
Author Ruth Walker brings us a fascinating insight into the seen and the unseen, the temporal and the spiritual in her autobiographical account of the supernatural in her own life, with How God Answered Us All: Spiritual, Paranormal and the Unknown. Now on the cusp of turning 60, Ruth takes the opportunity to look back and document the many strange, inexplicable and deeply spiritual things that occurred over the course of her life. Many of these occurrences are odd, strange, and some might even say unbelievable with many of them relayed through the eyes of a young child from a vantage point far removed from the events. The author also takes the opportunity to impart pearls of philosophical wisdom about life, death, the unknown and her own deep faith in an entity that is not that as espoused by the churches of the world, which are seen in her eyes as a construct of man, not spirit. What Walker attempts most of all to do, I believe, is to open up our thought processes, to make us look around and realise that what we see, touch and feel may in fact be just an infinitesimal glimpse at what the Universe contains.
One of the things that struck me the most about Ruth Walker’s work, How God Answered Us All: Spiritual, Paranormal and the Unknown was that she approached the task of detailing her experiences, many of which as lot of people will scoff at as being hallucination or a young child’s overactive imagination, from a very logical, clinical, and detached perspective. This leant so much more weight to her narrative than might otherwise have been achieved. She never once seemed intensely proud or arrogant over her “gifts” but rather matter of fact and intent on understanding. If there was one phrase that kept recurring in my mind as I read this book it was this: “We know what we know and we even know some of what we don’t know but how much more is there that we don’t even know we don’t know?” To me, this was the essence of the book – to make the reader question everything we think we know about the Universe and life. She asks us to look at humanity and its understanding of its place in the Universe as a continuum along which we have travelled very little thus far and still have a long, long way to go. I loved her explanation as to why “only the good die young” – they have already done what they were sent here to do (what a cool thought). I can highly recommend this book to anyone with an enquiring and open mind. There is so much solid meat to get one’s teeth into that a short review like this cannot do the book justice – read it and find out.
