At a recent Sunday service the visiting speaker spoke of the messages she received from God guiding her to go into the work which she did go into. A few of our members were uncomfortable with this idea. Is this something real? Is the idea of God, or the word God, right for us?

We certainly do not want to censor our speakers, especially one who speaks from the heart, as she did. However, these questions are worth thinking about. There is ample evidence in nonfictional literature that individuals do receive messages that do not come from their conscious minds.

These messages may be of many sorts: telling them to go into certain work, to go to a certain place, or to avoid going on a journey, to perform a service for someone, and so on. These messages may come in various forms: as dreams, as words heard within, as images, as coincidences, etc. They have a feeling for the receiver of validity, of guidance that is worth paying attention to. The question is where these messages come from.

Individuals will interpret them in accordance with their belief systems. For some they will be messages from God, for others messages from Jesus or another revered figure. Some will think of them as messages from a guardian angel or a deceased loved one.

People of other religions may think of them as coming from the Buddha-Mind or another source within their belief system. Transpersonal psychologists may speak of them as messages from our own Higher Self, our transpersonal self which which is in touch with a realm of thought beyond our personal ego. It is not for us to judge the source of someone's guiding messages.

One problem is that some individuals with twisted minds get messages telling them to kill people. They may think these are messages from God. Obviously they are from a demented mind; but how do we judge when a message is from some Higher Source and when it is from a lower source? The main answer is in the content of the message. A message from a higher source will not tell us to do harm to others; it will tell us to serve others in some way, or at least how to get out of the way of harm or illness.

The other question raised by one individual was use of the word God. This individual pointed out that this word has been used by too many authority figures in the past (and perhaps even today) to control others and to do great harm to groups of people. This comment reminded me of something I read in a book by Martin Buber, the noted Jewish philosopher and student of religion. In the opening chapter of Eclipse of God he tells of an encounter with a man who disputed his use of the word God. This man said: "How can you bring yourself to say 'God' time after time? How can you expect that your readers will take the word in the sense in which you wish it to be taken? What you mean by the name of God is something above all human grasp and comprehension, but in speaking about it you have lowered it to human conceptualization. What word of human speech is so misused, so defiled, so desecrated as this? All the innocent blood that has been shed for it has robbed it of its radiance. All the injustice it has been used to cover has effaced its features. When I hear the highest called 'God,' it sometimes seems almost blasphemous."

Buber's reply was that, even though this word has become soiled, mutilated, just for this reason he must not abandon it. This word and what lies behind it have meant so much to so many people over the centuries that it has become consecrated "in all human tongues for all times...We cannot cleanse the word 'God' and we cannot make it whole; but, defiled and mutilated as it is, we can raise it from the ground and set it over an hour of great care." These are matters on which we can disagree, but we can respect those who use a different language than we do for their understanding of the Highest.

Al Thelander