Preface to Godwriting™ Workshop in South Africa 2

I love so much about Godwriting™. I also love so much being able to be part of other people’s learning to Godwrite™. What a privilege. Can this be true? It is. I know it is. And yet it is unbelievable to me.

Anyway, God and the people who come to the workshops do it all. I’m just kind of there, well, maybe herding a little bit. I see it as herding the people away from misconception.  Perhaps the words guide and lead would be more fitting, but I love one-syllable Anglo-Saxon words like herd.

I herd people away from having to know a lot, from holding on to old ideas, having to know ahead of time what God is going to say, the idea that God must say what they already know of or have heard, the idea that the God they hear must agree with their precepts! We may think we know what God is going to say, but the fact is we don’t know what God is going to say or how He is going to say it.

I herd participants away from thinking altogether! From thinking, yes. I herd people away from concentrating, from trying, from judging, from thinking that Godwriting™ itself has to be a certain way. We hear God whisper in our language. God uses the same words we use. There is no curtain going up. There is no round of applause. There are no flashes of lightning or thunder. God is so simple.

I herd people away from thinking that Godwriting™ has to be a clear-cut experience or that it is something outside of ourselves or our experience.

I herd people away from the idea that Godwriting is some kind of how to, that it can be learned the way we learn to play tennis. I am sure Godwriting™ can’t -- CANNOT -- be taught. I am also positive that it can’t be learned. What we can do is open to it.

I have always felt that, at the moment of Godwriting™, God comes in. I know I don’t teach anyone how to Godwrite™. I don’t even know how it happens, so how could I teach it?

I love what Einstein said about teaching. He said: “I never teach my pupils. I only attempt to provide the conditions in which they can learn.”

Wow, I am in good company! Even when I taught seventh grade English, I always said that I create a climate for learning where all the children can feel safe to be who they are. Maybe I just foster the climate and not create it.

God is meant to be all-pervading, not the world, yet how all-pervading the world and all the cultures and societies are. As we are growing up, we don’t even have to be told this or that is not favored. It’s in the air. We just know. As children, we just kinda know what is acceptable and what is not acceptable.

I tell at workshops of a woman who took the Godwriting™ workshop and took to it like a duck to water. But here’s the sad story. When she was about seven years old, the innocent little girl she was would take pencil and paper and go outside to the farthest corner of her backyard. She would tell God her troubles, and He would answer her, and she would write down what He told her. How I would love to know what she asked and what God said to her.

But she knew, that little girl she was, just knew, that “Godwriting” without any name ever have been given to it would be frowned on. No one ever said to her: “Don’t Godwrite.” She didn’t have to be told. It was in the air.

This little girl, before she went back to her house, rather than chance being found out and disapproved of, tore up her beautiful words so no one could see them.

I feel like a crime was perpetuated against her.

I suppose everyone has his or her particular story. In some way, as children, many of us gather that we are not to be as we are. We gather that we do not fit the bill. How marvelous it would be if we could all as children have been just right as we were and not have to be something else. This being other than we were was not aspiring to something better. It was our child selves trying to come out unscathed from not matching up to standards, spoken or not.

I loved in the book Help how the nanny said to the children she cared for: “You is good. You is smart. Some day you is going to be SOMEBODY.”

And then the child would say back to her wonderful nanny: "I is good. I is smart. Some day I is going to be somebody.”

Imagine having the gift of wonderful words like those seep into our consciousness. Did you have it? I didn't.

I know I grew up being frowned on. I’m not even sure what about now. With my sister, it seemed to be everything about me was wrong.

In general, when I have tried to think of what was “wrong” with me, I think it was this: I was guilty of being the youngest. Perhaps I was guilty of being too fanciful. That could have been all there was, yet I knew I was "off" and it was, like, fatal.

At this workshop in South Africa, while we all were doing our personal Godwriting™,  God said to me: “Gloria, you know everyone in this room has been wounded.”

In the workshop evaluations coming up in the next blog or so, we see the “in the air” oppression Pierre went through and how deep and far-reaching it was. The feeling went to the depth that God would not approve of him, that God might well not want to talk to him, so indoctrinated had he been, somehow, with the idea which all of us, to one degree or another, have been indoctrinated with, and that is the idea that we are wrong to be who we are. We simply aren’t good enough because of who we are as we are, that we have to be different from what we naturally are.  This is, of course, quite the opposite of what God in Heavenletters says.  He loves us as we are right now.

Maybe someday we will have Godwriting™ workshops for little children.