Communion with God

Beyond conversations and friendship with God, there is communion, which is to allow your innermost truths to be inspired by Him. Different from being led by Him, it has to do with finding God in yourself as you follow your path and despair at all the faults and failings you find along the way. You discover Him by realizing, the author says, that God created us without conditions for acceptance and without our needing to produce any particular result while we are here. Though the ideas will seem radical to many Westerners, they are so smoothly rendered that most will suspend their cultural defenses and learn something from the program. The best yet from Walsch in a strong series of transformational audios. T.W. (c) AudioFile 2002, Portland, Maine

October 23, 2000
A stand-alone title to complement Walsch's bestselling Conversations with God series, this too-general spirituality manifesto borrows from most major religions while chastising all of them for their judgmentalism, with Christianity getting the harshest treatment. Walsch continues his tradition of writing in the first person as God, but this time there is no human counterbalance, making this no longer a conversation so much as a prophetic indictment. He begins by describing the "ten illusions of man" that have been perpetuated in unhelpful "cultural stories"--i.e., Biblical stories--and then helps readers understand and use these illusions in an effort to make their own realities. Walsch reassures readers that such things as failure, requirement and ignorance do not actually exist, but are among the ten illusions. We are part of God, he explains, and since God is perfect, so are we. Walsch seems to believe that his ideas are groundbreaking, but they are garden-variety New Thought concepts adapted for a therapeutic age. His once-innovative technique of writing in the voice of God has also lost its luster; God's prose is having an off day, as evidenced by Walsh's predilection for sentence fragments and stream-of-consciousness thought patterns. A superior work in general spirituality is Andrew Harvey's The Direct Path: Creating a Journey to the Divine Using the World's Mystical Traditions, which is in harmony with Walsch's declaration that "all paths lead to God" but offers outstanding writing and a more humble tone.