Learning to Listen
Father Richard Rohr considers the many challenges we face when seeking to “hear” God’s voice:
Humanity is in a time of great flux, of great cultural and spiritual change. The psyche doesn’t know what to do with so much information. For most of human history, knowledge was written down, gathered in libraries, and shared physically; now, we’re linked 24/7 to unlimited data via televisions, our phones, or computer screens. That may explain the confusion and anxiety that we’re dealing with today.
In light of today’s information overload, people are looking for a few clear certitudes by which to define themselves. We see fundamentalism in many religious leaders when it serves their cultural or political worldview. We surely see it at the lowest levels of religion, where God is used to justify violence, hatred, prejudice, and “our” way of doing things. The fundamentalist mind likes answers and explanations so much that it remains willfully ignorant about how history arrived at those explanations or how self-serving they usually are. Satisfying untruth is more pleasing to us than unsatisfying truth, and full truth is invariably unsatisfying—at least to the small self.
Great spirituality, on the other hand, is always seeking a very subtle but creative balance between opposites. When we go to one side or the other too much, we find ourselves either overly righteous or overly skeptical and cynical. There must be a healthy middle, as we try to hold both the needed light and the necessary darkness.
We must not give up seeking truth, observing reality from all its angles. We settle human confusion not by falsely pretending to settle all the dust, but by teaching people an honest and humble process for learning and listening for themselves, which we call contemplation. Then people come to wisdom in a calm and compassionate way without the knee jerk overreactions that we witness in so many today.
Faith isn’t supposed to be a top-down affair, but an organic meeting between an Inner Knower (the Indwelling Holy Spirit) accessed by prayer and experience, and the Outer Knower, which we would call Scripture (holy writings) and Tradition (all the ancestors). This is a calm and wonderfully healing way to know full Reality. [1]
Adam Bucko shares how contemplation refines our inner knowing:
Contemplation is about receptivity, about deep listening, about wrestling with questions like what breaks your heart, what makes you truly alive, and allowing those questions, as well as the pain of the world, to shatter us. When we do that, in the midst of all of that, we discover that there’s something arising deep within. For me, that’s the Holy Spirit looking to essentially flow into our lives, take whatever is left of us, and reassemble it into something that can become our unique gift to the world. The contemplation part is the receptivity and consent, and the action part is simply letting God live through us as much as possible, letting Christ live and love and protest through us.
A Loving Voice
If we can trust and listen to our inner divine image, our whole-making instinct, or our True Self, we will act from our best, largest, kindest, most inclusive self.
—Richard Rohr, The Universal Christ
Richard Rohr describes how we can humbly receive and share God’s “good word” for ourselves and the world:
We must receive all words of God tenderly and subtly, so that we can speak them to others with tenderness and subtlety. I would even say that anything said with too much bravado, over-assurance, or with any need to control or impress another, is never the voice of God within us. If any thought feels too harsh, shaming, or diminishing of ourselves or others, it is not likely the voice of God. Trust me on that. That is simply our egoic voice. Why do humans so often presume the exact opposite—that shaming voices are always from God, and grace voices are always the imagination? If something comes toward us with grace and can pass through us and toward others with grace, we can trust it as the voice of God.
One holy man who came to visit me recently put it this way, “We must listen to what is supporting us. We must listen to what is encouraging us. We must listen to what is urging us. We must listen to what is alive in us.” I personally was so trained not to trust those voices that I think I often did not hear the voice of God speaking to me or what Abraham Lincoln called the “better angels of our nature.” Yes, a narcissistic person can and will misuse such advice, but a genuine God lover will flourish inside such a dialogue.
We must learn how to recognize the positive flow and to distinguish it from the negative resistance within ourselves. It can take years, if not a lifetime. If a voice comes from accusation and leads to accusation, it is quite simply the voice of the “Accuser,” which is the literal meaning of the biblical word “Satan.” Shaming, accusing, or blaming is simply not how God talks, but sadly, it is too often how we talk—to ourselves and to one another. God is supremely nonviolent; I’ve learned that from the saints and mystics that I have read and met and heard about. That many holy people cannot be wrong. [1]
There is a deeper voice of God which we must learn to hear and obey. It will sound like the voice of risk, of trust, of surrender, of soul, of common sense, of destiny, of love, of an intimate stranger, of our deepest self. It will always feel gratuitous, and it is this very freedom that scares us. God never leads by guilt or shame! God leads by loving the soul at ever-deeper levels, not by shaming at superficial levels.
| (from John Chaffee’s Monday email on the mystics) Learning from the Mystics: Julian of Norwich |
| Quote of the Week: “Our soul is one-ed with him, and he is unchangeable goodness. There can be neither anger nor forgiveness between God and our soul. For the goodness of God has made our soul so completely one with him that there can be nothing separating us.” – Chapter 46, p 114. Reflection: For Julian, the line that separates the creation from the Creator has largely dissolved. In today’s world, someone is considered spiritual or learned because of their ability to separate, to distinguish, to be apart rather than unified, reconciling, and integrated with the world around them. Julian was under some level of scrutiny for these comments, but she was likely under the watchful eye of people who were “higher” in authority but “earlier” in their faith journey and maturity. Julian was unable to find a word to talk about the intimacy of God and our being she invented a new term: being one-ed with God. Elsewhere in the Showings, she likens the soul and God is tied in a knot, two ropes in one existence. If we take a moment to realize what she is saying, it is nothing more than what happens in the climax of Romans 8, that “nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus.” Sometimes we read that passage and affirm it conceptually but not in reality. For Julian, she took the intimate closeness of God and the human soul to be the reality upon which all other theology and spirituality should be built. Prayer Dear Lord, help us not only to affirm but to also live from the deep reality that you have chosen to tie yourself to us, that we are united in one existence by sheer grace and love. Help us also to recognize the deep unity and interrelationship of all things, and overcome every separation, segregation, and division that we foolishly employ. In the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Amen. |
| Life Overview: Who Were They: Julian, also known as Juliana Where: Norwich, England When: 1343-1416AD (During the Bubonic Plague) Why She is Important: She is the first published female in the English language, and is known for her incredibly hopeful, intimate and tender theology of God. What Was Their Main Contribution: The Showings (or Revelations) of Divine Love |
