Warning: This story continues many eternal truths revealed through a narrative socratic format. If you like your “religion” simple and unthinking, please leave now.

God Called

The microwave rang just as the commercials were ending. Robert pulled the hot dish from the microwave’s inner sanctum and hustled to his couch, just in time to catch the first seconds of Seinfeld. On the coffee table in front of him sat a Rolling Rock, Mark Twain’s The Gilded Age, a treatise on quantum mechanics, Churchill’s History of World War II, and a new volume on the principles of flight. In another stack, just to the left and on the floor, were the NIV Bible, the Lewis and Clark Journals, and Lord of the Flies. His mind ranged to different interests when left to wander.
Robert tore off the plastic top to his freshly heated prepared dinner, watched the steam roll out, and looked up to catch a glimpse of Kramer exploding into Jerry’s apartment. A show about nothing. He opened The Gilded Age, Chapter 3. The telephone rang. More correctly, the telephones rang. He picked up the cordless that waited on the table beside. Usually, he would let the answering machine do the job, but the cordless was near and he grabbed it. The turkey breast waited. “Hello?”
“Hello. This is God.”

Perhaps anything other than this line coming from a strange voice would have resulted in a Pavlovian hang-up, born from countless evening telemarketer calls. No, this line was too good to pass up. Robert replied, “Well, God, since you know I’m just about to eat dinner, how about I call you back in an hour? If you’re home, just give me the number to the switchboard in heaven and I’ll catch up with you later.” He figured that would throw this strange caller, but God was not so easily put off.
“You really cannot call me back. Let’s just say I’m unlisted. Of course I know you are busy, but at least I didn’t call you at work. Anyway, you’ve seen this episode before, The Gilded Age can wait, and I don’t mind if you eat while we talk. You should let that cool a few minutes anyway.”
Robert looked immediately to the window and wondered for a moment if he’d locked the door. The adrenaline that passed through him gave him an agitated feeling. Who would have known his habits well enough to hit the mark in a prank call like this? Who would do this? No quick answer, so Robert stalled for time. “What is it you wanted to talk about, God?”
“Not much really. Why don’t you go to church?”


“It doesn’t make God seem real to me, and isn’t that the point? People carrying those Bibles. If they really believed it was the word of God, how could they justify spending less time reading it than they do Stephen King? How could they do anything other than read the Bible? All the people looking at their watches at twelve o’clock, waiting for the sermon to be over. The solicitation for money – why is God broke? How can churches justify building fancy new buildings when there are so many unmet needs in their communities? Nope, it doesn’t work for me. Churches are mostly social clubs. Jesus never needed a fancy new fellowship hall to preach.” Robert caught his breath and switched gears. “So I’ve answered your question, you answer mine – who is this?”
“God.”
“On the telephone?”
“How else?” The deity questioned.
“Burning bush?”
“Trust me, the telephone is better for you.”
“I suppose. But it would have been more convincing if you made contact in a more miraculous way.”
“Form over substance. Here you have the opportunity to have a conversation with the one true Deity, and you prefer flash.”
“Why would God call me?”
“I have invested a lot of energy, so to speak, in the creation of the universe, and I like, now and then, to find out first hand how the creation is going. I thought it might be interesting to speak with you because you are ‘on the bubble.’”
“What bubble?”
“You are not sure what to believe. You could just as soon believe in God as not; to you the results are not far from the same. The fact is that your conception is close to the truth. That is interesting to me.”

Robert smiled, enjoying this conversation with the great Whoever. “You have me pegged, I have to admit. Now, if we met in person, I guess I might be so in awe that I couldn’t speak, but over the phone, I might ask you some tough questions and in fact be a little hard on you.” He lifted the remote, pressed a button, and the television screen went dark.
“Of course I know that. I picked communicating with you by telephone because it is immediate and comfortable. You can be as hard as you want. You can’t ask me anything I don’t already know, and, given that I’m God and you’re a human created and existing by my leave, I’m at ease in this situation, my ego not threatened in the least.”
“You’re right, but how could you be anything else? If you’re supposed to be infinitely good and merciful, then why is there so much suffering in the world?”
“I might object first to the word supposed. I am what I am. I simply am. I am universal; infinite in my scope. To apply any adjective to describe a boundary to my being is to move away from the truth, and ‘good,’ despite its positive connotations, is a limit. I am everything and nothing. So, in a phrase, I am infinitely good and bad, at least in the way you think. In this universe, the one in which you exist, evil exists along with good, and I allowed both to be. Having been responsible for the creation of both, it would be fair to say I am both. Clearly, as an infinite power, I could halt all strife, hunger, and misery in a second. The fact that I choose not to do so, for my own reasons, means that by your definition I am not infinitely merciful. Some people cannot accept that, so they choose to see only the good, and not the bad. But in this universe, there are both, and I made them.”

“That’s not the answer I would have expected. What about Satan?”
“Satan has a purpose for those who fear evil. Satan is a way of attributing evil to a being other than me, which gives comfort to those who want to see me as purely good. But, in fact, since I created Satan, I created evil. Satan would not exist, except for by my design and by my leave. This concept is not so troubling, I know, to you as you act it is.”
“Why create evil? Why let it exist? It seems so wrong.”
“Yes. You blame me easily. Do you really, though, object to the suffering? You spend more time on your own pursuits, by a large margin, than you do actually working to help the poor and the unfortunate. With your own failings, how do you presume to question mine?”
“I’m not God. I get tired. I’m imperfect. I didn’t create the problems to begin with.”
“Good points, but you have to admit they’re just excuses. I gave you so much, and you give so little back. There are children helpless and hopeless, and you’re watching Seinfeld while they starve. Real death, real misery, real pain, all while you relax.”

Robert felt shame, “God” hit His mark, but the conversation had reached such a speed that he didn’t want to reflect too deeply before parrying the thrust. “Maybe I am lazy. But if I were God and lazy, I just wouldn’t have created evil in the first place, saving myself the effort and preserving my infinite goodness.”
“You’re not God, though, and creating the universe, even this little earth, is not so simple. For you to experience good, there must be evil. For you to really understand life there must be death. For love to have its full measure of joy, you must know the emptiness of hate. For you to have perception as an independent life, you must be able to see things opposed to each other. It is dark; it is light. You cannot understand the light if you do not know the dark. So to give you full reign to enjoy life, I allowed the oppositions to occur. In many cases, I admit, people see much more misery than they do joy. Since, however, humans are not bound to fight, kill, and horde wealth individually, the fault lies with your species. Since I created you, I share in the blame.”

“Suppose that makes sense, why did you create us in the first place? To watch us suffer and die? That hardly seems a fit pursuit for a god.” Robert caught himself referring to the call as if the claim of divinity were accurate. He wondered for a moment. When, if ever, had something this odd occurred before? He couldn’t recall.
“To beg off your questions for a moment, I want to address that you doubt my identity. I lay the whole created universe out before you. The blazing sun, the freezing moon, and yet you want a burning bush? The fact you exist is miracle enough; certainly more miracle than you can explain, and yet you want more. The whole business of believing in me is faith, so you’ll just have to trust your judgment. You don’t get any more. The universe is enough. The breath you just took is enough. Take this call for what it’s worth: communication with the all-knowing creator, or a strange trick you can’t explain. Neither makes sense.
Now, on to your questions. I did not create you to suffer and die, nor to watch you suffer and die. I created you to experience something that I could not directly experience. Being finite. Being something, but not everything. I see from your experience that being finite has its drawbacks. You tend to be selfish, and that leads to unnecessary suffering.”

“But even if you’re infinite, aren’t you selfish too? After all, you did all this to further your own observations.”
“I don’t think so. And to the contrary, I gave you everything I had, and something I can never have. That, you must agree, is generous. There’s an irony here, though. I wanted to experience the finite through you, and I accomplished that. You, however, hold this against me because you cannot appreciate what it is to be infinite.”
“You have left me behind. If you are infinite, how did we get something you don’t have?”
“Again, by being less than me, you are the one thing I cannot be. I am everything and nothing at once. You are defined. And in making you such, I am provided with many insights into the condition of being finite. You go to sleep at night with aggravations and joys from what happened, and expectations of what will happen the next day. I have none of that. Largely, you sense these things through the movement of time, which gives you perspective on your physical dimensions. For me there is no time, and no mass; or, all eternity and infinite mass. It makes little difference, since I am relative to nothing. Am I heavy? Compared to what. Am I powerful? Compared to what.”

“So what you find interesting is our human condition. Our self-absorption. We’re selfish because we have the ability to be selfless, and we don’t exercise it. And, moreover, we have a self to be selfish for.”
“Now you understand.”
“What about all the singing and praise people do at church?”
“That’s of no consequence to me, but it is good for them, because it let’s them feel they’ve done something to please me.”
“I had always wondered about that. Why would God want people singing His praises on Sunday, and, if He did, why not make everyone great singers?”
“Now you know the real answer, and it is as you expected.”

“While I’ve got you on the line, what happens when we die? Do some go to the streets of gold in heaven while others burn in hell?”
“In a sense, yes. For those who truly see beyond themselves, they will pass to an existence that is ultimately satisfying, as, in truth, they are reunified with me. They were part of me once, before the creation, and they will be so again upon death. Part of the integral fabric of everything, this existence for them is supreme. For those who never see past themselves, and who live only for the pleasure of the day, death is a terror much greater than hell is commonly described. Death is the loss of individuality. Despite all their efforts to garner pleasant experiences and memories at the expense of others, these things will be ripped away, vanished, at the instant of death. But these conceptions are useful for the living only. In death, understanding comes for all. An understanding not in individual conception, but as part of all that I am. I can see this is difficult.”

“It is. Do you mean that people should not seek pleasure, because the…”
“Let’s take this further. The eternal truth is all about you. Your illusion of discrete existence is due to your inability to see the supreme. And all that is in the universe can be found in the smallest of things. Take for instance the overused saying, ‘Let there be light.’ Light has always fascinated and comforted humans. This is part of your genius; you have always been on the right track. Light as your physicists now understand it represents a tiny amount of energy, and so a tiny amount of mass, that you can create through stimulated radiation. You create the light, reflect it off an object, and the reflected or regenerated light finds its way to your eye. There you record the received energy as a visual scene. Perhaps begun with a flashlight. But consider the situation from the point of view of the light. For light, according to your equations, time stands still. The light, for all it can tell, has existed for all time and will exist for all time to come. In fact, it knows no creation and no destruction, because those things imply the passage of time. In fact, the light experiences everything at once, since it definitely traverses the distances of space, interacts with other matter, but all simultaneous as far as the light is concerned. Whether something has been or is to be is irrelevant to the light, because it doesn’t know time. It has an immediate awareness of everything that ever has been and ever will be. So while you are limited to recording one instant at a time, which generates the need for memory and for prediction, light does not have that boundary. Light begins to approach the divine, because it is infinite in its scope. Maybe you won’t take cutting that flashlight on so routinely next time. Now light doesn’t define the divine, there is more to it than that, but light is of the divine, and closer to it than you. Light, by not experiencing time, is closer to unity with me, as I do not experience time.”

“Again, I’m not with you.”
“Your scientists are working as diligently to find as much as a human can know about me and my nature as your clergy. They have the same goal; they just don’t know it. Neither can find the answer without the other. The clergy make the mistake of concentrating on the spiritual and the moral, but they ignore that the most palpable marvels I created are physical, and in the physical reside many of my secrets. The unity of everything, for instance. The scientists make the mistake of concentrating on the physical, but arrogantly to the exclusion of the spiritual. The nature of my being is so different than what they conceive as the limits of existence that I can truly be regarded as supernatural, and am best conceived as a spiritual being. Bound and described by no dimensions, by definition I am not physical, not natural to your world. Scientists begin to see that the dimensions you perceive were born of the disunity resulting from the so-called Big Bang, but they cannot imagine what was before, and since they say there was no time before the Big Bang, there was no thing before the Big Bang. But I was before the Big Bang.

In essence, I took a part of me, a part of all that was perfectly unified, and created a disunity which is your universe and which allows you to exist in your strange, limited way. I distorted what was perfect, and in this region of imperfection, the stars of your galaxies formed, the empty space formed, your solar system formed, and you formed. Behold your limitations. Your entire conscience mind will never know or experience a fraction of what one electron of one atom of one molecule of one cell of your body experiences. That electron, a blur of energy and mass, is a tiny step away from rejoining me in unity. Its energy is frozen, artificially, to become mass, so as to form the basis for the things in your universe, and it has existed since the beginning of time. With the right prodding, that electron will release itself back to pure energy, and become part of the seamless web of all. You have done this to some degree in the application of atomic energy. You have learned that mass itself can be vanquished, returned to a state of pure energy, and in that glorious insight you saw only the makings of a terrible weapon. But you do lack perspective.”
“I see that everything that I know that exists was once part of you, and the simpler and more basic something is, the closer it is to returning to unity with you.”
“That’s not an unfair summary.”

“If I’m understanding, then, our desire to explore and learn is owing to our separation, that you created, from everything else.”
“Fine.”
“And if I’m following you, then, what may be the key to happiness is accepting our own limitations, my limitations, and find joy in the things I do not have, but that I can enjoy experiencing. And find joy in sharing with others, because it reduces just a little that part of us that is alone.”
“Fine.”
“Why are you saying fine? Am I right or not?”
“I’m not going to lay out the key to happiness for you. You have to find it, if you ever do. And it may be different for others. But I am not disagreeing with you. I said fine, and that ought to be a compliment, coming from me.”
“You just won’t make it easy, will you?”
“No. Parts are easy, and parts are hard.”
“I should have guessed that.”
“You already knew it. Forgive the hard parts; they’re necessary for the easy parts.”
“I will try. I think I already believed all this.”
“Good. I have enjoyed this conversation as much as I can, but I really should go, and let you get back to dinner.”
“Thanks, it’s cool now.”
“You can reheat it. It was going to be bad anyway. Please continue to enjoy life. It’s not a waste of time, it’s the whole reason I created time.”
“That may not be as easy now. I can’t tell people you called. They won’t believe me, or worse maybe, they might.”
“So don’t tell. Maybe I’ve already talked to them, and they’re not telling you. It’s our secret. If it causes you a problem, you’ll come to believe it was a dream.”
“I’ll just have to trust you.”

The call-waiting signal clicked, and God spoke. “You should take that call.”
“Right. I’m afraid to think who it could be. But since you said to, I’ll be right back, so please hold.”
God replied, “I don’t do that well.” Robert clicked the line over. A voice said, “Is this Mr. Cordland?” “Yes it is.” “Are you satisfied with your long-distance carrier?” “Yes, and this is a bad time to call,” Robert replied, with irritation, before cutting off the telemarketer and switching back to his original call.
“Sorry about that. I’ve still got some questions, are you sure you can’t talk a bit longer.”

The line, however, was no longer occupied on the other end. Without surprise, Robert looked at the receiver and then set it on the table again. He looked down at the now cold dinner, and then at the blank television. Outside, the sun was going down, disappearing below the trees, on its way to bring day to another part of the world. Its light spilled out to the clouds, creating a brilliant pink glow that spread over the land. Robert walked to the window and listened to the still evening, the sound of children playing drifting through the lazy evening air. He crossed the floor, opened the door and stepped outside. Without shutting the door behind him, he walked outside into the fading light. He wasn’t hungry anymore. He was amused, and happy to be alive.

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