The creation of spiders
Before I get to this week’s post, something different. Last night, I watched most of the film “Jesus Revolution” on Amazon Prime Video. The film chronicles the true story (approximately) of how influential pastor Chris Smith and hippie evangelist Lonnie Frisbee joined forces in the late 1960’s through the seventies to create what came to be known as the Calvary Chapel and Vineyard Movement. The motive behind the movement was to convert hippies to Christianity.
The film had an interesting subject but was inexpertly told. There were obvious gaps in the narrative, with very faint hints at what was missing. The scene that led me to look up the details somewhere else took place in a tent revival. The tent is crammed with hippies and a few curious onlookers. Frisbee starts talking about “someone” who is experiencing a problem with her left ear. He centers his attention on an elderly woman, cups his hand around her left ear, and declares her healed, “in the name of Jesus.”
The way the scene was shot was unclear whether viewers were expected to believe the woman really was cured, or if Frisbee was a charismatic faker. In a later scene, Frisbee starts to do the same thing, but is stopped by Smith, who wants to deliver a sermon with less drama. Here, there is the suggestion that Smith may think Firsbee is a fraud and doesn’t want to be a part of it. Shortly afterward, he severs the relationship between his church and Frisbee’s evangelism.
Frisbee’s real background, or that portion of it found on one of the world’s least reliable sites, Wikipedia, is the stuff that dramatic Christian testimonials are made of. Crime, abuse, poverty, and drugs were all, apparently, a part of his life before he turned things around by becoming Christian.
This made me think of my reasons for believing in God. Note that I do not define myself as Christian, though I attend a Christian church, because I disagree with some elements of doctrine. My reasons are nothing like the testimonies I’ve heard in various places. The ones I’ve heard or read about may not be typical, or are only typical of the type worthy of publicity. In them, there is usually a story of a long and frightening descent into immoral behavior that is eventually arrested when the person reaches the absolute bottom of despair. At this point, they re-evaluate their life, often due to an instigating event or person, turn their back on their former life, and embrace Jesus as their savior.
In my case, I believe in God because of my dreams. That is the only reason. There was no “descent into despair”.
I was an atheist as a child. My mother did not bring my sister or I to church for religious edification or instruction. She did on rare occasion park in the back of a church, tell my sister and I to wait for her, and then entered the church through a back door. A few minutes later, she’d emerge with a box containing food, usually canned beans or Campbell’s soup. The box would go in the back, and we’d drive off. Two or three times we had to go to a Catholic mass because friends who had given charity to my mother demanded it. That was my experience of church.
In 1983, a friend of mine converted to Christianity. He wanted me to do the same. “You’d be such a good Christian!” he said as I backed out of his apartment.
“If your God is as powerful as you say, he doesn’t need your help to make me a Christian. If he wants me, he can find me on his own.”
My friend agreed, and I left. I never saw him again.
What I didn’t realize at the time is that I had already experienced several precognitive dreams in my life, and what some would describe as “miracles” while awake. A few years later, I met the woman I would marry. I knew it the moment I laid eyes on her, because I recognized her from a dream I’d had when I was seventeen. I thought it was a strange coincidence.
A few years later, I had a dream about being mugged and killed in an alley in Amsterdam. I’d forgotten about the dream until it happened. Then, with full knowledge of the dream racing through my mind, I used that knowledge to resist and escape from the would-be robbers. Another strange coincidence. My soon-to-be girlfriend insisted it was a dream of the future and a warning. I didn’t believe her.
Years later, shortly after getting married, I was tired of hearing my wife say that my dreams were of future events and that they kept on happening. I decided to prove her wrong by keeping a journal. Instead, it proved she was right.
This was a problem for me because a core principle beneath my disbelief in God is that God is defined as a supernatural being. I didn’t believe that there were supernatural beings or events. Precognitive dreams are very similar to prophetic dreams and both are thought to be “supernatural”. At this point, I had to admit that precognition was real, therefore prophecy wasn’t out of the question. This meant that those parts of the Bible that discuss prophecy could not be discounted as impossible.
This was not enough to convince me that God was in any way real. At most, it undercut one portion of my argument against belief in God, a creator, or any kind of hierarchically superior personality.
Then I dreamed of ghosts and elevated spirits that some would liken to angels. In some cases, enough, I was able to verify the information provided in those dreams. Until I realized this, I was content to think of precognition as a rare quirk of the mind. I imagined some kind of physical causality without a spiritual component. Ghosts imply spirits, as do spirits who seem to know the future and take pains to show me.
Now I had to acknowledge the existence of the soul. A “soul” is supernatural because it has no known material or physical component. It is composed of, if anything, consciousness. A soul is a supernatural being. It also has a personality, just like God. Still, this wasn’t enough for me.
At about the same time I was having these dreams, I started noticing what could be described as common design features of biological organisms. Everything from plants to animals, fish, birds, microbes, and insects appeared to be the product of design by the hand of the same designer. This observation led me to say to my wife, “okay, I admit that supernatural events do occur, that spirits exist, and that our universe contains considerable evidence indicating a common origin in the form of a common designer. For all we know, that common designer is a giant amorphous cloud of disembodied intelligences, not personified in human form as legends say.”
In other words, I was willing to go as far as a New Age conception of a supernatural creative force, but not so far as a creator with an independent and forceful personality.
In 2004, I was looking through my old journals when I saw hundreds of spiritual dreams. These had no material components to check, so I had ignored them for over a decade. The dreams discussed spiritual themes. They sometimes featured people known to us from the Bible, the Torah, or other mystical traditions. A small number featured God the creator himself.
It was about this time that I had several very powerful dreams that were more realistic than anything in waking life. In them, I was in the presence of God and there was no mistaking the reality of his presence. It was only here, after I had learned to trust my other dreams through years of study, that I was willing to accept the existence of God. Today, I don’t think of God in the abstract, but as a real being I have “seen” even if in a series of dreams.
The dream for today mentions God and contains an image of God, but he does not appear in person. This dream is not included in the group wherein God appears in person.
From the journal, 2/27/2011 (date i/c on entry)
I am at a church. Kitty is with me and so is someone else—a man. He is a friend in the dream, but a new friend. Not sure who he is now. I go to the altar at the front of the church. At the altar, I begin a painting. First it is of a hand. Then I paint a spider on the hand, newly created. I paint arms in various places, all with hands and spiders in various poses [see illus]. I paint everything in orange and yellow. When I step back from the painting, I see God within it, creating the spiders. The painting seems alive now, crawling with creative activity. I can’t make out God’s eyes because they shine so much. His beard shines too, and his hair. Both fly out from his face as if tongues of flame.
I turn to the pastor, to show him the painting. Instead, I start telling him of all the miracles God performed in my life. While I am doing this, I wake.
Comment:
In this dream, I make a painting of God creating spiders. It is similar to a vision, and felt that way in the dream. I’m unwilling to say that is what it is because I made the painting in the dream. Instead, it is like a test where I have to show some knowledge I have learned. I demonstrate this by making this painting, which is sufficient to explain to any viewer that I understand God’s role in the creation of all living things.