Hearing the Voice of God
[October 5, 2020. This essay is a working document to be shared in bits and pieces with the School of Prayer]
The School of Prayer is a structured journey through a series of interweaving conversations as each of us talk with God, each other, immerse ourselves in the Scriptures and the authors of our respective readings, along with the conversations of our lives. We are looking for resonances between each layer of these conversations. Prayer and reflection will allow us time to hear the voice of God more intentionally in and through these rich sources of learning.
Simply put, a chief goal of the School of Prayer is to tune the ears of our hearts to hear God’s voice more intently, actively, abundantly.
We proceed in the School of Prayer with the assumptions that God not only is able to speak to each of us, but that God desires to speak to us, and that each of us has a unique ways of hearing God’s voice. Moving between our readings, daily prayers, and various group listening practices allows us ample and regular ‘spiritual exercise.’ These disciplines can be compared to necessity of running laps for an athlete or practicing musical scales for the musician. We grow in prayer by repetition, trial and error, learning mostly through regular exposing our persistent failures.
There is an enormous amount of theology wrapped up in the assumptions of hearing God’s voice, that God is able to speak to me, that he desires to speak me, and that I have a unique mode of hearing his voice. One could spend a considerable amount of time and energy unpacking the breadth of what has been said about how a person experiences God. Some of us by nature need to work through the Biblical and Spiritual Theology of hearing God’s voice. However, that extensive study will lead to the conclusion that is central to Jesus’ invitation: hearing the voice of God is basic to following Jesus. “And his sheep follow him because they know his voice” (John 10:4).
it is a convenient hinderance to assume that hearing God’s voice is reserved for “super-Christians, for mystics, for some sort of advanced Christian practice. This convenient resignation allows us to continue as Christians in form but not in substance. We are conveniently licensed to not offer ourselves as a living sacrifice (Romans 12:1), to shuffle our feet, kick the dirt and aw-shucks-it with the false consolation that, well…nobody really prays anyway after all. Right?
The School of Prayer, however, pivots off the blessed assumption that no, there are many throughout the history of the Church who have enjoyed a dynamic, reciprocal, interactive prayer. We proceed in the School of Prayer with the assumption that hearing God’s voice is vital substance of bearing much fruit for the sake of glorifying Jesus (John 15:8). A conversational relationship with God is Jesus’ Gospel invitation, dying to ourselves, dying to our distractions and lesser loves so that we can more effectively live in and through God. Prayer is the essence of abiding in Christ apart from which I can do nothing (John 15:5). The School of Prayer pivots off this Gospel assumption that hearing God’s voice is so basic to following Jesus that at some point during your journey, in hindsight you may enjoy a sense of awe and relief that the School of Prayer is an attempt at Christianity 101.
Following Jesus means we audaciously claim access to the Creator of the Universe by whom, for whom, and through whom the holds the universe together (Colossians 1:16). When we pray, we claim to be speaking with a God who is transcendent and also vitally intimate, the One who is before and outside time and space yet who also knows us better than we know ourselves (Augustine’s Confessions, see below; Romans 8:27-30). Those who are spiritually asleep forget how offensive and seemingly insane the assumptions of prayer are to a materialist, rational consciousness. With great lamentation it is necessary for us to reckon with the spiritual sleeping institution of the church has deferred to materialism and rationalism. Most of us have been introduced to the concept but not to the reality of prayer. We offer our Hail Marys as faithless Hail Marys, vague, practically deist intentions of God possibilities. We offer prayers without much sense that God is listening, that God desires to listen to our prayers, or with little sense that any of us have any unique gifts of hearing God’s voice.
Dallas Willard puts a fine point on the spiritual slumber of the church: “We just don’t do what he said. We don’t seriously attempt it. And apparently we don’t know how to do it. You only have to look at our official activities to see this. It saddens me to say such things, and I do not mean to condemn anyone. But it is a matter of extreme importance, and unless it is openly acknowledged, nothing can be done about it. (Divine Conspiracy, xii).”
However, this is merely the bad news. As Fredrick Beuchner frankly explains that the Gospel is always bad news before it is Good News, we must discern the sickness before we can apply the remedy. Discerning the sickness should accompany a sense of relief if guided by the Spirit. Repentance requires the greater hope of goodness found in forgiveness. We confess not because we have to or because we are spiritually masochistic. We confess because of the hope of salvation. Understanding the School of Prayer as Christianity 101 might seem initially like a slap in the face. After all, what the hell have I been up to all this time…all these years? Yet, by the grace of the Spirit of Christ, approaching the School of Prayer as Christianity 101 is approaching faith again as a beginning. Here we can be relieved, refreshed, renewed to discover that prayer is true, that conversation with God is not an esoteric idea. If the School of Prayer is basic, Christianity 101, it turns out to be true that Jesus really is the one in who I live and move and have my being. There is a better, God-filled way of existence.
After discerning the bad news, Dallas Willard goes on to offer the hope that inspires the School of Prayer’s eight-month journey: “The really good news for humanity is that Jesus is now taking students in the master class of life Divine Conspiracy, xv).”
Prayer is supernatural even as it is practically domestic. A Christian is naturally supernatural, a practical mystic. I do not need to be an elite mystic in order to practice mysticism because prayer allows me to access God’s mystical being: I in him and he in me, a dynamic, interpersonal, indwelling of being with being.
There are many ways to unpack this lack theologically, historically, and institutionally. Our interest here is to examine this question personally, why do I experience a rift between prayer as an idea and prayer as a living, breathing reality? One key to understanding my personal lack of prayer is to examine my prayerlessness. Much of prayer involves the prayers of lamentation and confession in a consistent, penetrating, examination of my own personal resistances to God and to discuss these resistances with God without judging myself more harshly than God is judging.
The deeper move toward contemplative prayer eventually reveals that prayer is not so much about how capable we are to get God’s attention as it is about God’s ability to get our attention. God is always speaking to us. St. Ignatius helps us understand that God can speak to us through anything and everything. By saying that prayer is about God’s ability to get our attention, we mean to point toward each of our willingness to allow God to speak to us.
The question is if the ears of my heart are not clogged or deafened, if the eyes of my heart are not blind or distracted. Spiritual discipline is a practice of seeking the necessary purity, the cleansing and calming of my interior self and the directing and constraining of my attention so that I can enjoy God’s presence and hear his voice. Evagrius of Pontus encouraged askesis, rigorous sacrifice for the sake of keeping the attention of my heart “sharp.”
When we approach our sayings: [edit] on how their readings along with their practice of prayer, fasting, and the other disciplines—how God is speaking through all these things. The main question can be asked: “what is the Spirit inviting me to next,” of “how am I opening myself to God vis a vis how I am closing myself to God.
“Let me know you, O you who know me; then shall I know even as I am known. You are the strength of my soul; make your way in and shape it to yourself, that it may be yours to have and to hold, free from stain or wrinkle. I speak because this is my hope, and whenever my joy springs from that hope it is joy well founded. As for the rest of this life’s experiences, the more tears are shed over them the less they are worth weeping over, and the more truly worth lamenting the less do we bewail them while mired in them. You love the truth because anyone who “does truth” comes to the light. Truth it is that I want to do, in my heart by confession in your presence, and with my pen before many witnesses.
But the abyss of the human conscience lies naked to your eyes, O Lord, so would anything be secret even if I were unwilling to confess to you? I would be hiding you from myself, but not myself from you. But now that my groans bear witness that I find no pleasure in myself, you shed light upon me and give me joy, you offer yourself, lovable and longed for, that I may thrust myself away in disgust and choose you, and be pleasing no more either to you or to myself except in what I have from you.
To you, then, Lord, I lie exposed, exactly as I am. I have spoken of what I hope to gain by confessing to you. My confession to you is made not with words of tongue and voice, but with the words of my soul and the clamour of my thought, to which your ear is attuned; for when I am bad, confession to you is simply disgust with myself, but when I am good, confession to you consists in not attributing my goodness to myself, because though you, Lord, bless the person who is just, it is only because you have first made him just when he was sinful. This is why, O Lord, my confession in your presence is silent, yet not altogether silent: there is no noise to it, but it shouts by love.
For it is you, Lord, who judge me. No-one knows what he himself is made of, except his own spirit within him, yet there is still some part of him which remains hidden even from his own spirit; but you, Lord, know everything about a human being because you have made him. And though in your sight I may despise myself and reckon myself dust and ashes, I know something about you which I do not know about myself.
It is true that we now see only a tantalising reflection in a mirror, and so it is that while I am on pilgrimage far from you I am more present to myself than to you; yet I do know that you cannot be defiled in any way whatever, whereas I do not know which temptations I may have the strength to resist, and to which ones I shall succumb. Our hope is that, because you are trustworthy, you do not allow us to be tempted more fiercely than we can bear, but along with the temptation you ordain the outcome of it, so that we can endure.
Let me, then, confess what I know about myself, and confess too what I do not know, because what I know of myself I know only because you shed light on me, and what I do not know I shall remain ignorant about until my darkness becomes like bright noon before your face.”