GOD: An Autobiography, As Told to a Philosopher - The Podcast
GOD: An Autobiography, As Told to a Philosopher - The Podcast
284. Suffering, Purpose, and the Courage to Keep Living Fully | Jerry & Abigail: An Intimate Dialogue
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What happens when suffering enters a new season of life? How do we face aging, grief, limitation, and uncertainty without surrendering our sense of purpose?
In the latest Jerry & Abigail: An Intimate Dialogue, the married philosophers return for another stimulating dialogue exploring suffering, aging, calling, and the search for meaning.
Beginning with the Serenity Prayer and the Stoic distinction between what we can and cannot control, the conversation moves into deeper questions about suffering as a source of growth, the temptation to “give up” too early in life, and the challenge of remaining fully engaged with one’s purpose.
Abigail reflects on resisting cultural narratives of decline, particularly those imposed on women, while sharing her thoughts on aging, neuropathy, resilience, and refusing to “die before you’re dead.” Jerry connects these reflections to themes from God: An Autobiography, including the idea that “suffering is the law of growth in the universe.”
The discussion also explores antisemitism, historical responsibility, Aristotle’s vision of human flourishing, the story of David and Goliath, and the question of what it means to live in alignment with one’s deepest calling.
This is a rich and personal conversation about suffering, purpose, spiritual courage, and remaining fully alive on the timeline of human history.
Whether you are navigating grief, searching for meaning, or trying to discern what still has your name on it, Episode 284 offers a thoughtful and deeply human exploration of the courage required to keep living fully.
Other Series:
The podcast began with the Dramatic Adaptation of the book and now has several series:
The Life Wisdom Project – Spiritual insights on living a wiser, more meaningful life.
From God to Jerry to You – Divine messages and breakthroughs for seekers.
Two Philosophers Wrestle With God – A dialogue on God, truth, and reason.
Jerry & Abigail: An Intimate Dialogue – Love, faith, and divine presence in partnership.
What’s Your Spiritual Story – Real stories of people changed by encounters with God.
What’s On Our Mind – Reflections from Jerry and Scott on recent episodes.
What’s On Your Mind – Listener questions, divine answers, and open dialogue.
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Scott Langdon
[ 00:00:17,229 ]This is God: An Autobiography, The Podcast — a dramatic adaptation and continuing discussion of the book God: An Autobiography, As Told to a Philosopher by Jerry L. Martin. He was a lifelong agnostic, but one day he had an occasion to pray. To his vast surprise, God answered — in words. Being a philosopher, he had a lot of questions, and God had a lot to tell him.
Scott Langdon
[ 00:00:58,549 ]Episode two eighty four. Welcome to God: An Autobiography, The Podcast. I'm Scott Langdon. When I was growing up in my parents' house, there was this little plaque that hung on the wall in the living room. It had two hands in a prayer position, and underneath those hands a short prayer. It read, "God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference." I'd come to learn that this prayer was called the Serenity Prayer.
Scott Langdon
[ 00:01:32,179 ]And this week as Jerry and Abigail return for another intimate dialogue, the two discuss suffering and how we can face suffering not only in our aging years, but as humans in whatever era of life we might be in. Here's Jerry to get the ball rolling. I hope you enjoy the episode.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:01:59,829 ]Well, hello sweetheart. Thanks for joining me again for an intimate dialogue. And as general, we always start with me asking… putting some topics on the table based on the last episode of From God to Jerry to You. the very last one that I just recorded in fact yesterday was reflecting on what I called without specifying them.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:02:39,349 ]the travails of age
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:02:42,309 ]I know you don't believe you've... you rightly reject the hypothesis of age. You like the idea age is just a number, and that there's a lot to that, you know. On the other hand, you know, there's certain wear and tear and I often feel myself like a car with 150,000 miles on it. And you know, this or that has to be fixed and
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:03:07,489 ]Some of those are just ordinary decline you expect, and some of the things we've experienced recently, sweetheart, are things you don't expect that you thought something that always worked just right without effort suddenly stops working right. And some of these affect just oneself, some affect the interaction of the people in the partners in the relationship, and...
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:03:36,149 ] it's hard to be prepared for those, especially the ones that occur where you didn't expect them. It's just, whoa, what is this? And how do we adjust to it? And none of the things we have are, you might say, serious. Nevertheless, they're challenging. And they do involve, it seemed to me, a kind of suffering.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:04:01,049 ]And because you've got to, oh my gosh, what do I, how do I adjust to this now?
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:04:07,969 ]Or what can I do about it? Now. And that led me to go back and look at the prayers in God: An Autobiography. I always remember being told suffering, God to Jerry, “suffering is the law of growth in the universe.” It's the law of growth in the universe. And when I went back and reread those passages and then read the next chapter where God asked me to look at a time of my life, heart attack, which involved suffering mainly.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:04:47,209 ]Good hospital was wonderful, everybody's like angels. The next hospital they were terrible, and I was kind of fighting, having to fight with the caretakers.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:04:56,999 ]And you sometimes have to do that in a hospital. But anyway, it was certainly a difficult time. And as I reviewed that, you know, God had asked, go back and that, and I've reviewed it. And God asks me: What did you learn from that?
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:05:20,179 ]And I remember when I told you it was ways my mother had been extremely hard on me when we first were getting to know each other and kind of shared, you know, our life stories with each other.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:05:32,349 ]and my mother lacked empathy and was hypercritical and so forth. And those leave wounds in a little five-year-old. And the wounds of course stay for a lifetime.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:05:48,729 ]Anyway, you asked, what did you learn from that that you wouldn't have known otherwise?
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:05:56,529 ]And in fact, you gave an answer. You said you thought I was sensitive to women. And it's true. I was always paying attention to my mother's moods, trying to soothe her, trying to make her feel better. She was upset not only had these, you might say, character traits that were difficult, but she lost a child, my younger brother, and cried every day.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:06:21,879 ]and years later would just tear up at a baby food commercial or something like that. So, I was trying to do my best to soothe her during these years of her great pain and maybe that did develop a kind of sensitivity, paying attention to how a woman I'm with is feeling, the moods and feelings and so forth. And so the question, what did you learn from that applies to our current situation as well. We're having these travails.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:06:58,269 ]And I call them suffering lessons, the lessons from suffering. And what occurred to me that I reported in the From God to Jerry.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:07:14,729 ]What occurred to me was, well, two things that are closely related to each other.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:07:22,759 ]Stoic wisdom which says don't worry over what you can't control.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:07:28,699 ]and the more specific form of that wisdom, you might say, of of lots of wisdom in what's called the Serenity Prayer, which is virtually the official prayer of Alcoholics Anonymous, though it goes back to the Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. It was originally something he had included in several of his public prayers. But I'll just repeat it. People probably know it, but I'll read it. You know, I looked it up.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:07:59,549 ] and this is the prayer, so-called serenity prayer. “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:08:11,529 ]The courage to change the things I can change, and the wisdom to know the difference,” which is not easy. You know, if you ponder it, it's not actually easy to know the difference. And this serenity prayer, the Stoics were talking about everything in general. There's an earthquake where you can't prevent earthquakes, you can't do anything about the earthquake except run around afterwards, but you can't prevent it. The serenity prayer and the reason it's so relevant to...
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:08:45,719 ]is what you're looking inward at yourself. And what about myself? You got things about yourself you like and things you don't like, things that you see as strengths, things you see as weaknesses, things that make life harder for you. Anyway, of all of those things, which ones can you change? And which ones would you be better off just accepting? And so that was the less I've looked at our current situation, the travails of age as I call it, that seemed to be irrelevant. That okay, what in our situation can we change, what can we not?
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:09:25,649 ]And how on earth are we gonna tell the difference?
Dr. Abigail L Martin
[ 00:09:32,229 ]Gee, Jerry, I think I'm terrible at this.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:09:36,739 ]Yeah, what are you terrible at? Which part of it?
Dr. Abigail L Martin
[ 00:09:40,469 ]first of all, accepting the sort of lower ceiling or lowered expectations or contracted scope that goes with age.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:10:01,889 ]you're not good at acceptance.
Dr. Abigail L Martin
[ 00:10:04,989 ]I'm not good at lining it up, you know, and asking myself, do I accept this or not? Take my somewhat age-related, I guess, chronologically attached neuropathy…
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:10:27,929 ]Your right foot just doesn't work right. And it's a neurological thing all the way up to the brain, that the foot doesn't quite know what to do.
Dr. Abigail L Martin
[ 00:10:38,259 ]I am not good at all at accepting it, and we go periodically to California where there's a treatment for it that purports to reverse what normal medical science calls irreversible. You know, I paid $160 to a Park Avenue neurologist who told me I'd be in a wheelchair in a year. And I said to myself inwardly, I hate you.
Dr. Abigail L Martin
[ 00:11:15,299 ]and you know, and we found by accident, by providence, this neurologist who has a way that purports to reverse the neurovascular
Dr. Abigail L Martin
[ 00:11:34,679 ] contractions or sedimentations that create this condition and certainly has prevented it from getting worse in the way the Park Avenue guy predicted. And it may even be getting better or
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:11:56,169 ]this very morning we were commenting that although you walk with a cane, you're often as you went from one floor to another in our multi-floor townhouse, you would forget the cane. Ha!
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:12:09,339 ]that you're walking well enough that you simply forget to use it some of the time, at least at home on flat ground, you know, nice flat surface.
Dr. Abigail L Martin
[ 00:12:21,739 ]Amazing.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:12:22,789 ]So it's getting better. So you, yeah, that's interesting. So they have the, well, this goes to this question of the wisdom. I mean, your strategy as far as I can tell in life, you don't accept, you might say, the aging paradigm.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:12:39,289 ]just don't say accept that, oh, you've got to be in decline. And that next year's going to be worse than this year, and then the year after that even worse.
Dr. Abigail L Martin
[ 00:12:49,209 ] They always told me, you know, when you're twenty-five, you're over. That was back then, whenever it was. And when you're thirty, that's when I began to teach. And my colleagues tried out, you're thirty and you're unmarried and you're a has-been. And I just said, you want to be my friend, whoever you are, guy was named John. I don't want to hear about thirty and unmarried. And the same goes if you don't want to be my friend. You know, I just
Dr. Abigail L Martin
[ 00:13:28,889 ] toughed it out. I did not want these little power games that have to do with the imputation to the other person, usually the woman, of loss of power. I didn't want to play the losing hand in those games. If I lose power, okay, that's too bad. I guess it's too bad.
Dr. Abigail L Martin
[ 00:13:59,049 ]but I don't want the social dynamics, the power games within social life to be stacked against me. And with a woman, when I was setting forth in life, you were allowed to be about as old as 22. That was a little before feminism hit the marquees. And, you know, and I'd get to be 23 and 24 and not married.
Dr. Abigail L Martin
[ 00:14:36,259 ]and everybody was piling up to tell me what I no longer could hope for and what I no longer could be. So I considered all these social mandates about aging to be enemy fire. I just didn't want to play. If I'm supposed to deteriorate, deteriorate, it's not going to be on your timetable buster, because I know that you're playing a power game against me.
Dr. Abigail L Martin
[ 00:15:15,249 ]I mean, now, you know, we live together. There aren't colleagues playing those games of feminism or whatever ideological armor has come on scene so that people are more hesitant about playing that card has changed somewhat the social dynamic. But, I consider that for a woman, these stereotypes have to do with social power, and I'm very wary. You know, I am just what are you playing that you're playing that card with me? Now there's another question, how old am I or, you know, how falling apart am I? And I trust you, you're not going to do that to me. You love me.
Dr. Abigail L Martin
[ 00:16:26,139 ]You like me. We're friends.
Dr. Abigail L Martin
[ 00:16:28,849 ]we're colleagues thank you Jesus, you know, thank you God of Israel. That's not supposed to happen either. By the time we fell in love, I was way past the sell-by date. So, you know, that wasn't in the cards to begin with. That's not on the social map.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:16:51,259 ]Yeah, we were certainly at an age at that point. We both had a first marriage, but at the point we met we'd each been divorced for some years. And people would have said at that point, you're not going to find anyone. I think you had a friend say if you find love, I'll believe in God. It was so improbable.
Dr. Abigail L Martin
[ 00:17:15,489 ]Feminism
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:17:16,439 ]it would take a miracle. Yeah
Dr. Abigail L Martin
[ 00:17:20,059 ]She said, "Are you still looking for Mr. Right?" because she had been a founding mother of the feminist movement and was telling me about the sort of bittersweet, funny, caricatured jokes that she and other founding mothers were telling each other with regard to finding the right guy and I said, "Yeah, I am looking for Mr. Right."
Dr. Abigail L Martin
[ 00:17:56,509 ]Or, you know, I haven't closed the door because I don't know. Let's see.
Dr. Abigail L Martin
[ 00:18:03,299 ]Why didn't I close the door? I thought it was bad faith. You know, it's one thing if your body says, we are dying, kid, so wrap it up, pack it in, and get ready to leave this terrestrial veil of tears. Um, okay, you know, I can do that. Any of us can do that. It's called mortality, and you get to do that. Age
Dr. Abigail L Martin
[ 00:18:38,149 ]I don't know.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:18:39,169 ]so I sometimes want to say to people, don't die before you're dead. You know, they start packing it in, they think, “Oh, well, I'm past 60 now, I'm past 70 now, I can't do anything.” I remember a story of a guy who was a driver at NEH in my NEH years. And he was reporting how he went home after work one day and his mother...
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:19:09,249 ]who was seventy something like that had bought a piano. And he said, Mom, why'd you buy a piano, you don't play a piano?
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:19:23,579 ]And she said, I'm going to learn. And I thought, good for her.
Dr. Abigail L Martin
[ 00:19:29,589 ]Yeah.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:19:30,339 ]she's not going to be a concert pianist, although Grandma Moses, you know, became a famous artist starting at the age of who knows what. It's called Grandma for a reason. And, you never know for sure what's going to happen. And so anyway, live with the you might say the full throttle in that sense. As in doing what you think you want to do, what you feel called to do or want to do. Don't start checking out too soon. Like the...
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:20:05,949 ]closing down some of the rooms in your house, you might say. Don't start closing down.
Dr. Abigail L Martin
[ 00:20:12,269 ]Yeah. Be careful about that. I'm not a fan of stoicism.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:20:20,469 ]Yeah
Dr. Abigail L Martin
[ 00:20:21,689 ]I mean, as I understand it, I used to teach these texts, what happened was the polis, the free city-state in which philosophy was born and first flourished, the the the city of Athens that Socrates walked and Plato, and in a somewhat modified way Aristotle also lived in, that was gone and instead there were big empires and they...
Dr. Abigail L Martin
[ 00:21:00,929 ]represented the loss of political power to the voting individual. The transfer of the powers of governing to a central authority over which one wielded precious little influence and so stoicism came to give the ancient world the serenity prayer. Accept the things I cannot be empowered to do, and the wisdom to know the difference.
Dr. Abigail L Martin
[ 00:21:39,539 ]I can't, there's a lot that Socrates and Plato could do that the Stoic can no longer do. I just don't know. I have, you know, in addition to the Greco-Roman stream in culture, I have the Hebraic stream in culture. We all do, and I have it by inheritance.
Dr. Abigail L Martin
[ 00:22:14,449 ]and I can't recall a single psalm, a single verse in the Tanakh, the Hebrew Bible, that says, well, Jesus says, and he didn't know he was the first Christian, he thought he was Jewish, render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's, that's the whole country's under foreign occupation, and unto God the things that are God's.
Dr. Abigail L Martin
[ 00:22:53,399 ]So
Dr. Abigail L Martin
[ 00:22:54,489 ]Of course, you can't use freedom you don't have. Any nobody can. But you have all you can do usually your work cut out to make a constructive optimal use of such freedom as you have.
Dr. Abigail L Martin
[ 00:23:24,689 ]And it with regard to age, I think the moral there, you know, since I've told one anecdote after another about people trying to put me in the age box from the time of I was thirty on or twenty-three, and me climbing out of the box, I think it's important.
Dr. Abigail L Martin
[ 00:23:51,539 ]not to fold it up prematurely on the supposition that you're of an age to give up something that formerly you could do. I mean, if there's something you can't do that you used to be able to do, you'll know that. But I wouldn't get ahead of the game.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:24:21,139 ]Well, and one one thing, it's people preach acceptance a lot and that is a stoic wisdom, it's advice, but there is the second part of the serenity prayer which is have the courage to change what you can change. And the too easy acceptance, you know, who say, well, I just accept it all, you know, whatever horrors are going on, including maybe horrors in the social order or in the dysfunctional family or something. Well, maybe you can do something about it.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:24:57,069 ]this, that, or the other thing. In your relationship, in your parenting or being a child or or your community and your neighbors, if something's wrong, maybe you can do something about it. And right down to the management of your own body, certainly something I think you have you're you're a model of in my own humble view sweetheart, is you've worked assiduously in every way that you can find to maintain your physical and mental condition.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:25:34,789 ]of course you're always intellectually active, and that's something always recommended by everybody, but you also have this amazing regimen. You do more before breakfast than I do all day, and you've done the elliptical, you've done yoga, where you do yoga, I can barely, it amazes me to me to watch you do it. That you can do all these different yoga postures, some of which look like the human body can't do that, you know. Well, Abigail's human body can do it, and you just have to really work at it, keep it going, keep it going.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:26:13,499 ]a lot of these things are don't think well now I'm old or now I'm something else, so I step out of this, but no, keep it going.
Dr. Abigail L Martin
[ 00:26:25,539 ]Exactly. When you hit forty, they tell you that's one of those benchmarks or milestones or give it up times. God, every time you turn around, there's a whole phalanx, a chorus, like a Greek chorus telling you to give it up now. Forty was supposed to be the cutoff point. After that, you're kind of going downhill.
Dr. Abigail L Martin
[ 00:26:51,949 ] I just don't want to get ahead of the game. When I go downhill, I'll go downhill. You know, that means there are no more mountains to climb, there are some mountains to descend, and that's probably a full-time job too. But I don't, you know, you have to stay congruent with who you are, what you are, your powers.
Dr. Abigail L Martin
[ 00:27:22,729 ]So you have to stay congruent with your powers, not step back from them, or resign them, retire from them, because others have alerted you to the fact that they think you're out of time.
Dr. Abigail L Martin
[ 00:27:43,639 ]our time is, I don't know, there's a… I sometimes think of the classical as opposed to the Hebraic in Matthew Arnold's concept of culture, two great sources of Western civilization, of what is now a quasi-global civilization.
Dr. Abigail L Martin
[ 00:28:12,559 ]And the Hebraic or Jewish, that being the tribe of the twelve that survived, had to do with history, with staying on the timeline. And, one foot in front of the other. That sounds so simplistic that any child can do it and any child can, but grown-ups have trouble.
Dr. Abigail L Martin
[ 00:28:43,699 ]They are incessantly tempted to go all gnostic and get above the historical one thing after another of human time and get into some pink aureole cloud of mysticism or knowing better than to be part of the human condition, be part of where they are when they are. And it seems to me that the whole challenge of real life is to be where you are when you are.
Dr. Abigail L Martin
[ 00:29:29,129 ]And if you can do that, which is often painful. You know, it's painful. You want to be above it. You want to be outside it. Because where you are when you are is often enough a time of suffering, a time of frustration, a time when some things will go as you wish and other things as you don't wish. And it is a full-time job to be on your timeline.
Dr. Abigail L Martin
[ 00:30:07,089 ]So, that is how I see this question of, you know, darling you are growing old, silver threads among the gold, you know.
Dr. Abigail L Martin
[ 00:30:24,509 ]I color my hair. I don't know how many silver threads among the brunette would be there, but I'm not asking.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:30:56,879 ]When I prayed about our current troubles, what I received in prayer was something like, you just have to muddle through. In other words, you can't go around it, jump over it, click and solve it, you know. And the analogy I was given, which fits my own experience, was like grief. Grief is something, some people say, oh, let's see a smile. Well, that's the thing, you just want to slap them when they say that. No, there's nothing here to smile about.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:31:35,279 ]You know, my parents just died or whatever it is. It's a time of grief and grief is itself an important human function. And when it's called for, you need to live through the grief, not try to get around it or under it or over it in some way. And these other challenges in life, which would I think very much fit your sense, sweetheart, of life on the timeline. You live life right here on the ground, you live through it. You do have God as a partner.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:32:10,319 ]And when you speak of serenity, I know if I, God often asks me to do things that are extremely uncomfortable.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:32:21,479 ] In part because He gives me public roles when I'm a deep introvert. But the serenity comes if God and I are in sync, then at a more fundamental level, I can be at peace. At a more fundamental level, if I feel I'm doing what God wants me to do, in fact, what I do each morning, we pray when we have breakfast and I go through three things I pray for and one of them is for God to lead me to what God wants me to be doing and to, in effect, enable me to do it to keep me strong and capable enough to do what I'm supposed to do.
Dr. Abigail L Martin
[ 00:33:08,339 ]Yeah.
Dr. Abigail L Martin
[ 00:33:09,629 ]There's a turn that is that the culture is undergoing, a turn toward antisemitism and being Jewish and being attuned to history and making sense of history, I have some sense of responsibility
Dr. Abigail L Martin
[ 00:33:48,799 ]that isn't fulfilled or as I've recently discovered having tried one thing to sign up for or another, I can't right now become a fully signed up member of some congregation. I belong to a Reform temple.
Dr. Abigail L Martin
[ 00:34:17,279 ]I can when we do Bible study, Torah study, resist vocally the temptation to blame oneself, which seems to be a liberal vice, you know, when people have blood in their eyes and murder in their heart, it's not my fault. You know, it's their problem. My problem is not to get murdered. My problem is very simple and empathizing with my would-be murderer doesn't help me solve my problem.
Dr. Abigail L Martin
[ 00:34:56,089 ]So, there is a problem when people want to kill you or dismember you socially or caricature you or blame you for things that are actually, not at all blameworthy.
Dr. Abigail L Martin
[ 00:35:14,209 ]That's a problem, but if I look in the larger context in which hatred of Jews becomes a problem for those who entertain the hatred and who those who are the targets of it, there's a larger problem which is where should the culture go? Instead of hating Jews, that seems to me Plan B.
Dr. Abigail L Martin
[ 00:35:48,399 ]And I see myself engaged by training, by philosophical training, by my philosophical sympathy with Hegel who tried to fathom historical culture, what happens to culture in human history, that it lives by some spoken or unspoken ideals.
Dr. Abigail L Martin
[ 00:36:22,839 ]and when the realities tend to hollow out or cause a loss of trust in those ideals, the culture is in crisis, and the solution to the crisis is to reformulate ideals that are more adequate to the needs of the time. So, I'm thinking in those terms.
Dr. Abigail L Martin
[ 00:36:51,179 ]On the one hand, I'm feeling realistically threatened, but I don't, you know, there isn't anything much I can do about that except keep alert to the actual dangers and not gloss it over with idiotic platitudes.
Dr. Abigail L Martin
[ 00:37:10,859 ]But what I can do by virtue of my training and my interest in all these questions is try to think through where does the culture go if it has lost some kind of faith in its own future as something desirable and can only babble on about its culpability. You know, every culture has culpability. Give me a break.
Dr. Abigail L Martin
[ 00:37:44,719 ] Everybody wants to be western, culpability or no. So, it can't be that bad. But every culture needs a desideratum, needs a something to desire. And that's where there's this hollow place. And that's no matter how old I am, as long as I can still, you know, cut the mustard conceptually and thought-wise, that's where my thinking is going.
Dr. Abigail L Martin
[ 00:38:18,349 ]what ought we to be desiring as a band of brothers and sisters in the culture, which may be now global.
Dr. Abigail L Martin
[ 00:38:30,019 ]But I know antisemitism is global. I can't cure it. I can only ask what actual problem is that hatred masking? Is that a substitute for?
Dr. Abigail L Martin
[ 00:38:45,339 ]And there I can do something.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:38:48,719 ]So you have to figure out, well, what you're living for, what we're what we collectively are living for.
Dr. Abigail L Martin
[ 00:38:56,869 ]Yes
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:38:57,429 ]and I'm not so Hegelian as you. I always go back to Aristotle who has a teleological conception of human nature. That by our very nature, there are certain things that constitute our fulfillment and our flourishing. And just as there are things that, you know, the acorn, you water it and give it sunlight and it grows into a mighty oak. And so it has that teleology. We have our own more complex human teleology.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:39:29,129 ]and of course it does have the kind of cultural component that Husserl makes much of because from a cultural point of view everything within the culture, including individuals thinking, is shaped by the the equipment that culture provides, the concepts, institutions, relationships, norms, et cetera. And that's also true. But on this Aristotelian conception, you do desire to flourish and there's a romantic dimension to that among others.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:40:07,109 ]There's an intellectual dimension that he made much of being a philosopher. He thought if you can just think about thinking, that's just the most pure thing you could be doing. Okay. I feel the human soul has a trajectory toward the divine. That’s not just something we, it's not an add-on or something, oh, maybe you can go over there and be sort of religious or something. But no, right in the soul itself, I think there's a romantic urge, an urge to love, to love another person, to be loved.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:40:44,539 ]And there's also an intrinsic desire to connect with the divine.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:40:52,789 ]And which is a very special relationship. It's a very special relationship because it carries a lot of authority, for one thing. If you're if you're in sync with God, then you're kind of living life the way you ought to. And that's a blessed thing.
Dr. Abigail L Martin
[ 00:41:13,129 ]Yeah, there's something that goes with those considerations in Torah study today in my Reform Temple. We've deviated from what everybody is doing which is reading the five books of Moses. We're going through the Tanakh and see what else is in there, the way Protestants do, I guess.
Dr. Abigail L Martin
[ 00:41:52,989 ]That's the Bible. We got a long book there. And, we're on the story of David, who's going to be king in Israel but is right now just a shepherd boy. There's this giant Goliath from the camp of the Philistines who's fe fi fo fum, you know, uh, uh come and let me uh turn you into crumbs. Um, and David says, I can fight him.
Dr. Abigail L Martin
[ 00:42:30,539 ]And, and so they face off. And Goliath, you know, pounds on his chest and he's wearing this Greek armor and so you can hear the clanging and he's got the helmet and everything. He's going to make bird food out of David. And, David says, you come to me in the name of, you know, all the funny stuff you believe in, I come to you in the name of the Living God.
Dr. Abigail L Martin
[ 00:43:10,319 ]and you know, when he throws his swings his slingshot and that turns out to do what needs doing, which is put Goliath on the horizontal, and in the discussion of this text that circled around it, it was pointed out by this one and that one, hey, people can say, you know, they come in the name of God and look at the jihadis, they claim to come in the name of God.
Dr. Abigail L Martin
[ 00:43:50,679 ]and so, isn't this somehow, you know, blah blah blah. This can be abused. Very good. Those are two religions down the road or two and a half religions down the road from this unique encounter in which for the first time in battle somebody's saying this and making good on the claim. Hey, this is a drama that's happening now. And that's sort of what interests me.
Dr. Abigail L Martin
[ 00:44:27,139 ]Yeah, I think people long to be part of their own drama, you know, to be congruent with what is happening to themselves.
Dr. Abigail L Martin
[ 00:44:41,929 ]of course, in the cultural context, we can't even identify a happening, except in terms of the tools and concepts and memories and aspirations that we share, as a group, as a collectivity, as a piece of experience in a larger story. But very
Dr. Abigail L Martin
[ 00:45:13,469 ]interesting, sexy, real, engrossing, enticing, irreplaceable, is what is for me to do now. And to clear away layers of sludge so that you are prepared to be with yourself and be with your situation unimpeded is a major job in life.
Dr. Abigail L Martin
[ 00:45:48,979 ]The major job is to be again as an adult what you probably were as a little kid, you know, ready for the day.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:46:01,759 ]Yeah, what you're saying is somehow making me think of Charles Dickens and David Copperfield says right at the beginning of the book, I am the hero of my own story. And that's what one should be, the hero of one's own story. And there's this problem with becoming so generous and open-minded that you forget what your story is. And you forget, I mean, I think one of the things we should share with each other is not just tolerance, but if I have
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:46:38,589 ]something that seems true to me and I can share that with you, with the next person over and over, then that's what I should do. And if I've had an experience of some kind of reality that seems to me to be some kind of reality, well it's not very useful to say, oh yeah, but somebody else has their reality. We're not talking about them. We don't care about them. We don't know anything about them. Or if we do, we still don't care. We might know everything there is to know about some jihadi, for example, the Ayatollah who was just killed.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:47:17,239 ]And no doubt that Ayatollah felt he was just right with the world and he's hero of his own story. Well, we've got to be hero of our story. And that's our job, you might say. And this is a Kantian-Hegelian point, I think.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:47:32,459 ]You don't want premature synthesis….
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:47:36,389 ]We have different points of view. And let's express them. They can contend with each other. Or maybe, you know, you're Jewish, I'm not. Well, I'm not called to be Jewish. I prayed about that early on. Should I become a Jew? No, no.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:47:51,109 ]and so I was relieved. I didn't want to become a Jew. I was guided not to affiliate with any tradition. And I had this separate assignment that didn't involve that. And so I'm advocating for that assignment, you know, that's my job. So you have to figure out what one's own job is, what I sometimes…we were talking recently about what is your calling? Do you have a calling? Or I often quote you, sweetheart, because you said about some conflict you got into, this fight has my name on it. And sometimes you just kind of know this. Here's a task.
Dr. Abigail L Martin
[ 00:48:29,389 ]Yeah.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:48:30,119 ]And it has my name on it.
Dr. Abigail L Martin
[ 00:48:31,669 ]Yeah.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:48:32,319 ]And.
Dr. Abigail L Martin
[ 00:48:32,889 ]It’s not always a welcome one.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:48:34,669 ]And what?
Dr. Abigail L Martin
[ 00:48:36,059 ]The task that has my name on it is not always a welcome one.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:48:41,259 ]No, no, it's usually not. That's why it has to come to you in that way, you know, as why they call it a calling. You know, it's not just what you felt like doing. If you have musical talent, you feel like playing the violin or something. Well, there's a further question, is that your calling? Is that what you should be doing? Playing the violin?
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:49:03,109 ]Where and for whom and for what purpose and with what music etcetera those are the questions that are a little larger than just what you feel like today.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:49:15,049 ]What we're talking about is desire in the sense you're talking about it, what's one's ultimate desire or or telos, you know, teleological thrust of one's life. It's not just what do you like or what do you feel like today. It's more fundamental than that. It's what is in the heart of your being or as I'm sometimes told in the God: book, it's what your soul wants. You've got to be congruent with what your soul wants. And what your soul wants and what God wants are kind of like the same, you know.
Dr. Abigail L Martin
[ 00:49:47,979 ]Yeah, yeah. You know, we we began this discussion with talking about
Dr. Abigail L Martin
[ 00:49:59,269 ]our time of life when you kind of go into decline. And I wasn't willing to sign up for that.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:50:10,509 ]Yeah
Dr. Abigail L Martin
[ 00:50:11,209 ]Because, I've been told that I'm in decline.
Dr. Abigail L Martin
[ 00:50:16,153 ]ever since I was twenty-three, and I have never found that the advice was timely. You know, I am just okay, you think I'm in decline, get out of my way.
Dr. Abigail L Martin
[ 00:50:30,503 ] I don't like you anymore. The two of us have nothing to say to each other. Go away. Mr. or Ms… so...
Dr. Abigail L Martin
[ 00:50:44,913 ]you know, there's things that I can't do that I once could, but I think nostalgia for those particular abilities doesn't seem to be a first-order desire that I have.
Dr. Abigail L Martin
[ 00:51:14,853 ]I don't wake up in the morning and wish that I could run around the block or something whatever I could do before I had neuropathy or, you know, not have to go color my hair because it's naturally brunette. I don't mind coloring my hair and doing what I can to cure the neuropathy and not sign up for the neurologist's forecasts for me, downhill all the way forecasts.
Dr. Abigail L Martin
[ 00:51:48,973 ]The main thing is what is for me to do and that is not always easy to determine. There is a kind of treasure hunt involved in finding out,and I've been rather strenuously on that treasure hunt as I now perceive in recent months, certain tasks have been accomplished that were long in getting to be accomplished, and at this point it has now occurred to me that there is another task, that there is a future work that I might be that I seem to myself to hear as a calling.
Dr. Abigail L Martin
[ 00:52:49,333 ]And that's interesting because it's not make work. It's not what they tell you. You've retired, get a hobby.
Dr. Abigail L Martin
[ 00:53:02,133 ]No, I don't do hobbies. You know, I don't waste my time trying to fill my time. My time is a sacred allotment
Dr. Abigail L Martin
[ 00:53:15,063 ]What does my time call on me to do that no one else is called on to do in quite that way? And it has partly to do with what I've learned up till now in my time, what has concerned me, and what I, rightly or wrongly, dimly or brightly, perceive to be missing in the culture's time, in the time of us all.
Dr. Abigail L Martin
[ 00:53:49,393 ]Well, and you know, as I said just to recall the context, Jew hatred seems to be coast to coast, hemisphere to hemisphere, you know, the latest thing.
Dr. Abigail L Martin
[ 00:54:06,233 ]It is not interesting to me.
Dr. Abigail L Martin
[ 00:54:10,653 ]to be busy with Jew hatred. It is interesting to me to use the covenantal assignment of teaming with God on the timeline in history and see what the next assignment is.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:54:31,143 ]Well, and maybe...
Dr. Abigail L Martin
[ 00:54:33,083 ]a sort of a distraction, a plan B. Yeah.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:54:38,583 ]Yeah, yeah, let's… I think this would be a good topic next time or whenever you're ready, 'cause I know you have this in mind and are thinking it through as we speak. And, so next time might be too soon, but anyway, soon we should start sharing with our community just what that is. And I think it'll be very interesting to everybody.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:55:08,853 ]Yeah. So that's a... something to wait for and to look forward to.
Dr. Abigail L Martin
[ 00:55:15,373 ]Meantime, I've had no time for old age. I'm sure it's a fascinating time of life, but it doesn't fascinate me.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:55:24,583 ]Yeah, right.
Dr. Abigail L Martin
[ 00:55:25,373 ]So we can't do much with it.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:55:27,943 ]Yeah, right. Well, thank you, sweetheart, for this intimate dialogue.
Scott Langdon
[ 00:55:48,043 ]Thank you for listening to God: An Autobiography, The Podcast. Subscribe for free today wherever you listen to your podcasts and hear a new episode every week. You can hear the complete dramatic adaptation of God: An Autobiography, As Told to a Philosopher by Jerry L. Martin by beginning with Episode 1 of our podcast and listening through its conclusion with Episode 44. You can read the original true story in the book from which this podcast is adapted — God: An Autobiography, As Told to a Philosopher — available now at amazon.com, and always at godanautobiography.com. Pick up your own copy today. If you have any questions about this or any other episode, please email us at questions@godanautobiography.com, and experience the world from God’s perspective — as it was told to a philosopher. This is Scott Langdon. I’ll see you next time.