GOD: An Autobiography, As Told to a Philosopher - The Podcast
GOD: An Autobiography, As Told to a Philosopher - The Podcast
287. The Spiritual Meaning and Reality of Suffering - What's On Our Mind?
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What is the spiritual meaning of suffering, and why is suffering such a real part of human life?
In this What’s On Our Mind conversation, Jerry L. Martin and Scott Langdon explore suffering, grief, compassion, spiritual growth, and the ways reality discloses itself personally to each of us.
Drawing from God: An Autobiography, Radically Personal, Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, and the New Axial Age, this episode reflects on suffering not as a meaningless accident, but as part of the real terrain of life. Jerry and Scott discuss why pain can become information, why grief can reveal love and meaning, and how different spiritual traditions can help us respond to suffering with humility, discernment, and compassion.
The conversation also considers God’s presence in human suffering, the role of personal spiritual experience, and the question of how each person is called to respond to reality as it unfolds.
For anyone seeking meaning in grief, pain, loss, or spiritual struggle, this episode offers a thoughtful reflection on suffering, healing, and the search for divine presence in a real and difficult world.
Related Episodes:
283. Why Suffering Is the Law of Growth: What to Accept, What to Change- From God to Jerry to You
285. A New Axial Age? Religion and Spiritual Transformation- Radically Personal
Get the books:
Radically Personal: God and Ourselves in the New Axial Age
God: An Autobiography, As Told to a Philosopher
***Ultimate Questions***
Listen to the full episode and explore the question with a community of philosophers and seekers.
Join the Ultimate Questions conversation on calling and divine guidance: https://substack.com/@ultimatequestions
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
[ 00:00:58,349 ]Episode two eighty seven. Welcome to God: An Autobiography, The Podcast. I'm your host Scott Langdon, and this week I get to share with you once again my favorite part of this gig, talking with Jerry Martin for our ongoing series, What's on Our Mind. In this edition of What's on Our Mind, Jerry and I discuss the problem of suffering and how as we enter this new axial age, God is even more available to us than ever before. But how do we respond to what God is calling each one of us to do about our suffering? Are we open to exploring it and learning from it? Are we being called to sit with our suffering, to sit with our grief for a while? Here's what's on our mind. I hope you enjoy the episode.
Scott Langdon
[ 00:02:08,349 ]Welcome back everybody to another edition of What's on Our Mind. I'm Scott Langdon of course. I'm here with Jerry Martin of course. And this unit of episodes had a lot to do with suffering. And everyone in every age has known suffering. That's the one thing that we can say across the board of religious experience, non-religious experience, it doesn't matter. We can all agree on one thing: suffering in life is real.
Scott Langdon
[ 00:02:41,679 ]And Jerry, I want to talk about that this week and I want to talk about it in terms of a little bit later, in terms of the new axial age in which we find ourselves.
Scott Langdon
[ 00:02:54,079 ]And to start with, I'd like to, you know, talk about for a moment why suffering is such an integral part of our existence as a human being and why that's one thing that it has to be, God says it it it just has to be in this world.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:03:17,719 ]Yeah, that's... God tells me it's not an accident, you know, some peripheral phenomenon that happened to crop up, but it's essential. It's essential to what? Well, to a real world. You know, could you could imagine, well quite, why do we have to have a law of gravity where if you step off the cliff you fall to the ground and hurt yourself? Couldn't we just not get rid of the law of gravity? Well, then no, in a real world, you're going to have material reality, you're going to have laws of nature,
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:03:52,719 ]you're and if you have organic beings like us and animals and so forth, well what's the essential nature of an organism? It has sensations. moving
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:04:04,349 ]it has needs, it's moving about the world. It can hurt itself, step the wrong way. That's true of people, it's true of animals, it's true of anything that's alive.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:04:14,169 ]and it's better to be alive actually, even in a world that has all these hazards, and what I often just sum up as a world of rough terrain. We have to move, we can't glide across reality, just hovering above it. There's a nice Hindu story of Yudhishthira who tries to do that. He is gliding across reality, being more of a holy man than dealing with his duties as king. You know, we have duties in this world after all. We're implanted and placed. We're not just free floating.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:04:51,129 ]So, all of that is part of its being a real world. And so any world that's real, and especially if it has organic matter, so people can get disease and hurt themselves and die, you know, get old and die, go through the stages of life that so shocked the young Buddha when he went outside his rather privileged confines and oh, he sees all these crippled people and old people and a funeral procession. And he says, "What? Has this happened to everybody? Is this going to happen to me?" And he's quite, quite shocked by this. Well, that is the world.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:05:28,759 ]That is what it is to be real. And so God created a, I don't use the creator image much, but the world, God, that we're in with God is necessarily a world that contains all this possibility of suffering.
Scott Langdon
[ 00:05:47,949 ]One of the claims very early on in your new book is that reality discloses itself to us.
Scott Langdon
[ 00:06:00,009 ]Divine reality discloses itself to us. So could we also say God discloses Godself to us? Is that fair enough?
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:06:11,369 ]In general, we tend to, I think, a lot of Western philosophy, maybe Eastern philosophy too, rather misinterprets what experience is, as if it's an inner flow, just in the interiority of consciousness. Well, there's that aspect, as if you're looking at it from the back side, you might say. But in fact, most of experience is encountering reality. When I, you know, right now, I've got objects around me and I'm encountering them. I'm standing on the floor. I'm not just having an experience of floor.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:06:42,299 ]I'm standing on it. I'm encountering the floor, and if I trip, I'll encounter this desk in an unpleasant way.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:06:49,989 ]So anyway, we have to start with the fact that we actually in all of our waking lives, you might say, encounter reality. That's what experience is. And since reality includes its divine aspects, when we encounter those also, they're harder to recognize. You need, as we often talk, you need spiritual discernment because not every little whim and fancy and pop into our head is a divine moment. But, yeah, we encounter God. And of course, I encountered God in this dramatic way, God talking to me.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:07:29,029 ]But you don't have to have anything dramatic. We tend to think of God as kind of woo-woo, wowee woo woo. But no, God is just in the warp and woof of our lives, actually.
Scott Langdon
[ 00:07:43,069 ]A quote that I wrote down from an episode in this unit that you say. And I think this is from, correct me if I'm wrong, I think this is from your book Radically Personal.
Scott Langdon
[ 00:07:54,369 ]You say, we must each respond to reality as it discloses itself to us, and then theologize, make sense of life, from there.
Scott Langdon
[ 00:08:05,989 ]And the reason I wrote that down is that it really spoke to me about the personal nature of God and the personal nature of each of ourselves and how God and each of ourselves have that personal relationship. God is when we talk about being in tune with God, each one of us in our own personal way has that. Everyone who has always existed, you know, whoever has, is now existing, ever will exist, has their own personal place to start.
Scott Langdon
[ 00:08:46,649 ]When we think about how reality is disclosing itself to us consistently, constantly, and we might even put God in there, I would also say that, that's the term I would use, God is constantly disclosing God's self to me in every waking moment and often when I'm sleeping, I would think too, in dreams and things, God mentions that. And there are other stories of experience in that way from other people. So each one of us, you say, we respond to reality as it discloses itself to us and then from there to being open to that and I guess being open would be a big way to to think about it, you know, sort of being open to everything that's happening around you, inside of you, collectively. You know, how do we, you know, parse that? How do we make sense of life? Hans's book, which I'm excited to read when it comes out, Hans le Grand, whom we had on a few episodes ago with a spiritual story, talks about the way each one of us can personally sort of theologize.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:09:52,239 ]Yeah you have to start from where you are. You know, we're personal, each a person. God is personal. The encounter is personal. And it's a bit less like surveying the landscape, I suppose there's something personal about the surveyor who's looking through that little telescope or whatever they do and triangulating or something the landscape.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:10:15,559 ]Well, we have something a little less like that probably than like falling in love. You know, you go on a date with a person, you find out you connect in certain ways, maybe you don't connect in these other ways. So you take it from there. Maybe it's not your true love, but it's someone who can be a good friend. Or maybe it's just, well, that was an interesting person to get to know. Doesn't fit with me in particular, but nevertheless it now populates my understanding of the people in the world, you know, and therefore wasn't wasted time. Or occasionally, well, that person was just obnoxious.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:10:52,939 ]so I got nothing out of it other than a study in obnoxiousness, you know, that I now understand better. But for each person, including that poor obnoxious person, well, that person hopefully is pursuing reality as it's coming to him or her. And we can't, that's hard to say about someone else, what I knew, he's obnoxious in my reaction to him, and maybe that's because of sensitivities of my own, doesn't really reveal that much about him. So one sorts all of those things out, but
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:11:29,759 ]whatever takes in, and of course here I'm thinking particularly of moments that seem significant to us, and that's why I think of falling in love, a significant moment, or the kind of moments that poets put into words so very effectively. There are moments that carry meaning that strike us, that this is something I should take in, that I should think about more, or maybe draw into my life, you know, draw into my heart and into my body, into how I live, into my relationships.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:12:03,789 ]If when those moments come to you, then prize them and make the most of them because, that's how reality has, I started to say chosen to, don't want to get too theistic, but that's how the reality given to you to to watch over and follow up upon.
Scott Langdon
[ 00:12:29,059 ]Mmm, yeah. I might say it's your role to play. Your character is coming more and more in, you know, I was thinking about this not just the other day actually. This run of 1776 that we're doing at the Walnut Street Theater, which closes on Sunday. We're recording this on a Tuesday, the 26th of May. My parents' 59th wedding anniversary, by the way.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:12:54,579 ]Congratulations to them. Yes.
Scott Langdon
[ 00:12:56,099 ]Yes, it's wonderful, right? But I was thinking about playing John Dickinson in this piece and I'm having a wonderful time and it's a re- it's a longer run than I normally get to do. So we've done I guess I will have done over 50 performances including the previews of this same piece time and time again.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:13:20,429 ]Wow
Scott Langdon
[ 00:13:21,159 ]And, you know, you get a chance to really know him, you get a chance to sort of be in tune with him, you know, if we could use that language. And it that the the personal nature of of that relationship is really has really been interesting to me and and you know, I spend this little bit of time in this imaginary world with this character John Dickinson who has this journey from beginning of the play
Scott Langdon
[ 00:13:54,269 ]till the end of the play when he leaves, and that's a little slice of time. And time and again, I get to feel what he feels, he feels what I feel, and we just sort of really share this mutual connection in such a way that's that's different every night. And yet the goal is for it to be the same. So that irony there is also strange to play with, you know. And so you kind of think about, I kind of think about that too in relationship to our individual lives.
Scott Langdon
[ 00:14:25,949 ]that, well, let's stay with the 1776 for example. A lot of theaters around the country are doing that musical now because of the 250th anniversary of America, of course. And so there are going to be a lot of John Dickinsons out there. Lots of different ones, but this one is mine. Which is kind of tying into what you were saying, is that this is my responsibility for this time. Just like in a, you know, you step back from that, in a sense Scott Langdon is my responsibility now for however long the run lasts.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:15:05,239 ]Yes, yes, yes.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:15:07,819 ]And one of the things, of course, I'm told is that in a sense God's story, I'm told to tell God's story. Well, there are many aspects to what that turns out to be, but one of them, a key one, is that God's story is the totality of all of our stories. As as it is, it's a kind of dual relationship, as Scott plays John Dickinson, God is, I wouldn't say playing because that's not quite it's a good and interesting analogy, but anyway, God is infused in, let's say, Scott Langdon.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:15:45,459 ]And this affects the problem of suffering, in insofar as God didn't just create this imperfect world and drop us into it and so long suckers, you know.
Scott Langdon
[ 00:15:57,829 ]Right.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:15:59,159 ]God suffers when we suffer. If we're having a great day, God's having a great day vis-a-vis, you know, us. And, and when we're having a bad day, God's having a bad day, and that includes of course our suffering. It also includes important to God when we're living badly. When we're out of touch with God, we're not living in any sense on upright or upstanding or high-minded life, we're just in the gutter of life.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:16:31,769 ]And then God, the way a parent would, you know, if your parents come and you're just, you know, wasting your life away in some horrible venue, not doing your work as an actor at all, then that would be very painful for your parents to see. Oh no, Scott has become that kind of person. Has flunked, flunked, has failed in life, and failed in not both the empirical aspect of life, just our daily responsibilities aspect, self-care, and so forth. You know, you got to take care of your body and so on.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:17:10,329 ]Also your relationship to the divine or the ultimate is languishing. And that would be sad for your parents, what's sad that way for God too. And that's why in the Old Testament version, God often gets angry with people. You know, they're just not doing right. You know, he's right there. And the denunciations in this is in God: An Autobiography, I pray through parts of the Bible including the
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:17:41,799 ]the prophets and Jeremiah or somebody gives God says, tell Him what I tell you and what you're supposed to tell him is that I'm angry with you and the wrath grapes of wrath and everything. I'm gonna mop the floor with them. But after a time of going on in that vent, God says, but if they come back to me, I'll take them back. You know, so it's a kind of in the end a loving response and I guess anybody who's a parent has had that kind of feeling. Okay, went wrong, but let's bring 'em back. Hope they don't go wrong again.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:18:18,559 ]but you there's a lot of forgiveness in human relationships also, and that's a necessary aspect. You need to recognize you did wrong, but that's not the crime of the century. That doesn't mean you're not worth living. And so let's look not look to the past all the time at a past wrongs. Let's look to future possibilities.
Scott Langdon
[ 00:19:16,789 ]When God speaks to you of suffering, He says suffering is the law of growth in the universe. And you know, you talk about the law of gravity. Stepping out a second floor window, you're going to fall. That's the way it is. And I mentioned this in the introduction to, I think it was the From God to Jerry to You episode about suffering that you just did. I think it was that introduction where I talked about exercising. That lifting weights, we break our muscles down to build them back up stronger. That's kind of an analogy or one way to talk about suffering that maybe kind of makes sense.
Scott Langdon
[ 00:19:56,909 ]But suffering is the law of growth in the universe. The law of growth is difficult to understand.
Scott Langdon
[ 00:20:06,089 ]And when you talk to God about it and He said, and you say, well, why do kids get cancer and God says, don't fence with me about that.
Scott Langdon
[ 00:20:15,509 ]”You're fencing with Me”. But He also says, listen, suffering is as real as those who turn against me because of it think it is.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:20:26,599 ]Yeah, it's really
Scott Langdon
[ 00:20:28,049 ]absolutely real and I'm right there in it.
Scott Langdon
[ 00:20:30,739 ]this new axial age that you talk about gives us an opportunity to see how other religious traditions or how other ways of experiencing God deal with and talk about and handle suffering. So some ways that I grew up handling suffering, certain aspects of suffering, through my religious tradition of Christianity only went so far in certain ways, and I didn't know any other thing.
Scott Langdon
[ 00:21:09,919 ]But as we've started to work on, as I started to work on this project with you and start looking more into other religions in the eastern tradition, the Tao, the Buddhist way of looking at breathing and everything, just I found pieces and moments that have filled in some of the what seemed like gaps in my ability to commune with God in times of suffering. So for example, breathing that I learned from Thich Nhat Hanh, the Zen master, Buddhist monk.
Scott Langdon
[ 00:21:50,059 ]I hadn't thought, I hadn't learned that in Christianity, but then this became a way of connecting with God in a spiritual way that it hadn't had before. So, I could speak to an experience of this new axial age, the ability to see on YouTube or to read books or to hear lectures and everything else, of different ways of seeing God and talking about God and experiencing God.
Scott Langdon
[ 00:22:17,359 ]this new axial age gives me so much hope because the availability of God and God's presence seem to be more available than ever before.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:22:31,099 ]you know, the message of when God asked me, I want you to tell My story. And I say, hasn't it been told already? I'm thinking of the Bible, given my background, hasn't it been told already. Yeah, but it needs to be told again and in a new way.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:22:50,719 ]and I'll give them some reasons for that. But you know, what is the new way? Well, God started walking me through the worlds, the foundational texts, the sacred books of the world's religions. And what I ask about each one, I wasn't this scholarly thing where I'm trying to learn the language or anything like that. I'm learning just enough to pray about about the religion in each case. And I'm just to ask God, Lord, what were You up to with these people? Then this includes like the ancient Egyptians.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:23:30,629 ]It's not just the ones that are in the world religions textbooks, which are the current seven big winners or something like that, the ones that have survived. Includes a long thing on Zoroaster, a tradition that history was unkind to as various armies marched through Persia. It was once very big. One of the three wise men may have been a Zoroastrian.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:23:56,009 ]But they got trampled multiple times, Roman armies and later Muslim armies on horseback and some others. But it’s an amazing story and it's an amazing interaction of God and Zoroaster or the original is more Zarathustra. And going on through the others. And that doesn't mean they're all just right, like God's word, infallible word. No, I also got the limitations of this one and that one. Things they may have overdone.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:24:30,649 ]And when we get to Buddha for example, the part of Buddha that's commended, I in each of these I prayed about the original text, not the many strands of Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, et cetera that came later, but just the original text. And the part that God commends is Buddha's extraordinary compassion, which God explains as the Buddha, you know, we've heard this, I think Bill Clinton used to talk this way, you know, I feel your pain. Well, Buddha Gautama really did feel people's pains.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:25:10,179 ]it was he would have like an open sensorium taking it in and feeling this endless compassion for people a little bit different from Christian love compassion isn't exactly the same as love you don't have to love a person to feel compassion for them and Buddha had that God is less favorable to the Buddhist metaphysics that has a lot of what you've been studying which is makes the world somewhat look less real
Scott Langdon
[ 00:25:40,199 ]Hmm
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:25:41,099 ]and kind of you overcome suffering in that mode by kind of putting a wall between you and the suffering. You know, putting it under lowering that and reminded me of this a wonderful book, A Whole New Life by, often I know the name of the author and it doesn't come to me now, but I know that I've got the title right and it's mentioned I think at the beginning of of God: An Autobiography.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:26:14,099 ]professor of literature, also playwright and novelist, had turned out one day he was having terrible pain. Hadn't had it before.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:26:23,959 ]just comes upon him. He goes to Duke Medical Center, it's a top medical center. He's got cancer all up and down his spine. He's in intense pain from the top of his head to the sole of his feet. And it's the cancer is so wound in around the spinal nerves, you know, the column has these nerves that surgery was impossible. And all they can do is dope him up. And he says life he found was not worth living, just sitting around doped up. God, comes to him in a dream.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:26:56,129 ]In this case, it's a Christian story because the image that came to him in a dream was Jesus saying something like, "You're going to be healed." And yippee!
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:27:07,909 ]he thinks, then it turns out as the dream goes on or as he reflects, it means spiritually healed. Well, pooh, that's not what he's interested in. But actually, shortly thereafter, he's gone, this says something our medical professions, how they're all specialists of some sort. And, like the hammer that sees every problem as a nail. And, a nurse finally, not a doctor, says, "Well, you've tried the eighth floor." "Oh, what's what's on the eighth floor?"
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:27:40,409 ]biofeedback Well, none of these surgeons are going to be thinking of biofeedback. They probably don't even know much about it. Well, he goes there, it turns out he's rather good at it and highly motivated to do it's it's a kind of like a meditation.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:27:54,309 ]But the result of doing the biofeedback is not that the pain goes away, but it's a bit like someone shouting at you from behind a glass. You can see that they're making noise, but you don't hear it. And it's kind of like that. He knows he's in pain. The pain is there, but he doesn't feel it. And since that time, he's been more productive than ever. His plays and novels more successful than ever. It gave him a whole new life, and he was kind of healed. But the healing, you have to remember this in life.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:28:31,469 ]Don't always assume you know in advance what form the healing or or problem solution that you're looking for is going to take. It may be come in a form quite surprising to you and you're at danger of not noticing. You know that you might say your prayer has been answered, that your problem has been solved. Here's the thing that would solve it because you thought, no, I was looking for this other kind of thing. And so as you deal with suffering, there are lots of things you can do, including appreciating the lessons.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:29:08,379 ]you know, looking back at what did I learn from this suffering? I mean, that's what God immediately does with me when I raise this question. He focuses my attention on a specific unhappy time when I was hospitalized and the nurse, I had a Nurse Ratched who was just terrible and a guy who was supposed to do things with me who was always hurting me and you know, not paying attention to the patient. That can happen.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:29:43,809 ]And anyway I there was, and God tells me what it was, there was a positive upshot of that suffering. In that case, not so much something I learned, but a kind of turning of my attitude. This can happen with life-threatening situation. Suddenly you start thinking, as one guy put it to me, I now think, I used to know what's urgent, I now think, is it important? Not what's urgent, what's... that's what big on my to-do list.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:30:18,579 ]but of these things, what do I want to make sure I get done in this life? And so that's one outcome of mortal threats.
Scott Langdon
[ 00:30:30,749 ]I think when we respond to reality as it discloses itself to us, when we respond, it's the response part that's important.
Scott Langdon
[ 00:30:43,989 ]you know, when I think about when I feel my best, let's say, I will have my best physically, I mean, I will have been going to the gym on a regular basis. Which for me is probably three, four times a week and you know, it's not what I used to do in my twenties. And that's the other thing is realizing, you know, where I am, where we are, you know, being not just honest but realistic about, you know, what others know about what it means to be fifty-seven versus twenty-five.
Scott Langdon
[ 00:31:19,079 ]so doctors and specialists who will say, listen, you don't have to train like you did, you don't have to sleep as many hours or, you know, this is probably more normal than that, you know, paying attention to these things around us that in a sense God is giving to us to help us learn, to help us deal with suffering.
Scott Langdon
[ 00:31:40,679 ]One of the things that we've talked about before we talked about with the team on one of our calls that I've been thinking about recently is this idea that when I'm suffering, that's something that's wrong and that to stop suffering or to feel better is what's right. So I have to like do some kind of correction mode in there. But sometimes suffering is just to be sat with, to be to be in. Sometimes suffering is just that's where it is for a little bit and we, you know, you work through it, but there's nothing necessarily wrong with it.
Scott Langdon
[ 00:32:20,479 ]If someone you love passes away, that's what happens. None of us get out of this alive, as they say. And so suffering, you know, grief is everybody grieves differently and how can we be, as you mentioned earlier, compassionate
Scott Langdon
[ 00:32:37,569 ]to and with and for others who are grieving and suffering? And I think it's related once again to that response of ours, and each one of us gets to choose how we respond to reality disclosing itself to us. Do we want to be a part of it? How can I be, how can I be of service? You know, when I think about acting and I think about a character them playing, I really think of it as a service industry. I mean, I'm serving the script. The writer put these words out and got this, you know, made up the story in this world.
Scott Langdon
[ 00:33:14,909 ]and so my service is to the writer and then more specifically to this character, bringing him to life. That's what I'm serving. So in that sense, being filled with God, being filled with, you know, a connected spirit.
Scott Langdon
[ 00:33:35,399 ]would seem to manifest itself in a way of wanting to serve others in a compassionate way, to help alleviate suffering. It seems like that would be God's way.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:33:46,839 ]Well, that would be one part of it. I don't know. I guess this would be a question for each person. This goes back to discernment and maybe a lively life of prayer.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:34:00,639 ]Here's some suffering.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:34:03,179 ]I look at I'm Jerry Martin. My age, my capabilities, my this and my that, you know, things I know about, things I don't know about, skills I have, skills I don't have, the energy level I have to do what I feel called upon to do.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:34:21,289 ]Should I be trying to go into Philadelphia and bring health services to people, or work at a soup kitchen, or, you know, help people? There are a lot of obviously non-professionals at the hospital when I go who are helping, they're carting people around in wheelchairs, some of them are parking cars. Should I do that? Well, that's one kind of service, but I don't know.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:34:50,889 ]I guess I don't, as long as I'm doing what God wants me to do, that fits my capacity, I guess I sort of am happy there. If God says you should reach out to so and so and help them in some way, then I rush to do that. But I, that's interesting. And this may be the reality presenting itself to Scott. And not only to Scott, to Dorothy Day and you know, and various other great humanitarians of history.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:35:28,329 ]must have reality presented that to them as their task.
Scott Langdon
[ 00:35:34,159 ]Mm-hmm.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:35:35,339 ]and realities making that a capital R has given me rather other tasks like that some of which don't fit my capacities. I'm a deep introvert and yet I've got to go push a book, you know, God: An Autobiography. I was given that mandate and I sometimes think, gee, I would have been, had I had the mandate God gave to Saint Paul, I would have been really bad at it. Paul went gangbusters with that assignment. I could not have. And I'm glad I didn't get that. One point I ask, what is my task?
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:36:15,369 ]Because I saw these kind of, here God had spoken to me, given me a kind of assignment. That seemed rather, well, what does that mean? Am I a prophet, a seer, or this or that? I didn't seem to fit any of them, any of those categories. And so I prayed, you know, what is my role? You know, like job description here. Just to be a serious reporter of what God tells you when you pray. So I thought, oh, well I can do that.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:36:44,079 ]So that's what I do. And I guess that is a service, obviously. I'm bringing a certain divine word to the world. It's not the only divine word. I'm always aware of that. Nevertheless, it is rather uniquely pertinent to our point in time, because of the new axial age. We've got all these religions available to us. And, I often read something not read so much by the westerners, which is the Mahabharata, the great Indian epic. It's a war epic. People do in the west do read the Bhagavad Gita, which is one chapter plucked out of that great epic.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:37:23,599 ]and I like to read it in context of the whole battle that's going on and the story of the king that I mentioned earlier, Yudhishthira. And Yudhishthira is almost a bit too much of a Buddhist, you might say. He's a meditator, he's a meditator. He likes to go to the forest, which is where the holy people go, and divert and can talk with each other about sublime matters. And meanwhile, the kingdom is going down the drain.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:37:54,669 ]So anyway, I mean, that would be his service, you might say. But we each have to pay attention. Well, what is our role? What does God want us to do? And somewhere in Radically Personal, I talk about the Hindu concept of svadharma. When Dharma is the order of the rightful order of the universe, and svadharma is the rightful order of you, you know, your own rightful order, which isn't necessarily the same as anybody else in the world. That's another question. But it's very it's on least on the interpretation I take, it's very uniquely personal.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:38:35,289 ]And each of us has to find out what that is. And I think reality sends us signals of what that is. And those signals come in all kinds of ways. You were mentioning exercise and so on, going to the gym. I was told somewhere that your body is also the voice of God. It's one of the ways God tells you, lets you know what you should be up to, whether you're living rightly or wrongly.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:39:10,149 ]And maybe paying attention to it tells you something about what you should be doing, depending on what those bodily capacities are.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:39:22,669 ]And the other thing your body tells you, you know, if you ask, talk about suffering, what is the function of pain?
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:39:32,109 ]Why do you feel pain? You know, you twist an ankle, it hurts.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:39:38,069 ]That's information. That's the function of pain. The worst thing that could happen to a person would be to be incapable of feeling pain. Then they would not know when they had twisted their foot and would keep walking on it. And you need to know something's malfunctioning. You know, in your eye and it's hurting, well you better do something about that. And, we don't want to be without that information.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:40:06,289 ]And I guess one other thought I was having when you mentioned the case of grief, which I think is a very good example for thinking about suffering.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:40:18,079 ]Would you want to live in a world where nobody feels grief at the death of a parent or close friend or a valued person in their lives? Would you want to live in a world without grief?
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:40:33,139 ]Well, that would just seem like a worse world, a world where people didn't have adequate feeling for one another. And grief is a good and positive thing. And that's why you need to live it out. You know, go through the process of grief and not do this thing where people sometimes obnoxiously say, "Oh, let's see a big smile." No, I'm sorry, I'm grieving. You know, that's why we don't want a big smile right now. That's not truthful to the reality we're encountering. We're encountering a reality of loss.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:41:07,749 ]and this kind and many kinds of suffering, that example happened to occur to me, but many kinds of suffering are also tributes to the fact life has meaning. These activities have meaning. When you split up with a good friend, have a fight, and the friendship is threatened or maybe lost forever because words were exchanged that you can't take back. Well, that's a tribute to the value of that friendship. And so it is in our romantic lives and our parental and child of parents life, you know, family lives.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:41:44,289 ]And work lives and everything else, the the fact that there's conflict and and moments of discomfort and even more intense suffering, like you get, I've been fired in my youth, I haven't been fired thankfully in my adult life, but in my youth I was fired at least once that comes to mind. So I can be fired and that doesn't feel good, I tell ya to be fired. But that shows that job was valuable to me. And so suffering is, you might say, always the flip side of something of value.
Scott Langdon
[ 00:42:23,259 ]Well Jerry, thanks again for another wonderful conversation. I'm always so glad to be with you.
Dr. Jerry L. Martin
[ 00:42:27,969 ]Well, thank you, Scott. Thank you.
Scott Langdon
[ 00:42:40,529 ]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.