Listening to God

Everybody talks about listening, but nobody does anything about it. What I need are not more pleas to listen, but more lessons on how. So often I cannot say what I want to be heard. So often I cannot hear what is being said so plainly.

On a purely physical level, my high-frequency hearing loss leaves me oblivious to some things in this life; and I’ll just have to live with that. My cat cornered a cicada the other night, for example, and my wife grimaced with empathy as she heard the piercing peals of the dying insect, succumbing as it was to the cold mauls of an unfeeling feline. I was not privy to the insect’s wails, they being out of range of my sensory receptors. Death would have its day on my doorstep and I would go blithely on.

The kind of listening I need, however, does not require much physical equipment. What I want most to hear is the voice of God.

I have little trouble believing that God hears me. Betty Maltz, writing about her after-life experiences, relates a striking image in this vein. She was in heaven, she said, and saw shafts of light entering the throne room of God, knowing within herself these shafts were prayers. God hears prayer. That’s easy. But what does God say back and in what way? How does one hear His response?

Some people I know seem to carry on with God like two old-timers on bench. I sometimes envy the Biblical folks who heard messages from God as plain as day, like me talking to you.

For my own part, sometimes I feel like that gargantuan radio dish the scientists have aimed at the cosmos, straining to hear with the most sophisticated gadgetry any faint trace of intelligent life out there. So far they’ve heard nothing intelligible, but have managed to an even more imponderable, and mute, void.

My faith tells me that God is working all around me, communicating His will to as many as will receive Him, to as many as long to be part of the action. However, I don’t believe the problem has so much to do with listening as with accepting the message. God is God. He can and does get my attention. I simply discount His messages in favor of ones with sometimes sweeter tones.

The thing I don’t want to accept is the startling and profound truth that God does speak to me personally. He speaks in a flash of lightning that makes the streetlights go of and sends a chill of awe through all that I am. He speaks in my soul and what He says is stillness, quietude, solitude. He makes a word among words in Scripture, glossed a hundred times before, burn in my heart, the word becoming a window on the page to a vastness of challenge. In the midst of my sin He pelts my conscience like a Chinese water torture, but with a softness that says love and hope and possibility for change.

What of the hard of heart, the jaded, the puffed up, the indifferent, the insensate? Having been all of these, I find the answer in my question: How is it, despite all of these, that still I long for the voice of God? God speaks an irresistible tongue. It is not for want of listening that I sometimes languish, but in hearing I do not hear. –T.R.

written by Thomas A. Russell
first published in the Lafayette Sunday Visitor on July 19th, 1987