Sal Umana decided to publish his third book as part of a trilogy called "The Twin Towers Trilogy", containing his first two books, "The Day God Died", and" "The Day My Ego Died", and now a third, called Back to earth: A Spirituality for the Age of Terrorism.
Sal rocked the religious world when he wrote his first book after the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center. Sal, a psychotherapist, imagined God coming to him with an identity crisis. In "Doing Therapy for God", the author imagines God being upset by so many religious people who did so many ugly things to their fellow human beings "in the name of God." Who was this God they worshiped? The psychotherapist author tells God: " The reason you have been so depressed since Sept. 11 is that you are so disappointed at all the so-called "People of Faith" who pretend to speak for You, and then go against Your very nature as LOVE, and then go out and dominate, oppress, hate, and kill, all in the name of God.
Happily, it all ended up okay because Sal sang a paean of praise to the real God, calling God the One, the True, the Good, and the Beautiful, and finally, Love itself.
We don't know if God fell for this, but a year later, in "The Day My Ego Died", Sal goes to God and asks God to do a course of therapy on him. It was in the course of this treatment that Sal was asked to commit Ego suicide for no reason whatsoever, except that God didn't have an Ego, so why should he? You don't understand? Then read the book. This should have been enough, but along comes the tenth anniversary of the Twin Towers Tragedy, and Sal sees a team of Navy Seals wipe out Osama Bin Laden and we are back to Christian triumphalist revenge. So Sal, Christian pacifist, had to write a third book on Spirituality for the Age of Terrorism. First, he had to explain the "God Who Never Was" and the "God Who always Was." But God was fine. It was Sal's not quite dead Ego that needed the work. This he expands upon in the Third Chapter, "The Dark Night of the Ego". The Fourth Chapter is about "Living Without Ego", which really is about being a lover and accepting that we are all One with God. Finally, we all need to practice dying, so in the Fifth Chapter, "Dying Without Ego," he has some delightful tips on how to die each day, actually, how to die each moment, so that we will be so ready for death that we will enjoy it like going to a family reunion.
