Free Book Excerpts

If I gave you God’s phone number…:Searching for Spirituality in America, by Mare Cromwell, is a spiritual memoir, framed by twenty one interviews with people from all walks of life. The book combines the oral tradition of Studs Terkel with the soulful searchings of Neale Donald Welsh.

Excerpt

MC: If I gave you God’s phone number, what would you do with it?

JT: Well, I’d have to call. Partly it would be curiosity. But another part would be the idea of hooking up to some natural voice speaking in English for the God Energy. There is this thing about God Energy. We’re swimming in it. It’s swimming in us. I’d have to see if I could really talk with this.

MC: What do you think you would say?

JT: Hmm… [pause] …That would depend on when you asked me. If you asked me today “this may be too mundane” but I would want to ask God why so much of our lives, my life, are ruled by money. I do five different things for a living, and the ones that I do the very best are the ones I don’t get to do often enough and don’t get to make enough money doing. I’ve been asking this God Energy this question a lot of times. The last couple of days I’ve been painting the roof of a barn. I make my own hours and all that, but it’s not what I do. It’s not who I am. I want an answer to that question.

MC: If this God Energy gave you an answer, what do you think that answer might be?

You know…I guess the answer’s pretty obvious. It would be: “Hey, I didn’t design it that way. Other people did that, and I may be able to tell you how it’s going to turn out, but this is your trip. You’ve got to do this. You’ve got to figure it out.”

I guess that’s always true. But it’s strange to me that there are so many great poets walking around on the Earth, and only some are making a living. There are so many that are struggling so hard. Yet the number-one-grossing business in this country is weaponry. There’s something there that’s really out of whack.

MC: Would you want to ask God about this?

JT: I wouldn’t ask God why it is that weapons are such a popular business. I know that that’s not God’s doing. I think I know the answer, it is that profit is more important to this culture than God.

A whole culture can be based on profit because people are unhappy. Somehow they think that attaining more will change that and make them happier. Maybe I would ask God what could I do about it. But I don’t know. [Deep sigh]

I could do what the Berrigans did and go into weapons plants and destroy those guns and get thrown into jail. I don’t know if that would answer anything. I really honor them for having done that, but I don’t know if that changes things.

I can try to find time and space to make more art. I do think that a person making a poem, speaking it out loud, even if it’s in their bedroom and nobody else is around, is a very healing thing. I think it’s a very mystical thing.

There is an energy to speaking our poetry, really Speaking with a capital S. I think we have to ask ourselves what is this stuff, this energy, and also really revel in the mystery of what that is.

MC: Is this what you call the God Energy, this stuff that you are talking about?

JT: I think it is. This spirit is in everything. It’s in you. It’s in the bricks. It’s in the trees. And it’s so much more that that. And yet, I really get tongue-tied at this point because it’s…[pause] …this Being, the Big Being is all around, and we’re in it.
When we get caught up in the daily struggle of paying bills, it’s real easy to lose track of that. To not recognize that you’re eating miracles all the time.

So I have a mixed feeling about someone’s saying, “Here’s God’s number, you can just call up.” On one hand I feel like I’m already right there in the middle of it. I should be able to get all the answers. They are internalized. They’re here.

And then again, there’s a part of me that says, “Yeah, I want to not only get the phone number, I want the address, fax number…email. I want to look into this face and see the face that’s behind the face.”

So many times in my life I’ve wanted to see that face in a really joyful way. I’m doing some great dance, and I really want to be grateful about it. Then there’re times when “I’ve been there a bit lately” I want to see this face because I just want to say, “Come on, you know, what is this? Give me a break and make it clear!”

MC: You’re talking about being in the throes of the trials and tribulations of our human existence…I really wonder if having such a number would make our trials any easier. I don’t know.

JT: Well, I think the big mistake that’s been made about God in so many church philosophies is that they think they understand God. They think they know what and who God is and what God looks like. And I think that’s a big mistake right there.
We’re not supposed to get this. It’s supposed to be a mystery. And the fact is that it’s the mystery that I really love. I really love the fact that we can spend all of our lifetimes trying to figure this out and put a name on it. And it can’t be done. At some point, when we see the real vision, there’s just no way it could be explained in human terms. No name would make it. No words could describe it.

It might actually be that if we dialed the phone number, the top of our heads would completely explode!

Copyright 2010 Mare Cromwell. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the author.