On rare occasions He acts dramatically and chaotically, as at the resurrection; but not every day of the week. So I too would want to be undemonstrative; the days of mighty signs from heaven have gone. No more Mount Carmels! No more raisings of Lazarus. I would stick to what I knew about, which was the human mind.
I would reject the idea that the future lay with computers and thinking machines; computers are machines that do arithmetic rather quickly, and certain things they do admittedly much better than we can. On the whole though, they are but pale imitations of the human brain; and not imitations at all of the human mind. So I would set out to create an indwelling between someone else’s mind and mine. In this indwelling there would be a “clear beholding”, to use John Ruesbroke’s language. No deceit, no manipulation, no bargaining, and a willingness to disagree with courtesy. There would be no barriers; each could see into the other’s soul, by the simple expedient of the thoughts of each taking place in the mind of the other. At whatever distance, and in whatever circumstances. I would not encourage them to shout, “Jesus is King!” More likely to agree that the Rule of Law was one of the greatest creations of the civilized mind; and if the historical Jesus were to say, “But my Sermon on the Mount contradicts this!” to reply politely but firmly, “Much has happened in the last 2000 years, and we prefer our opinion to yours”. However I do not think he would say this. The historical Jesus was ever a realist; and I feel sure he would accept that times have changed.
This would be the blueprint. And if experience showed that this companionship was a more successful arrangement than conventional friendship, then there would be nothing to stop it replicating itself in others, in endless glorious variety. Not the same monotonous replication that you get in microbiology. From time to time, things would go wrong; they always do. But if experience showed that this blueprint was also very much more successful in running the administration of society, than the average give-and-take of civilian life, there would be no reason why it should not replicate extraordinarily fast, and take over. And in no time at all (in evolutionary terms) you would have created a new heaven and a new earth; and the old heaven and the old earth would have passed away. When this stage was reached, they might all want to shout, “Jesus is King”; but for myself I would prefer not to! All this fanciful mental and spiritual structure has as its foundation the assumption or belief that it was both possible and sensible to reconcile symbolically England and Germany after the War.
But a word of caution. There remains the problem of evil; and Emily Bronte in her novel, Wuthering Heights, gives a warning of what might happen if two people attempted such an intimacy without God. She said clearly they would destroy themselves. I think she was right. I didn’t make that mistake. I may have made many others; but I did not make that one.