE: THE CALL TO INTERFAITH
CHAPTER ONE
In 1999, I’d reached the end of my tether. Over the years,
there had been one crushing event after another. The woman I’d intended to
spend my life with, who had intended to spend her life with me, had been killed
in a senseless traffic accident. My mother, who had lived her life fettered by
the chains of patriarchy, had at last broken free and blossomed, recognizing
her own self-worth, only to be struck down by cancer after just a few short years
of truly enjoying life. And then my father, with whom I’d had major
disagreements but whom I loved and honored as my father, had died a humiliating
death, plagued by dementia.
These were just the tips of the iceberg. I was one angry
human. In the privacy of my house, I kept saying, sometimes out loud and
sometimes in my mind, “God, you’re there? Really? I want five minutes, and I
want some answers.” Then, after several months of expressing my anger, I got
answers--well over five minutes’ worth. I took three pages of dictation--revelation,
if you will, and not only about life and death.
What set me on my heels was that I had gotten answers to so
much more than I had been asking about. Indeed, the tragedies that so oppressed
my mind didn’t even come up until mid-way through the dictation. What came
first were answers to huge questions that had been echoing somewhere in the
corners of my brain for years but that I’d never actually put into words.
Living an Interfaith life is today so completely who I am
that it is sobering to realize that I’d reached the age of 50 without ever
seriously thinking about it. It wasn’t foremost on my mind. Not even close. It
was not a part of my day-to-day life. It wasn’t something I’d spent time
pondering. And frankly, while I dutifully wrote down the revelations as they
were given to me, my immediate interest was riveted on what came roughly
halfway through, most particularly two revelations. I’ll deal with them and their
broader meaning more fully in the next section, but for now, they threw me both
a mental and spiritual life preserver.
You cannot live forever, but you can be with
Me forever. Time is your measure, not Mine.
At this point in my life, I didn’t have any sort of handle
on who or what God was or might be. But here was the comforting assertion that
the woman I’d loved, whose life had been cut so horrifically short by a flaming
traffic accident, would forever be with God, whoever or whatever God was. The
same for my mom, and even my imperfect father. This gave me the chance to
breathe again. But what about how they died?
The mind is not the soul. Nor is the body.
Sometimes, the mind decays or the body writhes with pain before the soul has
left it. That is indeed a tragedy. Weep, but do not despair.
This was like God throwing comforting arms around me. My
father had tried hard to instill in me his belief that “real men” don’t cry. Now,
with “Weep, but do not despair,” I had permission to acknowledge my tears. God
was telling me that horrible things do indeed happen. Tragedy happens.
Acknowledge that. Accept that. It is terrible. Weep, yes, weep, but do not
despair. You still live. There are things you can do. You have a life. LIVE IT!
Wow!
That helped. It helped a great deal. Still, it wasn’t lost
on me that while these were the pressing issues in my life at this moment, they
weren’t where the dictation started. Clearly, they were important enough to me
that the call of the sacred indeed answered them; but they didn’t come first.
They didn’t come up until midway through the revelations. I had received
comfort and reassurance, but clearly there was more to this. I was also
supposed to do something. Me? I was supposed to do something? Good grief! What??
A few months later, after I’d recovered from the initial
shock of what had been given to me, I scooped up the dictation and travelled
south to Oregon to visit my longtime friend and now retired Methodist minister,
Rev. Wes Yamaka. I showed him the dictation I’d received.
“Am I nuts?” I asked him.
“No,” he told me. “You’re not nuts.” Then he handed the
revelations back to me.
“So, what are you going to do with this?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” I replied.
“Do you think you should sit on it?”
“No.”
“So, how do you intend to share it?” When I just looked at
him, Wes added, “Tell you what. Once you’ve written the book, if you feel like
it, I’d love to read it.”
Yikes! Ok, then, that clarified things. I had a lot to think
about. First and foremost, it seemed to me, I really did have to think about
this. I had to live with the revelations, ponder them, and then try to come to
grips with this dictation I’d been handed. I was well aware that I couldn’t
“do” anything until I had grappled with and better understood what it was I’d been
given. Thus began what ended up being about ten years of pondering and groping
with what had been revealed to me. And the first question to grapple with was
why was “Religion is
but a language for speaking to Me” the first revelation? Why was this
number one?
I’d been a Jew all my life, still was, and had no interest
in leaving Judaism. That said, I’d met some wonderful Christians; and while my
immediate knowledge at that point in my life was only about Judaism and
Christianity, I knew that there were a multitude of other religions. I’d
studied ancient history and not only knew of but deeply respected the ancient
Greeks. They’d believed in a whole pantheon of gods, led by Zeus. Christianity
and Judaism, while firmly parting company over the divinity of Jesus, were at
least related, particularly in their belief in one God. Yet the Greeks were
brilliant thinkers. What had happened? I also knew of Buddhism and Islam
(though at that time, little more than that they existed and a lot of humanity
followed those spiritual teachings). How could this be? So many differing
religions. If there is only one “right” answer, how could this possibly be?
And now, with the dictation, my first revelation did not
concern what angered me. Instead, it answered this deeply spiritual question
that had been quietly nagging at me for decades.
Religion is but a language for speaking to Me.
Think ye that arbol is better than tree? Was Old English a “false
language” because you now speak modern English?
Religion is a language? At first, that didn’t make sense.
And yet, after I sat with it and pondered it, it did make sense. It made a lot
of sense. No, the Spanish word arbol isn’t a better or worse word than
the English word tree. No, Old English wasn’t a false language, just as
the beliefs of the ancient Greeks weren’t a false religion. Humanity changes.
Cultures change. Language changes. Different doesn’t mean better or worse. Now
that I grasped it, this became for me an important, indeed life-altering, revelation.
The door to this revelation began to open wide as I reacted
to catastrophic events that occurred about two years after the dictation. It
was September 11, 2001. It wasn’t solely the horrific events of September 11
but also people’s reaction to them that made clear to me the need for a world
where we didn’t kill each other over our differing religious beliefs. I grew up
right after the Holocaust/Shoah. As a kid, it took me a while to realize that
it wasn’t Christianity that caused the extermination of over six million Jews.
It was the belief in the absolute rightness and supremacy of Christianity that allowed
some fanatics to accept that killing Jews was somehow “holy.” After September
11, as so many turned to a blind hatred of Islam, I didn’t know a lot about the
religion. Yet, I did know enough to understand that it wasn’t Islam that caused
9-11. It was belief in the absolute rightness and supremacy of Islam that
allowed some fanatics to accept the idea that blowing people up in the name of
Allah was somehow “holy.”
This brought home to me why “religion is a language” was
first on the list of revelations. 9-11 and people’s reaction to it also helped
me to realize that I needed to dig deeper into things , a lot deeper. I
needed not just to ponder this, I needed to study it. I needed to study other
religions. Ok, that’s a lot of study and a lot of books!
My study began, but certainly did not end, with Rescuing
the Bible from Fundamentalism by Bishop John Shelby Spong. I then read book
after book. Still, after more than two years of reading I realized I needed to
dig into this even more deeply. To do that, I needed structure. Go back to
school? Really? Ok, where? A Jew speaking only to Jews didn’t seem to work for
me. But what to do? At this moment, I was the choir director at a Unitarian
Universalist fellowship. Was that the answer? In 2004, I began exploring the
possibility of becoming a Unitarian Universalist minister. Me? A minister?
Me???
I realized I needed to study theology far more thoroughly
than I possibly could by staying at home and reading. So, I applied to Seattle
University’s School of Theology and Ministry and started my studies there the
summer of 2005. I received a Master’s in Pastoral Studies in 2007 (for more
details and context, please see my spiritual memoir, One Family: Indivisible).
Indies Today runner-up
Firebird Book Awards honorable mention
Pacific Book Award finalist (runner-up)
American Legacy Book Awards finalist
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