Comments from the Author: Gene Wesley Marshall
“Consciousness is a combination of awareness and freedom.”
“Freedom is awareness in action”
“Awareness is freedom in waiting.”
“To be humanly conscious is to be aware of the environments of nature and human history and to make free responses out of the depth of those encounters.”
As a culture and as religious practices within this culture, we are experiencing struggles with the “Call of Freedom” found within our human essence. We are culturally conditioned to flee from freedom into words, words, words of reasoned excuses. All these words do for us is cloud and deny our freedom. Perhaps these words lie to us that we are completely determined and have no freedom. Or perhaps we call things freedom that not freedom. We have all in one way or another ducked our response-abilities in favor of open escapes from our basic freedom. We have sought to blame the results of our lives on anything other than our own responses. “Forgiveness and a fresh start in freedom“ may be the last topic most people want to hear about.
This book is for those who are catching on that the loss of freedom is a most horrific condition in our species, And this condition is so pervasive and rationalized in our culture that I have felt called to write a book on the subtle facts about this unwelcome calling to be free. Facing our loss of freedom can seem grim at first, but this is intended o be a happy book, simply said, and everyday helpful.
Table of Contents
An Author’s Preface
1. The Choices of Horses
2. I Did It!
3. A Return to Reality
4. Truth and Freedom
5. Liberating Proclamation
6. Imprisoned in Personality
7. The Soul of Freedom
8. Freedom and Politics
9. Bending History
10. Freedom and Hope
11. Freedom and Death
12. Science and Freedom
13. The Freedom to be Approximate
14. Freedom and Aloneness
15. Freedom and the Interpersonal
16. Freedom and the Long View
17. Four Pitfalls for Essential Freedom
18. Freedom and the Word “God”
19. Freedom and the Law
20. Divine Decision Making
21.The Freedom of Jesus—Called
22. The Freedom of Jesus—Healer
23. The Freedom of Jesus—Courageous
24. So Be Free
Notes on Other Writings
About the author
Gene Wesley Marshall is, in 2024, a 92-year-old religious teacher who began his education at Oklahoma State University as a mathematician and physicist. In 1953, he decided to leave a mathematics career and attend seminary at Perkins School of Theology in Dallas, Texas. He has served as a local church pastor, a chaplain in the army, and in 1962 joined a religious order of families (the Order: Ecumenical). For six years, he served as dean of the Ecumenical Institute’s eight-week residential “Academy” that trained leadership for religious and social engagements with participants from many parts of the world. He also traveled the United States, Latin America, Europe, India, Hong Kong, and Australia as a teacher and lecturer on religious and social ethics topics. In the early 1960s, he was an active participant in the civil rights revolution, serving for two years as the Protestant executive of the National Conference on Religion and Race. In the mid-1980s, he was one of the organizers of the bioregional movement. Beginning in 1983, he and his wife Joyce Marshall organized a non-for-profit educational organization, “Realistic Living,” and began co-teaching innovative programs and workshops plus publishing journals, books and essays. The Marshalls live in Bonham, Texas, in a straw-bale house.