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Engagement with God: A Love Story (abridged)
by Patricia A. Williams

Table of Contents

1. Introduction
2. The Call
3. The Interim Years
4. Spiritual Marriage

From the Introduction
This is a spiritual autobiography. To understand it, you need to know how I came to write it. I had a series of spiritual experiences that occurred over a period of seven years, from early 1993 through 1999. During those years, I wrote a daily spiritual journal and also retained my weekly planners. Thus, when I decided to write a spiritual autobiography of those years, I had the raw materials available. I wrote the autobiography during 2001 and 2002, framing it as a series of monthly letters to the spiritual presence I refer to as Jesus or Christ or God or the Holy Spirit or any of several other metaphors typical of Christian references to the deity—Comforter, Advocate, Light, Savior, Teacher.

This essay offers a taste of that 60,000-word book in fewer than 8,000 words. I have retained most of the first year and the last and offered central letters from the intervening years. I deleted most of my social and work life, leaving a core centered on my spiritual experiences. I began as an Episcopalian and later joined the Catholic Church. Along the way, I worshiped with the silent Quakers and the jubilant charismatics. I had visions, and I spoke in Tongues. I came to understand that God is present in all things and all people. Indeed God is truly omnipresent, as orthodox Christian theology proclaims.

Please do not mistake the narrator for an omniscient voice. I am the narrator, and I have tried to capture what I experienced at the time and what I thought about it then, whether I considered it right or wrong upon later reflection.

by Patricia A. Williams

Click here for Pat's Spiritual
Autobiography