How this book came to be written
According to the author, his life was full of disappointment, so one day he decided to write God a letter to express his anger and frustration. Just as he was about to toss his pen aside, his "hand remained poised over the paper," and then "God began talking with you. Through me" (p.1). The entire book turns out to be a dialogue between Walsch and God. He writes, "Before I knew it, I had begun a conversation...and I was not writing so much as taking dictation" (p.2). God was talking to Walsch through his own hand.
God wasn't just talking to Walsch, though. She was talking through Walsch to the rest of us. There seemed to be a sense of destiny in the way Walsch explained himself. He writes, "I want you to get into this dialogue as soon as you can, because what's really important here is not my story, but yours. It is your life story which brought you here. It is your personal experience to which this material has relevance. Otherwise you would not be here, with it, right now" (p.2). According to Walsch, then, I would not have been reading his book if the material in it did not have some relevance to my life. It all sounds as if I was meant to read it. [Maybe I was meant to read it so I could give it a good thorough critique!] Later in the book, God says, "there is no such thing as coincidence" (p.46), so it was no accident that I was reading his book. Whether it's true or not, such statements appeal to a person's need to feel important, and nothing satisfies that feeling more than the notion that God has a message meant especially for that person. It's all very seductive, and I found myself wanting to believe it. Was God really talking to me? Was little ole me really meant to read this? If I was meant to read it, then who am I to question it? It was meant for me, so it must be true. No wonder so many otherwise intelligent people have been impacted by this book. It appeals to their emotions, not their intellect.
On page 60, God said to Waslch, "You'll spend your whole life looking for God and not finding Her. Because you're looking for a Him," so throughout this review, I will be referring to God as "she" or "her" except where I lapse into habit and don't catch my own mistake. All of the italics in quotes are in the original unless otherwise indicated.
to be continued...
Part 3
2 comments:
god as a her, that's a very new age thought, Dan Brown ish even. A female god would make more sense though since females give birth. It would make sense on an allegorical level.
I don't know whether it would make more sense. With that reasoning, perhaps it would make more sense for there to be 2 Gods, one 'male' and one 'female', since a female by herself can't produce offspring.
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