Sidebar:
God's CALLING
Nick Bunick remains a jock: He's confident he can whip fellow Oregonian Neale Donald Walsch, author of Conversations with God, in one-on-one basketball. Nick Bunick isn't the only Oregonian with a direct connection to heaven--and a book that bears witness. Two women from the Portland area, Carole Sletta and Nancy Snodgrass, have written a book about channeling angels, titled Journey to Your Soul: The Angels Guide to Love & Wholeness. Neale Donald Walsch, a former Medford talk-radio host, has written two volumes of his Conversations with God, with a third on its way. Many recent religious books focus on a direct channel to God--the concept seems to come from a growing sense of helplessness as we near the century's end. Sletta and Snodgrass both came from troubled backgrounds. Walsch, before hitting the bestseller list (52 weeks in a row), had been delinquent on child support payments and was taken to court twice by the state of Oregon. At first, both books offer a refreshing, even subversive, message: That instead of having the clergy pass spirituality down to the common people, the masses are finding strength to reach up into the heavens themselves. Snodgrass claims she started to commune with angels through therapy, and then helped her co-author, Sletta, get in touch. One of the angels they say helped write the book was Tom Oddo, a Catholic priest and president of the University of Portland before he died in a 1989 car wreck. Their book focuses on free will, claiming that each person chooses his or her path in life. Walsch writes that he first heard God speaking in his mind while writing an angry letter. God tells him, "I talk to everyone. All the time. The question is not to whom do I talk, but who listens?" Walsch wisely thought to take dictation. When he refers to God, it's with the female pronoun. And She reinforces the idea that you don't need clergy to help you communicate with divine powers. Although the books start with messages of empowerment and strength, they soon collapse under their own pretensions. They're dull and muddled, and it's a struggle to find truth among the contradictions in ideas that are supposed to have come straight from the clear-thinking deities. They're also patronizing. On one hand, we can all supposedly open a direct channel like the authors. But on the other hand, readers feel as if they aren't special enough to hear the message themselves; they have to get it from the authors. Both books seem to contain benign fluff, harmless but lacking any intense soul-searching. As one critic says, "More and more, people are cobbling together their own personal faiths from what they remember from Sundays as children, books read, with a dash of Ann Landers and a few bumper sticker sayings thrown in for good measure." --Sarah Patch |
