Is there a Second face of God?

I had an experience once when it seemed that something (perhaps Spirit) seemed to be looking over my shoulder.  The context was the following.  In October 1973 my wife and four-year-old daughter died in a car crash.  I handled the grief, let us say, poorly.  Later that fall I discovered alcohol would blot it all out.  It even worked for awhile.  After a second marriage that didn't work out, a friend took me to a weekend retreat called Beginning Again in spring or early summer of 1985, where I did some serious, supervised grief work.  Part of that work was a letter to the deceased.  (There's another story here of some real love by the counselors that brings tears to my eyes even now.)  After the retreat, I rewrote and expanded the letter, saying what I wanted to say in a more polished way.  For some reason it was important to get it right.  Then, following directions, I took the letter to a special place known to my wife and daughter as the picnic rock, where I read the letter aloud.  Half way through, I had the most amazing experience.  There came a gentle breeze that stirred the needles of the pine tree I sat under--but not the ones of the surrounding pine trees twenty feet away.  And it seemed that someone or something was reading over my shoulder.  So I turned back to the earlier pages, so whoever or whatever it was could read the whole letter.

When I was finished reading the letter, I sat there for a few minutes, sort of basking in the experience.  And then I felt free.

Last Sunday a lady in my Unitarian Universalist church told me of a similar kind of experience she had with her father, who had died shortly before.  She had something to say to her father, and while saying it she felt a presence close behind her.  So she turned around and spoke to the spirit of her father, face-to-face so to speak.  (Although to an observer, she was talking to air and would probably have been considered insane.)

An interpretation that works for me is found in the books by Michael Newton, Journey of Souls and Destiny of Souls.  His work establishes beyond doubt, in my mind at least, that reincarnation is a fact of our existence, and that our souls (to use Newton's term) live on after our bodily death.  Further, we all have Spirit Guides.  And further, under special (extraordinary?) conditions, it is possible to have direct experiences between us here in the world of form and souls in the spirit world.  The mystics of all the world's religions assert the same thing, except they use fancy sounding words such as numinous, or the One, or Holy Spirit.

I make a formal appeal to one and all:  Let us approach this subject with open mindedness, and let us for a time stop trying to analyze it or even try to understand it.  Let us, rather, simply gather stories until we have, say, a hundred of them.  Then let's lay them all out on a table, look at them objectively, and see if we can discern a pattern.

One last thing for this post:  I don't have a problem with dualism.  If the universe is divided into the world of form and the world of spirit, then that's the way the universe is.  The universe is the way it is, and if it doesn't conform to someone's idea of nondualism, then it is not the universe that needs to change.

Jerry Jacoby, Grass Valley, California, June 9, 2009.