Hearing Things

What would you do if someone came to you and said, “God spoke to me and said such-and-such”? No one has yet come to me with that statement, but I already know that I wouldn’t dismiss it out of hand. I’d want to hear more. If he or she was truly hearing voices, or a Voice, it would be essential to determine whether the next step is a psychiatric evaluation or spiritual direction. Just because we live in a post-Enlightenment world doesn’t mean that God is now voiceless.

The prophet Jeremiah doesn’t come right out and say that he heard a Voice, but it’s clear that he has a conversation going with God. “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you,” says the word of the Lord. It’s a commission to go out and be a prophet. Like Moses, Jeremiah objects; unlike Moses, he runs out of objections pretty quickly. I’m only a boy, he says. But God replies, don’t say that! I will send you, and you will speak whatever I command you. [Note to those in my parish: God makes no reference to frontal lobe development.] Action swiftly follows words, for God touches Jeremiah’s lips and puts the words in his mouth. He got off easier than Isaiah, who had a hot glowing coal put on his lips.

“Before I formed you in the womb I knew you.” God knows Jeremiah better and more thoroughly that the prophet knows himself. That’s a promise that God makes to all of us, whether we like it or not. If you can make it through the thirteenth chapter of Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians without recalling every wedding at which you heard it read, without getting caught up in love, love, love, love, love, then you’ll hear those wonderful verses: “For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I am fully known.” This is the same state of being fully known that Jeremiah experienced, at the deepest and most intimate level. Most importantly, it is being accepted and loved at that level as well.

One of the works of Bernard of Clairvaux that I come back to again and again is “On Loving God” (De Diligendo Deo). In it he talks about the four degrees of love. The fourth degree, which few souls on this side of heaven attain, is loving oneself for the sake of God. It is to be totally immersed in God, to fully know as we are fully known. As Bernard says of such blessed people, “they are wholly immersed in that sea of eternal light and bright eternity.”

The danger in being so blessed – or in hearing voices – is that we can become transfixed on our vertical relationship with God. But that is not enough. We are called to love God and our neighbor. The relationship needs to be both vertical and horizontal. As Teresa of Ávila once wrote, no doubt thinking about her fractious convent, it’s a lot easier to tell if you’re growing in love of your neighbor than growing in love of God. It’s a lesson that’s hard to learn, and one that people don’t like to hear. Jeremiah was friendless because of his prophecies. Jesus was almost thrown over a cliff by the hometown crowd. Only that connection with God, that being fully known, kept them going. Sometimes it is only the promise of being full known, being fully loved, that will sustain us. “So faith, hope, love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.”

4 Epiphany: Jeremiah 1:4-10; Psalm 71:1-6; 1 Corinthians 13:1-13; Luke 4:21-30.