Am I Nuts or What?

In Sacred texts, God often speaks to people.  Sometimes those "words" are literal words, but often God speaks to people in other ways.  He spoke to Joseph through dreams. Others had visions that shared a message. Sometimes God speaks to us in our meditations. Somehow most of us don't have any problem with God speaking to those people way back when, but somewhere along the way, many, if not most, of us lost our faith in the credulity of God speaking to our contemporaries.

Last night I watched the first episode of the revival of the Carl Sagan's 1980 program "Cosmos."  The story of a 16th Century Dominican friar Giordano Bruno consumed one portion of the hour.  Bruno had a dream that he was sure have come from his "infinite God," which showed him an infinite universe in which the Earth rotated around the sun, and in fact, our sun was really a star, like countless other suns which were also stars, going on forever.  Now, this was at a time when telescopes didn't exist, and it was "well established fact" that the sun rotated around the Earth, and that the only planets were the ones that could be seen with the naked eye.

Bruno believed so completely that God had spoken to him and shared this vision that after he was kicked out of his monastery, he went to several different countries to teach and write books.  He was kicked out of each of them.  Eventually, he was tried and burned at the stake...along with his books...for heresy...for claiming God had shown him something that was "well known" that it was false.  He never recanted what he knew to be the truth.

The problem is that he was right. And he had been right in knowing that the vision of the Universe which had been revealed to him was precisely accurate.  With the passing of each year, as space discovery vehicles probe more and more deeply into space, his accuracy continues to be affirmed.  The more we know, the more we know Bruno was right.

Most of us have had an amazing, even revelatory dream, at some time.  Countless stories have been shared of premonitory dreams that foretold a situation and allowed someone to "save the day."  Yet, how many of us would go to the mat for what we learned in a dream?

I am certain that God speaks to us all the time, in dreams and other ways.  I have absolutely no expectation that God would have stopped speaking the human beings when the ink was dry on the Bible.  When I look around the world at the messes we've collectively gotten ourselves into, I can't keep but wonder isn't there a Joseph out there somewhere who is sitting on a dream that would reveal what should be done or a Moses who has been talking to a burning bush and knows how to lead people out of their misery? 

But can you imagine it?  Imagine a man coming into Damascus today, saying he'd been out in the mountains having a nice conversation with a burning bush, and that now he knows how to bring the conflict in Syria to an end.  Or better yet, think about a woman bolting out of bed tomorrow in Kiev saying that she dreamed the solution to the problem in the Crimea.

Where are the people with the spiritual fortitude of Bruno who might really change the world with what they knew...if they'd just share it.  Well, I have that thought right before I have the one about Bruno being burned at the stake.  I have no more confidence that our generation would be more receptive of divine information than Bruno's fellow monks. (At least, I hope that we've stopped burning people at the stake.)  Today they would probably be turned away because they don't have a Ph.D. from the right universities and the right experience with the right think tanks.

I've heard, and I've acted.  Oh, never anything quite as remarkable as a vision of the cosmos as astrophysics has now proven to be correct in a time before the telescope had been invented. People have said I was brave; others have said I was crazy or foolish.  But, like Bruno, once I've heard God speak to me, I just couldn't not do what I'd heard.