When All Goes Quiet

A man recounts a lifetime of divine intercession.

Lodewyks characterizes his nonfiction debut as a Navi, a Jewish scriptural term for a work channeled directly through a human mouthpiece from God. “These promptings by the Holy Spirit,” he writes, referring to his own book, “have come from a place unfamiliar to this author’s capabilities as an English writer.” This relationship as conduit and amanuensis for God began while Lodewyks was still in his mother’s womb: she was pregnant with the sixth of seven sons while she and her husband and other children were moving from Holland to Canada. In quick but vivid detail (“God managed to get me excited about the chiropractic profession,” he writes, for example), Lodewkys recounts his youth growing up in Canada, his family life, his marriage, anecdotes of his parents’ and grandparents’ experiences in Holland during World War II, the death of his father from lung cancer, and so on. But there’s a parallel narrative running underneath this autobiography and often surfacing to overtake it. Lodewyks was in a frequent state of spiritual ecstasy, possessed since childhood by the ability to experience moments when all the day’s surrounding noise suddenly went quiet and God made contact with him directly. These visitations were never visible or audible to anybody else, but they guided, surprised, and often amused him—this is a delightfully playful spiritual odyssey. Angels and spirits were everywhere in Lodewyks’ daily life, watching over his friends and relatives, attending the births of his children, safeguarding those children all through their adult lives. Through it all, Lodewyks stresses that his readers don’t require his supernatural gifts in order to further their own spirituality: “Life does not have to go quiet for you to note the signs that God puts in front of you as he directs you to do His work.” The upshot will of course be lost on Lodewyks’s non-Christian readers, but for his fellow faithful, this will be the ultimate comforting account of a safeguarded existence.

An accessible story of a man whose quiet moments are filled with heavenly guidance.