A Good Conversation

I wonder if some of you have already read this book I am holding right now while of course most of us have already came to know about it’s publication through the buzz it had created in the Internet. Consider this, “Conversations With God” had been in the New York Times bestseller list for 137 weeks or about two-and-a-half years straight. Now that’s an amazing feat for a religion-centered work. And accordingly, it had been considered as a “publishing phenomenon” (see this Wikipedia article).

I myself have already learned about CwG (Conversations With God) some years back from great acclaims it had garnered from several local blogs that I have been reading during that time. The praises it had gotten then were so astounding that now, as I leaf through it’s pages, I am not anymore surprised.

I was not initially sold out by its popularity I must admit and thought that despite it’s astronomical volume of sales, it might just be yet another religious book with a unique irresistable trait, but just another individual’s thought about God and religion. For all the while, who is really interested in religion nowadays? Perhaps, none except those that are extremely pious in spirit.

But now—-by some good fate—-I have this wonderful book in hand. Thanks mostly to my bestfriend Major Victor Loon for sending me a copy all the way from Manila and all my greatest gratitude goes to him. He reads this blog once in a while and I hope the message goes to him. He is a real police major mind you and not merely a major wanna-be like “Major Tom” and at the very young age of 35, he heads now the formidable Eastern Police District in Metro Manila. Success is in his hands and to be sure, more would come in the future.

CwG is certainly one amazing book with some phenomenal things going on within it. According to its author Neale Donald Walsch, all the conversation that had been written in this book—-and on succeeding eight other installments of it—-had started when one day he had decided to write a letter to God and let out many of his resentments in life. And suddenly, a voice coming from his left shoulder spoke to him, and after that, a book had seen its birth.

Mr. Walsch had averred that in writing the “conversations”, he had felt feel his hands moving on its own as he was writing the first pages of this book; as if it had a life by itself. If he is to be believed, then God must have really spoken to him. Of course, I wouldn’t take this claim hook, line and sinker but in this often-strange world that we live in—-that might just be possible.

I often wonder if I myself could speak with God like Mr. Walsch did and then God talking straight back at me like a “burning bush” of the Old Testament. To be sure, I would have lots of questions to field. I wonder if the Lord can have time to spare for a wandering soul such as I am, always questioning, always inquiring.

Once when we were so much younger, Major Loon had presented this question to me asking, “Do you want to meet Satan?” I answered that he was just being ridiculous. I wouldn’t want to meet the demon I said because to be sure, I would just be drown by enormous fear, imagining how fearsome his façade would be—-horns on his head, fangs on his teeth, fiery red eyes, with a huge dark cape heavy on his back.

Then Major Loon asked me once more if in fact I believed in the person of Satan. I said that I could not be so sure—-since no one could be so sure about a guy that we only could see in our mind—-but I told him that mostly, I felt that if God exists, then Satan must be possibly an existent being; that the existence of the demon would in fact become a venerable proof that God exists. That if there is light, then there must be darkness, for how does one know the fact of light when there is no darkness that could be compared it from? How do we know righteousness if there is no such thing as wrongfulness; or good deeds from sin; right conduct from misbehavior; dry from wet; red from blue; sky from earth.

I had a thought then that in order to see Light in the mightiest of splendor, one must at least have a certain awareness of Darkness.

All in all, I have enjoyed “Conversations With God” even though I might not say I believe entirely that the author had really spoken with God. It is a well-written work and so filled with original and mind-opening insights. I bet that if Mr. Walsch was a fiction writer, he would for certain be an exciting storyteller.

Be warned that the idea of speaking with God might be mostly a blasphemous claim. But take it with enough grain of salt and read beyond the facts and see its wisdom in general terms. You would enjoy it I am sure.