God Wants You to Read This
Part One of Three: Traveling Through Nepantla
I love to practice bibliomancy. I suppose I’ve been doing this all my life without knowing it had a name, but I started regularly practicing it when I was 23 and became an evangelical Christian. If I had a question for God or needed an answer to a problem, I would pick up the Bible and randomly turn to a page and a passage, and magically, it was exactly what I needed to know. I was on fire for the Lord, going to church three times a week, unsuccessfully trying not to sin, and walking door to door in suburban blocks spreading the Gospel.
I carried my Bible everywhere, and I loved to read the stories and the wisdom, the Book of Esther and Proverbs being my favorites. I got my BA in Political Science, but I wanted to be a writer, and I wrote and read late at night until I fell asleep. I loved entering into books, because it was like walking into an alternate universe, a separate reality, and when I became a Christian, the experience got even richer. The main point of reading the Bible was to hear the voice of God, to listen, to learn, to apply the lessons to your own life. To do like Jesus did.
It was the tome that mattered most, and not only was it filled with fantastic stories and aphorisms, but it was also literally (in the fundamentalist Christian reality I lived in) God DIRECTLY speaking to me.
God speaks through the Bible.
This is a fundamentalist belief, but I took it a little further. I believed God was in the details of everyday life. I remember when I first became a Christian, after I had recited the official “sinner’s prayer and became one of the elect,” that the brethren told me that God was always with me now, and He would show me the path I needed to take in life. He would find the way to speak to me, they said, and I believed it. Although the Bible was literally the most direct voice, God could speak through the wind, and the Holy Spirit walked with me, pointed out things that I should pay attention to.
I would walk around Fresno State truly believing that the Spirit was walking along side me, and He wanted to show me things, if I would just notice. Maybe there were hidden messages in the trees, or through open windows, or in how the birds flew overhead. I believed there were messages in anything. How fun it was for a creative writer to be a Christian!
Everything was new and significant. I was surrounded by unopened letters from God. If some rando came up to me and asked, Where’s the men’s room? I would think this was from the Spirit. I was meant to meet that man, maybe lead him to Jesus. But as a writer, I couldn’t help but going deeper into the details of my chance encounter with the toilet seeker, so my desire to lead him to God was only one level of reality. Beneath the details of the encounter, God was showing me more. Why did he need the men’s room? Why not the administration building or the café? He needed the restroom to expel the waste within him, the caca and pee of sin, and that’s what I needed. Get rid of the waste! Be pure. Jesus says that it doesn’t matter what enters a man, but what comes out of him. No matter what I eat, beans, Kentucky Fried Chicken, porkchops and applesauce, it needs to come out. That’s what matters. What comes out of you.
I loved living in a world where everything meant something, where there was no coincidence. Even the very hairs on my head were numbered! I entered with ease into this reality, maybe because –as a creative writer–that’s how I enter into the books I read or the works I write. God is in the details, and all I needed to do was reflect on them, pray on them, and I might get a glimpse of truth. Like a lot of new writers, after I wrote a first draft, I would be stunned to return to it later and see how significant some of the details turned out to be, without me intending it.
With or without the writer’s intention, in good fiction and poetry, every detail matters. After years of being an atheist, when I believed that nothing mattered, that what you see is what you get, being a Christian was like taking magic mushrooms. Suddenly the world was vibrant and every detail pulsed with possibility. Like many things in my life, I might have taken this idea to extreme levels.
I believed that if you are always aware, present in all you do and speak and walk, you will not only notice the divine that is all around you, but you can also be guided to make the right choices every moment. If you can maintain perfect alignment with God in a single day, by the end of that day, you might see His face. You might stand before the throne. I couldn’t help, but think of Elijah from Kings 1 and 2, who was so in tune with God every second of his life, that he didn’t even have to die. He just walked right into heaven and sat with God. I learned later that this is an actual belief among some Jewish mystics that there are right steps, moment to moment, that can lead you to stand before the throne. It’s almost impossible for it to happen, because we live in the flesh and ego, but like an unlikely position of a quantum particle, the possibility exists. We miss most of the hidden beauty and meaning in ordinary life, but they are there. Perhaps that’s why some mystic traditions believe that the biggest sin anyone can commit against God is ennui, boredom, having no joy because nothing is new.
As a new Christian, everything was new.
One day on campus, I went into a men’s restroom, and as I was doing my business, I looked around the bathroom thinking, Where is it? What does God want me to see? I looked at the porcelain sink, pure white. The light reflected off it and cast a rectangle of light over the shadowy wall. I looked up, and there was another rectangle of light, a little window, and through it I could see the treetops outside, the leaves shaking like the bells of angels. What are you trying to tell me, God?
Perhaps, Follow the light! It will lead you to the tree, which is Life, which is goodness. I didn’t know it at the time, but the mystic Emanuel Swedenborg says trees are a correspondence to the warmth of God’s love, and as I stood there at the urinal in that cold tile bathroom, I felt the warmth of God. I also felt my warm pee on my shoe, as I wasn’t paying attention.[1]
I believed the details in the landscape contained hidden meanings that could lead me to something great, to a blessing, or better still, it might show me a portal to higher realms. I think there is a human sense or gut feeling that all things are connected, that the physical landscape is embedded with meaning, and this is rooted or related to the evolutionary imperatives of our species. If we want to survive and thrive, we need to see.
[1] I don’t know if this really happened or if it’s a cheap literary device