GOD IS REAL
My Spiritual Journey to God and Eternity
By Shelley Gilbert
Published by Shelley Joy Gilbert, Ossining, NY, 10562 USA
Smashwords Edition 10,200 words
Copyright © 2012 Shelley Joy Gilbert
All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical or electronic, including photocopying, without written permission from the author. www.shelleyjoygilbert.com. shelley@shelleyjoygilbert.com
ISBN: 978-0-9718317-8-0
Cover and Interior design: Shelley Gilbert
www.shelleyjoygilbert.com
This book is all true and is a work of Nonfiction.
Other Books by Shelley Gilbert
Islands, A Coloring Book for Adults, 30 Drawings, 30 Poems, 2001
Swimming Naked with Jellyfish, 2008
Islands, A Coloring Book for Teens and Kids, 30 Hand-Drawn Drawings, 30 Poems and Recipes, 2010
Islands, A Coloring Book for Adults, Volume 2, 30 Hand-Drawn Drawings, 30 Poems, 2011
Land of Sooj, Six Seahorse Stories, 2011
Islands, A Coloring Book for Adults, 2nd Edition, 30 Hand-Drawn Drawings, 30 Poems, 2011
To Hank, Into Eternity
CHAPTER 1
For the first 59 years of my life, I was an atheist. My parents didn't raise me to be an atheist. They just didn't bring God or a spiritual life into our home.
I didn't mind being an atheist. I was always independent and relied upon myself anyway, so I didn't feel the need to lean on anyone else. And I loved the heated debates I had with people about God. My favorite lines to stump the believers were: "If God created the world, who created God?" and "Can you prove there's a God?" I was very black and white then. If you couldn't prove things to me, I didn't believe. And I didn't believe in a spiritual world or in anything that had to do with it, like ghosts, so it was easier and neater to just disregard the whole thing.
One day when I was 55, my spiritual life shifted into a new direction. This is a funny and ironic story. I was shopping in my local Bed, Bath and Beyond store, buying yet another set of bed linens because I didn't have that particular shade of beige. I suddenly stopped walking and looked down at all the stuff in my cart and felt a longing. I thought to myself, Is this it? Is this all there is to life? That Peggy Lee song came into my head: Is That All There Is? I just stood there, in that store, staring at all my stuff in the cart, and feeling a strong yearning to find a deeper meaning to life. I couldn't believe that life was just about cooking dinners, buying bed linens and sending people greeting cards. I didn't realize then that I wanted to find God. I just wanted to find something deeper and more meaningful. The Eternal Being does indeed have an ironic sense of humor when It planted that seed in me in Bed, Bath & Beyond.
At some point soon after that shopping experience, the second seed came into my conscious brain. I had seen Rose Kennedy being interviewed on TV after her son, President John F. Kennedy, was assassinated. The reporter asked how she coped with all her difficult times. The camera went in close on Rose Kennedy's face as she answered. She cocked her head, had this serene look on her face and said that it was her faith that got her through. I remember looking at her peaceful face then and thinking, I want that face. I wanted what was in her heart, what was in her being that emanated such a peaceful look. Growing up with anxious and depressed parents, I didn't often see that face in my childhood home. Rose Kennedy's face came back into my awareness as the goal of my spiritual journey.
I made an appointment with the rabbi at my local temple in New York. I told her I wanted to find God and asked her for help. She said I should go every Friday night to temple service, go every Saturday morning to Torah Study group, plan to become bat mitzvahed, and read the Holy Scriptures and a book on Jewish heritage. I did as she said for about a year. Nothing happened. I didn't feel that I found God or even that I was on the right track. It didn't matter to me that billions of people on Earth said they believed in God. I had to know God. It wasn't good enough to just say that I believed in God. I had to feel God. So I stopped doing all the things the rabbi told me to do and I stopped going to temple. I felt I was going in the wrong direction.
CHAPTER 2
On January 12, 2002 something pivotal happened that enabled me to open my mind to believe in God. My husband Hank and I were staying at a historic, antique-filled bed and breakfast house in Connecticut. It was Saturday night and we went to sleep on the comfortable and luxurious bed.
In the middle of the night, I woke up, eyes wide open, and sat up tall in bed. Looking back on this experience, I must have looked like I was in one of those movies when someone is under a spell and rises from their sleep with their eyes wide open, back straight as a board. I didn't hear or smell anything and I wasn't touched by anything but I instantly turned my head to the left.
About three feet away from me, suspended in mid air about eye level to me, was a ghost. The ghost was shaped like a huge, round, horizontal Bayer aspirin tablet. It was flat on the top and bottom with rounded edges. It was about two feet in diameter. The ghost was made up of thousands of tiny black particles, each shaped like a sperm, which furiously rotated clockwise as fast as a tornado. It spun around so violently that it spewed off some of the tiny black particles. But, although the ghost was just a couple of feet away and although it was spinning as fast as a tornado, I didn't feel a breeze and none of the particles touched me. It was as if the ghost was contained in its own little world, separate from my human world.
This whole experience actually lasted just a few seconds, because as soon as I sat up and turned my head and my eyes saw the ghost, as if it saw me looking at it, it instantly broke down into an amoebic mob of particles and made a mad dash for the closed old door and disappeared through the long crack of the warped frame.
I sat up for a while thinking about this experience. Strangely, I did not feel fear because if I did, I would have awakened my husband. I did feel a sort of fear because I didn't want to put my head back down on the pillow, afraid to go back to sleep, afraid the ghost would return. But I was very tired and layed back down to ponder what I should do. The next thing I knew, it was morning.
As soon as we woke up, I told Hank about the ghost. He just listened to me. He looked like he was believing me. I told him there probably was a small chance it was all a dream but I didn't think so. It didn't feel like a dream. It felt real and I remembered it in vivid detail.
When we went downstairs for breakfast, I was so excited that I told everyone in the dining room what happened to me that night. The two owners mockingly pooh-poohed my story but there was a visiting pastor from Pennsylvania. She also stayed overnight because she was to give a sermon at a nearby church. She confirmed that she was also visited by the ghost. She said she didn't see what I saw but she woke up during the night and felt its presence sitting in a chair by her bed. She said that in her line of work, people often came to her with stories and issues concerning ghosts and spirits. With the pastor as witness, I was validated 100% that I did indeed see a ghost. Actually, I think this pastor was an Angel because in the days ahead I tried to reach her but I couldn't find her anywhere, even though she gave me her business card.
Seeing the ghost was a shocking but crucial experience. It had served a greater purpose in my life than just to amaze me. It took about a year to digest and process the ghost before I could tell anyone else. Then I told a friend. After getting this experience out, I started to really think about the ghost. It dawned on me that I saw a ghost! The reality of seeing a ghost, I realized, became proof that there really was a spiritual world. Standing now on the threshold of this whole new world, my mind looked out and wondered: Wow! Now that I know ghosts are real, what else can I believe in? The answer came in my very next breath: God. But, still, I didn't find God for another year. And on that day, everything became crystal clear.
CHAPTER 3
I was in my car running errands one hot sunny afternoon in late July 2004. It was just another ordinary day, or so I thought. As I was lazily making my left turn at the corner of South State Road and Pleasantville Road in Briarcliff Manor, New York, I glanced to my right, as I always did, to read the wise saying posted on the sign in front of Briarcliff Congregational Church. The sign on the lawn said:
You say there’s distance between you and God. Who moved?
Those words stopped me dead in my tracks. I stopped my car and stared at those words. I found myself thinking about what those words meant.
Suddenly I began to whisper the answer to the sign:
I moved. It must be me who moved because God doesn't move. He's all around us.
Then I thought about what I was saying.
Why am I answering? I don't believe in God.
I suddenly felt so utterly lonely, like there was black all around me and I was all alone in the Universe. I began to cry and shake. I didn't know what was happening to me. I remember thinking that I could stop this strange feeling by just taking off in my car and continuing down the road into Pleasantville to run my errands, but I decided to stay with the feeling. I was oblivious to the line of cars piling up behind me, honking their horns. Then I suddenly heard their horns and I realized I had to move. I looked around me and saw that the small Briarcliff Public Library with its big, empty parking lot was just a few feet away, so I pulled into a spot in the quietest corner of the lot and parked my car. I turned the engine off and just sat there crying and shaking.
I don't remember feeling afraid or puzzled. Somehow I was trusting whatever was taking me over. Without thinking, I looked down at my chest and saw that my chest was ethereally opening up and that a small current of wavy air was going into me. A serene feeling began to wash over me. Then God began to play a game of connect the spiritual dots with me. Visions and signs that I had experienced in my past, some of which I forgot for decades, came alive again in my mind.
I thought about the ghost and how it proved to me there really was a spiritual world. Then I remembered a traumatic experience I had when I was about five years old. My beloved father had just left our home, abandoning me, which threw me in a state of panic and chaos. My older sister, who hated me, had bonded with my mother, so they were aligned and spent time together. But I aligned with my father and now that he was gone, I was alone. He and my mother were divorcing. My father suffered from severe depression and anxiety and my mother couldn't take care of him and two little girls.
I developed signs of trauma: muscle ticks, bedwetting, nailbiting, nightmares, hallucinations. One day I was leaving our sixth floor apartment to visit a neighbor. I opened the front door but I stood on the threshold and couldn't go any further. I looked down the dark hallway but I couldn't take a step out onto the hallway floor. Even though I walked down this dark hallway many, many times before, on that day I couldn't move. I was physically paralyzed. I couldn't even turn around and go back into my house. I just stood there unable to move in any direction. My mind wanted to move but I couldn't get my body to move. Then a strange thing happened. I saw an ethereal cocoon begin to wrap itself around me, starting at my feet, going up and stopping at my neck. My whole body, including my arms, was wrapped in this mummy-like cocoon. It made me feel safe and secure. It calmed me down. Then I got an idea how to break out of the trauma and paralysis. I put out my arms and twirled off the threshold. Then I twirled all the way down the long hallway. The trauma was over but I picked up a new habit and twirled in our home and in the street for a long time after. I feel that Holy Spirit came to me on that day to protect and help me.
Connecting another dot, I thought about that day in 1974 when I was 29. I was feeling pretty despondent at that time, having spent four years trying to make a living as a visual artist in Manhattan but failing. Not knowing how else to support myself, I enlisted in the Army. My sister was married to an Army officer and I was envious of her free health care and general protection from life. But as the day of my enlistment grew near, I was becoming increasingly anxious and fearful. I was a free spirit and knew I would hate losing my freedom and someone else telling me what to do. But if I didn't go, I wouldn't know how to take care of myself. I was stuck in a tight spot.
Two days before the big day, I was sitting on my bed, staring out into my room, not knowing which way to turn. It was daytime. With the suddenness of a light just turned on, a brilliant white, round glow with a more brilliant Christian cross in the middle of the glow appeared before my eyes. The vision was suspended in mid air. The glow and cross were about ten inches tall and sat about eight feet in front of me, a little lower than my eye level. The light that emanated from the glow was contained. There weren't any rays like you see in some movies. The whole cross fit totally within the glow. It was a plain, elegant cross with no detail. The ends of the narrow vertical and horizontal bars were cut straight across.
Although the glow and cross were as intensely bright as a flame, I stared easily into it. I wasn't afraid by its presence or doubted what was before my eyes. I never said to myself, What is this? or Why is a Christian cross coming to me? I’m Jewish!. Actually, my mind was blank, without any thoughts. But I was transfixed by this incredible sight, spiritually locked into it. It was the same spiritually locked-in feeling that I had when I saw the ghost. I was aware that the glow and cross were calming me down, making me feel peaceful and serene. I remember how the glow and cross came on but I don't remember how it went away. After staring at it for a while, I think I probably put my head down on a pillow and went to sleep. When I awoke, the vision was no longer there and I didn't even remember that I saw it! Actually, I didn't remember this event until 30 years later, when I was sitting in my car experiencing my epiphany!
I didn’t decide that day if I should go into the Army but when the day came to report for duty, I made the crystal clear decision not to go. I showed up at Fort Hamilton in Brooklyn and had to claw my way out of the Army. I was fighting with a male officer who refused to let me go, when a female officer came to my rescue and gave me an Honorable Discharge. I remember her telling me that if I didn't want the Army, the Army didn't want me. Made sense to me.
Another spiritual experience happened when I was studying to be an artist in Manhattan's Soho. I was working on a collage. It was filled with hundreds of cut-out pictures. I was at the end of the design and I couldn't figure out how to end it. I worked for a long time trying to find the right picture and where to place the last piece, when a tiny little square suddenly flipped over to reveal the whole face of a high-spirited, happy woman. Her face was perfect. That was just how I felt about my art, excited. And the size of the little square fit perfectly in the spot that ended the design. Now some people might call this a coincidence but I know that Eternal Being helped me out.
Back to sitting in my car... I thought about smaller signs I experienced. Like when I was a teen, I used to call my mother the Jewish Jesus Christ because she was so compassionate and giving and would give even to those who hurt her. I always liked churches and felt spiritual and serene in their sanctuaries. I didn't feel that way in synagogues. The number 3 has always been my favorite. It's a profound number, as in Father, Son, Holy Spirit.
As the last spiritual dot was connected, a floodgate opened and all the Truth came pouring out. I suddenly realized: It's all true. There really is a spiritual world. There really is a God. Jesus really is the Son of God. The Bible really is true. I really was saved by God when I was 5 and 29 years old. I felt resolute in all this decision-making. There wasn’t a doubt in my mind. I was Jewish for my first 59 years but in the heat of all that spiritual awakening, in my heart I converted to Christianity on the spot. I knew God wanted me to be Christian. In the half hour that I sat in my car, I went from believing nothing to believing everything.
CHAPTER 4
When I got home, I was all excited. I told Hank about my experience. He just listened to me at first, taking in all that I was telling him. In the weeks ahead when he saw I was serious, he became a little angry. When we met we were happy little atheists but now I was filled with God and shifting away from him. Maybe he feared I would leave him. But Hank stayed by my side and his fear slowly melted away.
I wanted to join a church. I wanted to study the Bible. I wanted to go to school and take Christianity 101 courses and learn all about Jesus. But I wanted to do all of that NOW! I was frustrated when I realized I couldn't. The most immediate thing I could do was to buy books on the subject.
I went to my local Barnes & Noble and looked at some Christian books. I didn't feel right with them. I didn't understand the words, the concepts, the history. Then I realized that I didn't know anything about God or Christianity or religions or the Bible. I was like a baby, a young child first learning this huge, deep subject. I stopped in the aisle and thought, If a mother was teaching her little daughter about God and Christianity, how would she do it? I answered, She would go to the children's section of a book store and buy her daughter some books. So I went over to the children's section. Excitedly, I told the saleswoman what I was doing and could she please show me where those books were. She took me to the spiritual section. I bought eight first books: how to pray, who is God?, a coffee-table family Bible filled with pictures, a book on Christianity, a daily devotional book, and a few others. I couldn't wait to get them home! I was in ecstasy, looking at all the books at home and trying to decide which one to read first. The books were sprawled all over my couch and coffee table. I could barely contain my excitement. I read a few pages of one book and then picked up another and read a few pages, and then picked up another. I kept going back and forth because I didn't have the patience to sit and read just one book.
Then I wanted to join a church, so I went online to explore my local churches. It suddenly dawned on me the gravity of what I was about to do. I was a Jew who wanted to join a Christian church. I thought about the Jewish groups who believed in Jesus so I called them to see if I belonged there. I spoke to a man at Jews for Jesus. He explained what their organization was about. He asked me to come down for a visit but I backed off. I didn't feel that was right for me. Then I learned a member of the Messianic Jews lived nearby so I went over for a visit. The man was calling Jesus by a Hebrew name and that turned me off. He was talking about Jesus from a Jewish point of view and, somehow, that turned me off too, so I knew the Messianic Jews wasn't for me.
I remember sitting at my kitchen table and thinking about all this. I felt a deep, unmistakable need to uproot my roots from my Jewish religion and plant new roots into new Christian soil. That's what I wanted to do. That's what I felt God wanted me to do. A few years later, I grew to understand my new identity. I was Jewish in my heritage but my religion and spirituality were now Christian.
I went online again exploring local churches. The artist, the romantic in me wanted to find a church with a big white spire that I had seen in so many of those wonderful classic movies. I was looking for one in my neighborhood when, suddenly, Holy Spirit planted a picture in the right side of my brain behind my ear of the church in Briarcliff whose sign connected me to God. Of course, I must go there. I went onto their site and read all about Briarcliff Congregational Church on South State Road and Pleasantville Road. I went to the next Sunday's service.
In my state of excitation, I joined that day. I signed up to work on a couple committees. I went to service every Sunday. I joined their Bible study group. I wrote a rapturous song about the church. I offered to start and organize their first Art and Craft Holiday Fair. And I told them all about my epiphany in front of their directory sign. It was strange, but I noticed that every time I told my story, I felt chills in my body. I was in love. I was so filled with a high energy that I felt I could move mountains. I was baptized there on February 6, 2005.
As I was learning about God and Christianity, I was becoming more and more orthodox. I was believing every word in the Bible and looking for more epiphanies and signs from God. This Protestant church had Holy Communion only the first Sunday of the month but I was wanting it every Sunday. I even resented them serving grape juice instead of wine. We didn't go up to the altar to receive communion but stayed in our seats and that bothered me too. I wanted it all to be authentic. As I was learning about Jesus's human family, I found this Protestant church emphasizing Joseph and ignoring Mary. But I wanted to learn about all of His family. At that time, I didn't get that there was politics in religion, that the Catholic Church revered Mary but the Protestant Church tended to play up Joseph. After a year of going to this church, something told me to move on and find a more religious church.
CHAPTER 5
At about this time I heard about a Spiritual Direction program offered by Mariandale Retreat in Ossining, NY. I needed someone to talk to, like a spiritual therapist. When I learned that Mariandale was a Catholic institution, I was wary if an individualist feminist like me could fit into their program and if I could find someone I would feel comfortable with. I felt their agenda would perhaps overtly or covertly tow the Catholic line and they would try to influence me but I was wrong. I spent the next two years meeting once a month with Beth. Call me Beth, she said, not Sister. I loved Beth the first time I met with her and felt totally comfortable with her throughout. She never brought the doctrines of Catholicism into the room. She let me talk as I wished, cry when I needed, accepted me as I was and wasn't judgmental in any way. She was a literature professor and I was an author, so we were connected by words. And by our love for God. Beth was gentle with me. She nudged me to pray when I was lost or confused. She made easy, thoughtful suggestions when I needed them. She believed me when I told her about the signs and visions I received from God. I think I stopped going to Beth just after I started A Course in Miracles, which I'll tell you about later. I told her about this program but she said she never heard of it. I brought her the book to look at and told her that Jesus channeled His words through a scribe. She cautiously looked at a page or two and then put it down. I saw Beth one or two more times just to be sure. I felt right about leaving the program when I found A Course in Miracles. It's just about moving on.
CHAPTER 6
I'd like to digress right now and tell you about several additional Signs, Visions and Knowings I've recently experienced.
On August 20, 2006, Holy Spirit visited me. I was making beaded jewelry that I sold at different outlets. I had finished a line of bracelets and cleared off my beading table, and put away all my beads, to make room for a new line of bracelets I wanted to make. I walked away from the table but when I returned, I saw in the middle of the cleaned-off area a Christian cross made up of small clear glass pebbles. You know, the kind that were shaped like a half-moon on one side and the other side, flat. I liked these clear glass pebbles and kept a glass of them on my beading table. The cross was positioned on the table askew but its lines were absolutely perfectly straight. The long part of the cross was made up of all one side of the pebbles while the short part was made up of the other side. I stood there and just stared at the glass cross. For the first few seconds, I was in a mild state of shock, just staring at the cross. Then I knew where it came from. Hank was working in his office and I called him in. I pointed to the cross and asked if he did this, knowing that he didn't but I just wanted to eliminate all possibilities. He stared at the cross and said no. I told him I didn't do it either. I told him Holy Spirit did it. He didn't say anything about this. We looked at it some more and then Hank went back to work. I tried to Crazy Glue the glass pebbles together to keep it as it was but the round glass pebbles wouldn't hold together even with the glue. I put the pebbles in a pretty silk sack and I keep it together with my other Signs from God. I went to my spiritual journal and recorded this experience, like I did with the others.
During the summer of 2006, Hank and I were at an outdoor party. We had met this group of people the year before, so they were new to us. It was a sunny day and I was talking to a very suntanned man everyone called Mike the Painter, to distinguish him from all the other Mikes.
While I was talking to Mike, his whole face suddenly turned a deathly gray color. It happened in a snap, as if you turned on a light and boom! I guess it was shocking to see because my brain took a couple of seconds before I realized that his face had changed to gray. His face was gray for several seconds and then it snapped back to his normal tan color. I stood there staring at him. I don't remember what he was saying.
A day or two later I understood what I saw and why I saw it. Mike was a heavy smoker. He was usually smoking a cigarette whenever I saw him. I believed that God wanted me to warn Mike to stop smoking or he'll pass on young.
I waited a whole year before I got up the courage to tell Mike. I didn't want this new group of friends to think I was a religious zealot or crazy. So that summer I went up to Mike and told him what I saw and that I was meant to pass this warning to him. I apologized if he thought I was a zealot but Mike stopped me and said he was Catholic and believed that people see signs from God. He said he wasn't going to stop smoking and thanked me for telling him. I saw Mike every summer for a few years after that time and noticed that he was still smoking. Hank and I have since changed our summer plans so I don't expect to see Mike at that location again.
Sometime in 1996 I saw a vision that I've named Our Human Timeline of Existence. At the very left of this horizontal Timeline image was an ape. To the right of the ape was an image of the first human. Next to the human and going to the right was the iconic image of Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man. To the right of that image was an extremely long empty area that took up all of the middle part of my vision. At the very right end of the Timeline, and the last image, was a great gust of horizontal wind blurring out the right end of the Timeline. This vision said to me that we humans are currently into about 20% of our survival, from our beginnings on Earth to our end. I couldn't see the end of us because it was just a blur, so I don't know how it would happen, when, or if it would happen at all. What I did see is that we humans still have many, many more millenniums of survival. There weren't any words or numbers in this vision, only images. I have always believed in this vision. I never doubted its reality or its message to me, which is that Holy Spirit wants me to make this vision public.