Film Review

Living in a Sea of

Spiritual Possibilities

A woman suffers because her daughter suffers; she prays and God responds. Her real-life story is a perfect match for Neale Walsch’s tale in the film, Conversations With God. In her moment of most desperate need, God speaks to her in an audible voice.

In Walsch’s book-based film, available on DVD, he says God spoke audibly to him “out of a desperate personal need to change my life.” Whatever the

circumstances in which God chooses to be heard, many people are now returning to the belief that God does “speak” in more than a symbolic sense.

From the early days of Christianity a mystic tradition of belief has persisted -- despite attempts to stamp it out -- in a spiritual reality discernable through the senses, existing parallel to the physical dimension. And now, as the church

emerges from the shadows of pseudo-scientific formulations of belief which have haunted it since the enlightenment, many Christians feel empowered to admit they too sense God’s spirit as a fact -- as more than a metaphor -- in the same way they might claim to feel the wind and rain.

Christian writer Marcus Borg, in his book The Heart of Christianity, describes “thin places” where this awareness of spiritual dimension breaks through into the physical world. These can literally be places: mountain tops, wind-swept sea shores, a peaceful forest. And they can be people, or situations. Times of great suffering can be a thin place.

The “real-life story” mentioned above is of a woman, a Christian woman, who learned her teenaged daughter was cutting herself on the arms and legs in a stressful response to constant verbal abuse by her father, the woman’s husband. For years this wife and mother struggled to stay true to the Biblical discouragement of divorce. But her daughter’s suffering was now too much. As she prayed in agony, offering her own arms and legs in sacrifice if God would lift this burden from her daughter, she says God spoke in a clear voice, saying the words, “Let him go.” God had stepped forward in the moment to intervene and free her from her marriage.

Certainly, some would argue for a neurological explanation for this phenomenon. Researchers have attempted to trace spiritual perception to the complexities of the brain and subconscious. The phrase “God gene” has been in the news. And let’s be clear, not everyone who hears voices is hearing God. It might be a symptom of mental illness. But for many of the best minds of the modern era, this tearing of the fabric of conventional reality when temporal and sacred worlds collide is more than a sweet dream. One of those thinkers, philosopher and theologian Paul Tillich, says this unveiling of God’s face often occurs in persons we call prophets. The greater the prophet, the more completely we see God though him or her. For Christians, it is through Jesus that we know God perfectly. For us, Jesus is the ultimate “thin place.”

As orthodox thinking took hold in the early centuries after Christ, church authorities insisted “that a chasm separates humanity from its creator …” (Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels). But Borg says the tradition represented by “thin places” never went away completely. “… this way of thinking,” he says, “sees God as the encompassing Spirit in which everything is. God is not somewhere else, but ‘right here.’ In the words of Paul in the book of Acts, God is ‘the one in whom we live and move and have our being.’”

Of course, despots, tyrants and garden variety control freaks often claim to be acting on direct orders from God. In these cases God’s historic written word -- for Christians the Bible, helps us recognize God’s true voice and spot the fakes and frauds. We know from scripture that God favors courage over fear, love over hate, peace over war, justice over oppression, and caring connections over selfish isolation. Establishment figures often asked Jesus by what authority he taught, but the common people knew instinctively that he spoke with God’s authentic voice.

The woman with the troubled daughter of whom we told earlier said God spoke audibly to her once more, again in a time of need. Just how Neale Walsch heard God’s voice in such detail is impossible to know. In the books and film, Walsch’s God says he “speaks to people all the time in their own voice.” For most people that may be a more familiar experience than hearing God’s voice audibly. We search our hearts for God’s solution to a finite dilemma and suddenly it comes to us fully formed. God has spoken to our hearts and we have heard.

Watching Walsch’s character, played by Henry Czerny, rise from life’s ash heap under God’s care is a reassuring experience. God finds Walsch at his weakest and asks, “Have you had enough yet?” We’re left wondering if emotional and spiritual destitution is a prerequisite to God entering our lives. As Jesus said, “those who are well don’t need a physician.” At least they don’t know they do.

God begins gently with resurrecting Mr. Walsch. Imagine: if it’s true we move in the reality of God’s spirit, we also move in a sea of possibilities. Sometimes God’s wishes for us line up in something beyond coincidence, often called “synchronicity.” In Walsch’s story a car accident starts him on a downward spiral to homelessness. One morning he wakes from his bed on the ground. A newspaper he used for bedding has slipped from under him; he glances down and sees a want ad for a part-time disc jockey--his line of work. When he calls, he learns the ad wasn’t scheduled to run until the next week. It seems the job had also been open months earlier. He had stumbled upon an old paper in which it had been listed. Now he’s first in line and gets the job.

When God does invade Walsch’s consciousness full force, wisdom follows. God teaches Walsch with broad truths that are either a mile wide and a foot deep or a mile wide and a mile deep, depending on one’s level of skepticism. The advice is at least practical: God tells Walsch that when feeling uncertain how to proceed in any situation, simply ask, “What would love do now? Answer that question and I will be there.” God also says, “If you want to create abundance for yourself, create it for someone else.” Walsch does, and God is true to his word as a multi-million dollar book deal follows.

Conversations With God ends with God’s statement affirming that the spiritual word is a constant reality: “I cannot leave you for you are my creation and my pride … my purpose and myself. Call on me therefore whenever and wherever you are separate from the peace that I am.”

If that sounds familiar, remember that Jesus in his last days on earth reassured his disciples that his absence in body would not mean they were alone. He promised the very real presence of God’s Spirit on earth and said: “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid.”

Jesus was telling them to have courage and faith. Without them it’s difficult to hear God’s voice.