To see God

TO SEE GOD

I know that I must have told you this story before, probably many times before because it was the defining moment of my life, but I'm going to set it down for you, once again here, because it is germane to our conversation and illustrates for me, what it means to 'See God'.

I was brought up without any formal religious education. My parents, at the time, were both from Jewish families and were only very nominally 'believers', at best.

We would go to Grandma and Grandpa's for Passover, and I loved that! And I remember seeing Grandpa, sitting on the couch in the living room, saying his prayers in the morning…

But it was Grandma who was the first and only person up until then who ever mentioned the word 'God' to me.

I must have been all of five years old or so and I was staying with her there at Piermont ave during the day. We were out in the backyard, it was springtime and she was showing me all of the wildflowers growing in the yard and she said, "Look at them all! Each one different and each one so beautiful! There HAS to be a God because nobody else could have come up with this!"

So, that was my first introduction to and impression of God as Creator and Artist, an impression that has certainly stuck with me up until this day.

When I was a little older, around ten, I did go to Hebrew school at a synagogue in Westwood, very briefly. I remember hearing some of the Bible stories back then, but they didn't make any particular impression on me at the time and I never really related them to my conversation with Grandma.

All of that ended abruptly however, one afternoon when my mother and I had driven home from the Temple in Westwood, only to find my Father, kneeling on the living room floor, clutching his heart. That was the last time I ever saw my Father. My Mom sent me up the block to my friend, Glenn Potter's house and from there, I watched the ambulance come and take him away.

As fate would have it, he survived the heart attack, only to die of pneumonia in the hospital, nearly a week later, (which I always thought was particularly unfair somehow?)

Dad was only forty years old himself and for me, at the tender age ten, this was devastating! It pulled the rug right out from underneath me! I loved my Father dearly and never could have imagined that something like this could happen!

Being confronted with the reality of death at such a young age, it made me question everything that I thought I knew. It plunged me prematurely into a state of existential dread that lasted for the next four years - if my Father could die just like that, out of the blue, then there must be something dreadfully wrong with the universe! Something that I was unaware of up until then. Oh, I had had a few unpleasant things happen to me before that but nothing like this! In general, my life had been a fortunate and happy one, but now my eyes were opened and I began to see all of the evil at work in the world.

I went through four very difficult years where I could find no satisfactory answers to the questions that were tormenting me. The only thing that kept me going was this feeling that there had to be something that would explain it all, there had to be more to life than what meets the eye, something that no one had been able to show me up until then, or else there was just no reason to go on, life was just too absurd, unfair and unjust and the small degree of happiness that people seemed to live for did not balance out the horror of the existence of evil in the world.

My poor Mother would ask me, "What do you want?" And all I could answer her was, "I just want to know the Truth!"

After four years of this kind of grief, I think God heard my cry as a prayer and, out of His loving kindness towards His creatures, He answered it.

He answered it by coming to me Himself and by sharing Himself with me.

When people say that they have 'seen God', as I myself have said many times, I think that very rarely is the physical sense of sight involved, (although, in some cases, perhaps, in one form or another…)

The sense of sight is however, the most immediate and clearest of our senses and, as the saying goes, 'Seeing is believing'. Beyond that though, our Soul has its own senses and 'sees' things in its own way and even in those rare cases where the sense of sight is involved, there is also an interior experience that confirms that what they are 'seeing' is indeed a manifestation of God.

The word, "Telepathy" (from the Greek τῆλε, tele meaning "distant" and πάθος/-πάθεια, pathos or -patheia meaning "feeling or perception") is the purported communication directly from one mind to another without the intervention of either any of the five senses or through any other physical interaction. In other words, an extrasensory perception.

"Clairvoyance" is defined as, "the power or faculty of discerning objects not present to the senses. The ability to perceive matters beyond the range of ordinary perception."

Perhaps each of us has had at least some small experience of this during our life?

I had one preliminary telepathic experience which prepared me for, what I believed to be at the time and still believe to be, my first real encounter with the Living God.

I was over at the beach on Memorial day weekend in 1970, with three friends of mine that I had only just met the week before in Highschool and really didn't know well at all. I was fourteen years old at the time. 

We were sitting in a very big tent that someone had made by stretching a parachute over an old, unused telephone pole with about fifty other people in it. There was a radio playing and everyone was talking and laughing... Suddenly, the only way I can explain it, it was as if the four of us were sharing the same mind. 

One of us would think something and I would 'hear' it, crystal clear, in my own mind but at the same time, be able to discern whose thought it originally was.

It was as if, each one of us, our own mind was like a bubble which contains all of our own thoughts, when suddenly, all four of our bubbles merged together into one, (while at the same time remaining distinctly separate, if that makes any sense.)

To this day, I don't know what the other three guys experienced, I never thought to ask them, but that's how it was for me.

As I say, this unusual experience prepared me for what was about to happen soon afterwards. If before, my 'bubble' had merged with the 'bubbles' of my three friends, now my bubble merged with, what can only be described as a MUCH LARGER BUBBLE, a bubble that shared with me a great deal of information, Knowledge, Wisdom and Power, that I had had absolutely no idea about beforehand. 

Things I had never heard or read or even thought about or ever considered. Things about God, things about the world, it's history and interrelationships; I saw humanity going down the wrong road and God continually trying to bring us back, I saw things about myself that I certainly didn't know beforehand; how the consequences of the fall of Man had impacted my own life from the moment of my conception up until that present moment, etc.

At the same time, these 'thoughts' were accompanied by feelings of being loved, of overwhelming love, of Joy, Bliss, Peace of mind, utter contentment, complete fulfillment, etc.

And a Will towards Good that upheld and empowered me. 

I was convinced that God existed for sure as a Living and entirely independent Being who had nothing but Good in mind for us and an incredible and almost unimaginable future life prepared for us that He wanted nothing more than to bring us into.

Another thing that was instantly apparent to me was the inherent dignity of what it means to be a Human Being. Out of all of God's creatures, we are the ones who stand midway between the Angels and the Animals and are the only ones to whom He has given the potential to become Sons of God and gods like unto Himself. We are the Crown of Creation and everything else was created for us, for our sake, to be our responsibility and as an environment within which we are given the opportunity to fulfill our destiny.

And the really strange thing about this whole experience was that, first of all, being merged with this REALLY BIG MIND did not overwhelm or obliterate my own, unique individual sense of self, but rather upheld and fulfilled it in a completely satisfying manner, and secondly, although this was an entirely new and unexpected experience for me, it didn't feel that way. In fact, it felt completely natural and familiar, as if it was something I had always known and somehow, had forgotten, only to suddenly have remembered it!

I knew without a doubt that it was the answer to everything that had been troubling me for the past four years and I went, in a moment, from being Agnostic, at best, to being a Gnostic and an Evangelist because, from that moment on, A STRONG DESIRE WAS BORN IN MY HEART TO EXTEND THE MESSAGE TO ALL PEOPLES - it was clear that, whatever it was that I was experiencing at the moment, it was not just for myself, it was for everyone at all times…

One of the main things I realized at the time was what it meant to be created in the Image and after the likeness of God. In particular, the way in which the consciousness of the God that I had encountered, had three distinct facilities that I shared with Him but had never considered before. These three are Thinking, Feeling and Willing, which together, form what is known as Intent.

It is this power of Intent that builds the worlds and maintains them, renewing their molecular structure from Micro-second to Micro-second.

We share these same facilities and power of Intent with God. 

What I had learned, in the twinkling of an eye, was the difference between using these facilities and this power, 'on our own', from our own, very limited perspective, and using these same facilities and powers while being upheld and fulfilled by sharing in God's consciousness, effectively making us Sons of God and gods in our own right as we were originally intended to be. 

I saw quite clearly, the kind of world we were meant to be inhabiting, one where whatever we Intended would come into being instantaneously and by virtue of our intimate Oneness with God and all of creation, would come into being in complete balance and harmony with All-That-Is, a world where Time/Space and the Laws of Physics were the loosest of frameworks, if at all applicable.

Pretty heady stuff for a fourteen year old, but there you have it. Changed my life forever for the better.

From that moment on I have been convinced that God exists, that we are created in the Image and Likeness of God, that we are meant to be gods ourselves and that nothing less will ever truly satisfy us.

Since then, God's consciousness has always been there in the background, sometimes veiled and then in turn, unveiled according to my inner disposition and outer behavior. It's a living relationship of greater and lesser intimacy entirely dependent upon my willingness to come closer or push it away.

God never imposes Himself on us but always awaits our free choice whether or not to know Him and to grow closer to Himself.

The Mystical experience is very much like a marriage and the image of a wedding is used very often throughout the Scriptures and in the writings of the Holy Fathers on Prayer and the Spiritual Life, to allegorically describe it.

It was not until years after having first had this experience that I finally read the Bible and other writings on Theology, which only served to confirm the validity of what I had somehow managed to experience on my own.

This personal experience of Communion with God, as far as I'm concerned, is one of the predominant ways in which the phrase: "To See God" is meant and I would like to add this very appropriate quote from the First Epistle of John the Evangelist and Theologian:

"Beloved, now are we the sons of God, and it doth not yet appear what we shall be: but we know that, when he shall appear, we shall be like him; for we shall see him as he is." (1 John 3:2)

In the course of the next seven years, I continued to have experiences like this.

 Then, while I was visiting friends in Charlotte, North Carolina, I was trying to talk with them about these experiences I had been having and they just weren't getting it - I just wasn't able to get it across to them…

I was staying in a tent on their property and I went out there, upset, crying, praying to the God I believed in and asking, “when will I ever be able to communicate this to other people?”

Suddenly, I felt a presence, as if someone had come in the tent with me. I looked around but didn't see anyone. Then I was ushered once more into that experience of oneness with God. But this time, I knew that someone was doing the ‘ushering’ and that this ‘someone’ was Jesus.

Now, up to this point, I knew next to nothing about Christianity. Brought up nominally Jewish, never read the New Testament, hadn't talked to anyone about Jesus, but knew, without a doubt, that this was Jesus!

Had a whole lot of things revealed to me in the twinkling of an eye, about life, about history, about myself, about the Holy Trinity, etc, etc, etc…

Felt this indescribable oneness that didn't obliterate my individual sense of self and heard a ‘voice’ saying, “This is what I have in mind for you. And not just you, but for everyone. Just focus on this, make this the most important thing in your life and everything else will fall into place.”

I was keeping a diary at the time and, after having this experience, wrote in it: “Decided to become a Christian today.”

Immediately thereafter, miraculous things began to happen to me, more numerous than I can recount here.

Suffice it to say that my prayer was answered and I was blessed with the ‘gift of gab’ and there isn't one person I've met since then that I haven't told about what great good things God has done for me.

It was many years later, looking back on the fact that God answered my prayer in that tent so long ago, that I realized, that, had I known that God was going to answer my prayer, I would have perhaps made a smarter prayer, something along the lines of, “When will I ever be able to PRACTICE what I preach?”

Oh well, better late than never, I guess!

After having this experience in North Carolina and deciding to become a Christian, I began meeting other Christians and I soon began to realize that there were very many different ‘flavors’ of “Christianity”.

The first few I met just didn't feel the same to me as the presence I had experienced in the tent so I didn't either go with them or get involved with them right away.

Then I went to visit my other set of grandparents in Florida and they brought me over to my Great Aunt's house for dinner and I did there what I do everywhere when I visit someone for the first time, I began looking at the books in her bookshelf.

I saw there a book that I had seen the title of before in other places, but had never actually pulled off the shelf and looked at before… “Franny and Zooey” by J D Salinger

I pulled it off the shelf and still without looking at it, brought it over to my Aunt Gertrude and asked her if I could borrow it? She looked at me for a minute, obviously realizing what it is about, and said, “Yes, of course.”

So, as it turned out, the very first book I read after deciding to become a Christian was a book about a girl who was reading a book called, “Way of a Pilgrim”, which is about a Russian Pilgrim who was wandering the countryside reading a book called, “The Philokalia” and looking for someone who can teach him about what it means in the Bible when the Apostle Paul says that we ought to ‘Pray without ceasing'. He eventually meets someone who begins to teach him about how to say the Jesus Prayer.

First book I pick up…

So, naive and inexperienced as I am, I start attempting to say the Jesus Prayer.

Not long after, I found myself in Flagstaff Arizona where friends of mine from High school were living at the time. More miraculous things continued to be happening on a regular basis.

I had been staying with my friends at their house but it was getting kind of crowded because more of us kept on showing up, so one day, I decided to go out and look for a place to rent for a couple of us.

I walked past this one house on Humphreys street that had a strange symbol in the window - a square with a circle in it, with a triangle inside that with a flaming Cross inside that - no name, just the symbol - and I thought to myself, “hmm. That's unusual…” and continued on into town…where I saw a young guy, must have been about the same age as myself at the time, dressed in a brown robe, with all of this Light pouring out of him like you'd see around a magnet and I felt like I had to go over and talk to him.

I walked up to him and asked him, “What are you a part of?” Because it was obvious to me that he was hooked into something bigger than himself.

He just smiled at me and looked at me like, (got another one…) and said, “O, the Holy Order of MANS. We have free classes and Services. Why don't you come by sometime?” He took out a piece of paper and a pencil and wrote down an address, handed it to me and said, “Bye. Have a nice day!” And that was it.

I thought to myself, “hmm. He was real sincere and didn't try to lay any weird trips on me. I think I'll go check it out.”

A couple of days later, I went to the address written on the paper. Same house with the unusual symbol. I knocked on the door and someone in blue clerics let me in - br Allen.

From one side of the door to the other, the feeling of the Presence of God was so strong you could cut it with a knife and it felt exactly like what I had experienced in the tent back in North Carolina, and I said to myself, “THIS IS IT! THESE ARE THE PEOPLE I'VE BEEN LOOKING FOR! I'M GOING TO BE WITH THESE PEOPLE FOR THE REST OF MY LIFE!”

This before anybody said a word to me or I had any idea what they actually believed or taught…

As it turned out, they were just some New Agey cult that began in San Francisco during the Sixties and then spread throughout the Country after that, who's only difference was that, although they saw ‘the truth of the Perennial Philosophy in all religions and spiritual paths’, they considered Christianity to have recapitulated all of those truths and taken them all up to another, unparalleled level, something that I also believed.

Very long story short, after a number of years of being very loosely involved with them, I moved to San Francisco and there got more involved.

At that time, the General Director of the Order was going through a crisis in his faith and was looking for the heart of Christianity and in which direction to take the Order.

Then, seemingly by accident, he stumbles upon some copies of a publication in his library called, “The Orthodox Word”, edited by a Fr Seraphim Rose of the St Herman of Alaska Monastery in Platina CA.

The rest is history and in the course of the next ten years about 2/3 of the members of the Holy Order of MANS converted and were received into the Orthodox Church.

Imagine our surprise when we found out that the thing that our weird New Age cult was most like, was the oldest form of Christianity that somehow still existed!

It was right around this same time that I stumbled into a bookstore in Berkeley and discovered, much to my surprise, that “Way of a Pilgrim” was a real book and not something that Salinger had just made up for his book!

So, there I was, at the time that we were deciding to become Orthodox, reading “Way of a Pilgrim”, “Writings from the Philokalia on the prayer of the heart” and a book called, “Unseen Warfare”, so, for myself, Orthodoxy was a ‘no-brainer' and the obvious direction for us to move in.

I was Baptized in 1987 and have been in the Orthodox Church ever since and involved with many of the same people I first met in Flagstaff, Portland OR and in San Francisco, (married to one of them…)

Uncountable miracles since then, in fact all of life is an ongoing miracle that comes into being over and over again from microsecond to microsecond… Oh well, you know the rap by now. You will just have to decide if it sounds interesting to you or not.

All the best to you and yours!