A shout out for "Golfing with God"

I got through three books on my little vacation, short though they were! The one I enjoyed most was "Golfing with God" by Roland Merullo. It's just what it sounds like. There is a lot of golf in it, and the sport is written of with such enormous love that I found it quite enjoyable, though I know little about golf. (With Tiger gone, I rarely watch anymore. Yes, I was one of those fickle fans.)

It turns out that golfing is a metaphor for many other things. The book is written with a light touch and plenty of humor, and I agreed with nearly everything written about heaven, which made me enjoy it all the more, of course. (Lots of the book takes place in heaven, where there are many golf courses, but many but many other things for all of the rest of humanity as well.)

So, to summarize a few of the major premises of the book: We continue to work in the afterlife (we are made for work, and that is where we find our highest fulfillment). We continue to mature (grow) spiritually. As we grow spiritually, we become more disciplined and able to take on more tasks and to recognize that is what we are made for. The book speaks of each person having a mission, his/her own deepest spiritual purpose, which is the essence of being and does not change.

If we have unlearned lessons, they stay with us in the afterlife, and we keep having opportunities to learn them. God has many names and is quite large enough to accommodate them all. Time is an earth-bound phenomenon.

We can still eat, drink, and be merry in heaven, and love others in every sense of the word. And there is a bodacious amount of humor in heaven, though the author seemed to have it in for practical jokers, saying they didn't make it into heaven! Hell or eternal punishment is of human creation, and if it occurs, it is during our lifetime, and it is always self-imposed. The devil did make an interesting appearance in the book, playing a high-stakes round of golf with our hero, the narrator.

We have others with whom we are linked spiritually and may share many eons of existence together. In the book, there are spiritual siblings, and spiritual parent-child relationships. If someone is a parent to someone else on earth, they aren't necessarily in that relationship in the spiritual realm.

There was quite a bit of the Buddhist perspective in the book, which delighted me. The narrator got to golf with Buddha, as well as God and Jesus, Moses, and Mary (the mother of Jesus). There were other great prophets around as well. The book talked about our many lives, and how millions of lives could be lived as an insect, an animal, and then eventually thousands more as a human being.

I just adored this book, and it was fun to read as well. There was a lot to ponder, and plenty of gems of wisdom about human nature.