Dancing with God: A Spiritual Autobiography

Copyright © 2013 Reverend Bobbie McKay, Ph.D.

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ISBN: 978-1-4917-1007-4 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4917-1008-1 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2013918338

iUniverse rev. date: 09/30/2013

Contents

About This Book

Prologue

PART I

In The Beginning

Chapter I. Introduction

Chapter 2. God Becomes Real In My Life

Chapter 3. God And A Friend

Chapter 4. God And The Piano

Chapter 5. God In A No!

Chapter 6. God In A Yes!

Chapter 7. God In Action

PART II

God Can Do Anything

Chapter 8. Meeting God Without Words

Chapter 9. Five New Friends

Chapter 10. Ministry Before The Electronic Church

Chapter 11. A Traveling Church

Chapter 12. God In Four Persons

Chapter 13. When God Speaks Mountains Move

Chapter 14. And The Doors Wouldn’t Close

Chapter 15. A Story About Bethlehem

Chapter 16. Paul’s Story

Chapter 17. The Winds Of Change Arrive

PART III

I Thank You God, You’re Breathtaking!

Chapter 18. God In Two Questions

Chapter 19. God On Highway 95

Chapter 20. Two Years On The Road With God

Chapter 21. Three Waitresses, One Artist And A Woman In A Mental Hospital

Chapter 22. The Protestants Are Coming!

Chapter 23. Why Are You Discriminating Against The Episcopal Church?

Chapter 24. God And The Internet

Chapter 25. God In The Army & Navy

Chapter 26. God And Our Questionnaires

Chapter 27. God, The Parish Nurses And George Gallup, Jr.

Chapter 28. God And The Librarian

Chapter 29. Making A New Christian Science Connection

Chapter 30. On God And Harvard

Chapter 31. God At A Baseball Game

Chapter 32. God In Four Books

Chapter 33. God In A Secretary’s Mistake

Chapter 34. An Unexpected Visual Of God

PART IV

God Everywhere

Chapter 35. God In The Neighborhood

Chapter 36. God In Small Moments

Chapter 37. God In Another Parking Lot

Chapter 38. God And The Boomers

Chapter 39. God Never Leaves Loose Ends.

Chapter 40. God Is Not A Causal Agent

Chapter 41. God In Two Miracles

Chapter 42. A Different Kind Of Miracle

Chapter 43. God And Love

Chapter 44. God And Lew

Chapter 45. Dancing With God

Chapter 46. The Final Dance

Chapter 47. On Prayer, Gratitude And Endings

PART V

Afterward: Special Resources—Special Friends—Special Programs

Synopsis Of Research Projects And Programs

Books And Publications

Author’s Credentials

Taking A Chance On God Reverend Bobbie Mckay, Ph.d. And Lew Musil MFA

The Religious Experience Research Centre Westminster College, Oxford UK

Center For The Study Of World Religions Harvard University

Review Of Healing The Spirit Stories Of Transformation

Reverend Dr. Fred Fourie, Pastor, Cocoa Beach Community Church

The Reverend Jay Sidebotham, Rector, The Church Of The Holy Spirit,

The Reverend Gilbert W. Bowen, Retired Pastor

John Shea, Author, Lecturer, Story Teller

Reverend Gregory Sakowicz Catholic Archdiocese Of Chicago, IL

Rabbi Douglas Kohn San Bernardino, Ca.

The Reverend Paul Sherry, Ph.d., Former President, United Church Of Christ.

Reverend Elizabeth Andrews Presbyterian Minister And Spiritual Director

The Reverend Wendy Lane, Retired Episcopal Priest

T. Tolbert Chisum, Businessman And Philanthropist

The Reverend Jane Fisler Hoffman, Former Illoinois Conference Minister Of The United Church Of Christ

Excerpts From The Spiritual Healing Project Goes To School, The Christian Science Sentinel, September 12, 2004.

Student Evaluations For Courses Taught At Chicago Theological Seminary

God And The Spiritual Life Teams

God And The Interfaith Dialogue Program

Many Faces An Interspiritual-Program For Adolescents & Young Adults.

George Gallup, Jr. and Dr. Bobbie McKay, Princeton, New Jersey, 2011

For God who is Always

Waiting to Dance

Special Thanks to Lew,

Who is always there;

My children and my grandchildren;

And to all the people who have entrusted me

With their God experiences; shared their spiritual lives;

Prayed and cried with me.

God has blessed us with Presence and Love,

New Life and Energy; Peace and Joy;

And vast amounts of Laughter.

With Love,

Bobbie

ABOUT THIS BOOK

Dancing with God may be thought of as a Digital Book which is like a computer program in which the stories are arranged in a way to give you important information.

Each of the more than fifty God stories which appear in the book might be considered a bit of information which can be read in multiple ways: in the order in which the stories appear; by your design of choosing the order of the stories; by relying upon randomness; or perhaps by that which is God’s design for you.

May you find your own God stories within these pages to help enrich your spiritual life.

Dancing with God is also a powerful way to share God experiences in a group setting.

PROLOGUE

This is a book about God: this force for life; this indescribable energy; this glorious light that is never extinguished. This is the same God that also lives in intimate connection with each one of us; who never leaves us, but who also waits for us to discover what life with God is all about.

This book is the story of the entrance of God in my life. Like a spiritual tsunami that transforms everything in its path, God walked into my world, transformed my life and has never left.

For the past nearly fifty years, I have been privileged to listen to thousands of people sharing their experiences with God. I have learned from all of them that God’s signature is always a changed new life: not material gain or good fortune; not an uncluttered life; not a problem free existence. Instead, we discover an unexpected, cherished life with God as partner, creating a life-long passionate process of discovery and energy.

This book is organized according to the path I’ve followed with God from the first day God entered into my life to the present day of writing this book. I was living an ordinary life as a wife and mother with a conscious agenda that didn’t include any plans with God, when God disrupted my organized existence and changed everything.

Today as a psychologist, ordained minister, researcher, writer and composer, I know that none of this would have happened without God’s interventions in my life.

This dynamic, ever-present God is always available, but not according to our plans and schedules. Our preconceived ideas of God are entirely lost in the reality of meeting God face to face, moment to moment. Too often we’ve sanitized God to be devoid of passion and majesty. But the God I’ve come to know is paradoxically both power and intimacy, a catalytic force that explodes with creative energy and excitement, in which results are less important than the journey taken.

This book is for anyone who wants to know more about this intimate, personal God who resides within each of us. Familiar words describe the process of learning about God with great truth and simplicity: I once was blind, but now I can see! And what I see is God everywhere.

A few rules on the road to discovering God in our lives:

We don’t find God; God finds us.

We can’t see God except through other people.

We don’t know God’s plan except as new life becomes the anchor of the outcome.

The one truth I have learned about life is that God is always present and I drift in and out of the relationship. God is the constant. I am the wanderer. My continuous prayer is to stay connected and to love God as deeply as God has unexpectedly loved me.

Now in my eighties, I see God’s appearances in my life as unexpected connections with other people; moments of insight and understanding; loving moments that defy words; painful lessons learned; surprising opportunities that were clearly gifts from God; moments when God became so real that to identify them as anything but God would be to deny the presence of God in my life and in the world.

God appears in the best of times and the worst of times; in a flash of recognition or a slow arrival of understanding. God is always with us and sometimes we get it as quickly as it happens. Other times, we are ponderously slow in catching on. Most of the time we forget that God is right here, right now and we remain lost in a state of spiritual blindness and emptiness.

Then this God of all love and presence touches us in the gentlest of ways, or in a hail storm of reality, and we remember: God is mystery; God is presence. We live in the intersection of two realities: When mystery becomes presence, God becomes real.

This book is a collection of moments when God became real in my life. All of them were unexpected gifts that transformed my life. I didn’t seek them nor try to organize or control them. God simply entered the moment and, if I were choosing to pay attention, there was no question that God was in the neighborhood just waiting for my response.

When I was wise enough to respond, the world opened in unexpected new ways that were never a part of my life plan, but which were designed to grow my spirit exponentially. Once I recognized the gift of God in my life, these new opportunities became the footprints of this entirely unexpected God who was now in charge of my life.

God challenges us to follow a new pathway; to trust that Love does not abandon us; and that Spirit-linked to Spirit will change the world.

I’ve organized these God experiences as moments experienced in my personal life; in my life as a pastor and psychologist; and in the world around me which is where God is always to be found. I’ve included several stories that involved my husband, Lew Musil, who accompanied me on this journey from the very beginning. I hope you can use these God moments as a catalyst to discover God in your life. It will set you on a mission that is beyond description.

You won’t find any explanations of God in this book. No one can explain God. But God appears in everyone’s life at some time through an experience in which God becomes visible through other people; through our senses; or through our heart and spirit which long for connection. God is an in-your-life force engaged in a lost and found operation directed into the world. When we have been found, we are entirely changed by this power of love calling us into relationship.

For each of us, life is the medium. But God is the message. This book is an invitation for you to make the same discovery in your life.

One hint may be helpful. God’s other name is always surprise!

PART I

IN THE BEGINNING

"IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE WORD

AND THE WORD WAS WITH GOD

AND THE WORD WAS GOD."

Prologue to the Gospel of John

CHAPTER I

Introduction

When does God begin in our lives? When are we aware of God in our lives? What is the switch that turns on

our God connection?

Many of us go through life with a picture of God that’s something like our first interactions with our early caretakers. Like a spiritual conduit, they show us the parameters of existence and they coax us into life with the reality of their care: heart to heart; body to body; spirit to spirit. Our transition into the world is complete and the experience is stored somewhere in our spirit as our first internal awareness of what God might be like.

The trouble is that some care takers aren’t able to love us very well; or their love is mixed with fear and anger or, sometimes, they are so filled with their own survival needs, our needs are simply too much. When that happens, our first experiences of the God of safe-care become an ambivalent message of confused signals. Sometimes we are greeted with delight; another time we are shunned or disregarded. Unable to understand the difference, we experience an emptiness we don’t know how to fill.

These early non-verbal experiences of Spirit infuse us with the reality of connection. We are not alone! Or they confuse us when the messenger is neither reliable nor constant and we are left to live in the dark of not knowing what will happen next. In either case, they are stored somewhere in our memory bank to be examined later when our quest to know who God is in our life becomes more urgent and necessary to our spiritual growth.

In my life, my parents were instrumental in my early physical survival. At five weeks of age, I contracted pneumonia at a time when the powerful drugs of today were non-existent. My only hope of living was thought to be in the sunshine and warmth of Florida where this newborn body might heal. My parents and God became intertwined as partners in my struggle to live and God and life prevailed. In some inner spirit place, in an unspoken language, I experienced God as a source of healing in my life.

Two years later, my parents became change agents in the growth of my spirit. They would never have labeled their behavior as God-connected. But they had a conviction that children needed to be taught special skills unavailable in the public school environment. I was given piano lessons in my second year of life. And, most important, I was handed over to a dancing teacher at three years of age to learn how to dance. They chose a woman who trained children to dance on the stage, not simply to dance for fun and amusement. Dancing became embedded in my being and a profession.

In this amazing environment of sound, rhythm and movement, my spirit burst into life.

My dancing teacher would not have recognized God in the work she was doing. But she knew how to recognize a spirit that was being fed through her instructions, and I discovered a rhythm and force for life that would become a permanent part of who I was. God was still unspoken and unnamed, but God was filling me with spirit and life.

A few years later, two other people would continue my spirit-birthing process without ever speaking of God. The first was a woman who taught me you can sing without having a voice, so long as you are willing to work at it. A voice with spirit will always be heard. The second was a teacher who taught me that girls have the ability to do anything that attracts them, if they use their brains. Both messages became permanent God gifts for my spirit. I would not yet have my own language for spirit. But I would know and recognize the results!

Generally, young children are exposed to a kind of Sunday school idea of God whether they attend a religious community or not. This God is usually powerful, distant, wise and reliable so long as we respond with appropriate diligence and obedience. This God offers a quid pro quo partnership: you do what is right and God will be around to protect you. God is a super parent who teaches us the rules of living and trains us for life.

Later, powerful stories of women and men in the Bible or the Koran or other spiritual resources will teach us about people who have already encountered God. If we are part of a religious community, we may learn special prayers and rituals to celebrate God’s constancy and faithfulness.

Whatever our religious background or understanding of the nature of God, sometime in our adulthood we come to a spiritual crossroads where we need to learn a critical lesson about God. God must now move beyond our internalized parental figures (good or bad) to enter into a personalized relationship with us: not as a magical and special friend who will grant our wishes and attend to our needs; or a punishing parent who shapes our behavior with a special series of rewards or punishments.

But the God of all time and space who is as real as the next breath we take.

By this time in our growth process, we’ve already found the magical God to be lacking in multiple situations in which God didn’t give us what we wanted or thought should happen. It’s no wonder that so many of our young adults have left their religious roots because they find no usefulness in a God who doesn’t enter into life to make it better. Why believe in that which is no longer believable or helpful? Instead, they choose to look for some spiritual experience which has enough personal empowerment to satisfy their needs for a better life and their hopes for a safer world.

What has been lost in today’s world is the reality of what God actually is for all people, regardless of religious, economic, geographic or personal orientation. In fact, God may not always save us or heal us or make us feel better at all. If you use the Christian experience as an example, even Jesus cried out to God, Why have you abandoned me? before that question was fully