hearing God

 

Have you ever heard God’s voice?

And, if so, has that been an exceptional experience, or is it a familiar one?

God is spirit, and so the way God speaks to us differs from a face-to-face conversation with another human being, because human beings are animals we can see, with vocal cords, and lips we can read.

But the human animal is also spirit, for God has breathed God’s own spirit into the human animal. This is what distinguishes us from every other animal, including our hominid ancestors. (God gave them life, but gave us something more: I would suggest, for the very purpose of conversation with a spiritual being.) And so we don’t only communicate body to body — including, but by no means limited to words — we also communicate spirit to spirit.

People who have experienced a bereavement will often have conversations with the person they have loved but no longer see. My own parents are still alive, but we live at a physical distance; nonetheless, there are times when I hear my mother’s voice, or my father’s voice. Distance and death come between the physical, but the spirit is not bound by such constraints. Some might say that is just the imagination or the subconscious; but I would suggest that the imagination and the subconscious are to the spirit what vocal cords and body language are to the flesh.

We have other ways of communicating spirit to spirit. These include writing. I can read words written down by someone who lived many centuries before me, and their spirit speaks to mine.

God speaks to us in many ways, including through our imagination and our subconscious — that is, through visions and dreams, and a voice in our head that is not our own conscious voice — and through things written down — whether the Bible, which is so important to some (much as I love the Bible, I think it is more a way we learn to recognise God’s voice speaking to others than a primary way God speaks to us) or the writings left to the Church by those we cal saints, or any other work written by a fellow human animal into whom God had breathed the spirit.

God also speaks to us through such other human animals who do stand in front of us, whose vocal cords move air waves that hit our ear drums, whose lips we might read.

The best way to learn to hear God’s voice is to be present to the possibility that God would want to speak with us at all. Whether what follows is constant chat or long companionable silence might depend on your personality or season of life or simply the overall length of the conversation.

But to hear God’s voice is not at all unusual, not the preserve of the exceptionally holy or the mentally ill.