About Me

My name is Tom Whitney and I have found the truth. It was under the middle sofa cushion next to the remote.

They say you should run away from a man who has found the truth, but if he is persistent enough, eventually you’ll get tired and want to go home, like Forest Gump. So you might as well answer the door now and listen to the spiel instead of turning down the television and pretending like you’re not home.

Weaned on Jesus and science

I was raised by a devoutly Catholic mother and a devoutly scientific father. The Whitney kids were as likely to argue over whose turn it was to light the Advent wreath as we were to spend an evening at the Science Museum of Minnesota. My favorite Sci Museum Omnimax show was Genesis about the origin of the cosmos. I loved the giant explosion that nearly shook you out of your seat. But I also enjoyed Christmas Eve midnight mass, where the story of Genesis was read every year by an older gentleman with velvety pipes. I loved listening to him read that story. I don’t recall raising my hand and asking “What day did the Big Bang happen on?”

My years as Darrin Stevens

I was a good student of science, but the ants in my pants were more interested in playing music and writing. Rock bands and journalism school won out over double-blind experiments and significant figures. Later I settled into a career as an ad guy and owned my own agency in Minneapolis for six years. I write, design, art direct and do all that good advertising stuff. Now from nine to five I make my dough doing marketing through my brand consultancy Pixidis.

In the financial downturn following 9/11, my agency did poorly and eventually collapsed, forcing me into bankruptcy. Under that mountain of stress I got frustrated with the teetering stack of contradiction that was the foundation of my faith. I estimate I had heard some 1,000 sermons by theology-school trained priests and later, pastors (I switched to Lutheranism in my thirties). Yet I didn’t know whether to love and trust God, as Jesus taught, or to be afraid of Him, as the Old Testament suggested. Each week we read one reading from the old and new Testaments, responding to each with “This is the word of the Lord.” We didn’t say, “We believe the New Testament more than the Old, but keep teaching it anyway to hedge our bets.”

God loved me unconditionally, I learned, but He would burn me forever if things went south in our relationship. Call me cynical, but I might consider that just a wee condition on someone’s love. Imagine meeting someone at one of those three-minute dating events, and they say, “Oh yeah, almost forgot to tell you…I love everyone I date unconditionally, but if they don’t return that love, I set them on fire, throw them in my basement, lock the door and listen to them wail and shriek forever.” Would you fall to your knees in worship or dial 911?

Cubits were the measure of my discontent

One day in a small group discussion about Noah and the ark flood story, for no reason other than I was at an extremely stressful place in my life, I blurted out, “Who cares how many cubits long the ark was! What about a God that can build a universe from scratch but can’t discipline His kids without drowning them!”

At that time South Carolina mother Susan Smith was being vilified in the media for methodically planning and executing the murder of her two sons. You may recall she strapped them into their car seats and rolled the family sedan down a boat ramp into a lake. Yet here we were in our beautiful Lutheran church politely discussing the details of the length and width of Noah’s ark, and whether it could hold all those animals, while ignoring the fact we worshipped a Being Who methodically planned the murder of His own children over six generations. It took Noah about 120 years to build the ark, the Bible says. Couldn’t God find a family counselor with an opening?

So I pushed back on the logical absurdity of it all and have kept pushing back ever since. I have literally challenged everything I was taught about God to the core, holding only one truth as absolute: God is love. The persian mystic Rumi said, “Love is the astrolabe of God’s mysteries.” An astrolabe was an ancient tool for exploring the stars. In other words, explore deeply how God can be love—and only love—and the secrets of the cosmos fall into place.

Confronting God the Alpha Wolf

Holding God’s love as a rock-solid absolute, I methodically confronted every brutal fact of God, while never losing faith, to paraphrase a Jim Collins’ idea from Good to Great. My journey to find the truth has taken me through modern physics, a study of global spiritual traditions, mystical accounts of God across time and from around the world, and through the perceptual spiritual psychology of A Course in Miracles, which I study daily.

From all this stuff, what I would consider global spiritual and physical science best practices, I have reverse-engineered a coherent framework of understanding that answers all the God contradictions I learned over the years. Yet despite this journey through science and global spirituality, I would consider myself more Christian than ever, even though some of my core beliefs have been abandoned or modified by my investigation.

It also wasn’t purely an academic exercise. An inner guide emerged in my life, what we Christians call the Holy Spirit, and has provided continuous teaching, healing and contextualization of my book learning.

All along I had one criteria in my search: I wanted a reasonable God I could love and trust. To find Him, it would take seven years and some 6,000 hours of study, writing, meditation and prayer. This blog is the result of that journey, which continues and deepens to this day.

Oh, yeah, and one more thing: I am a duck man of sorts. I have webbed feet. Two of the toes on each foot are connected by an extra flap of skin, a genetic condition called syndactylism. I don’t put it on my resume, but given the title of my blog, I thought it would appropriate to reveal my secret.

Peace and love,

Tom Whitney

Crystal MN, USA