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 and 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. [2]
References:
[1] Adapted from Richard Rohr, Things Hidden: Scripture as Spirituality, rev. ed. (Cincinnati, OH: Franciscan Media, 2008, 2022), 128–130.
[2] Adapted from Adam Bucko with Mark Longhurst, Letting Heartbreak Be Your Guide, September 12, 2024, Center for Action and Contemplation, YouTube video, 28:11.
Image credit and inspiration: Kuo-Chiao Lin, After Work (detail), 2017, photo, Taiwan, Unsplash. Click here to enlarge image. When we are listening we stop, be still and quiet, because we don’t want to miss the voice that is speaking.
Story from Our Community:
I was so moved by James Finley’s brave and vulnerable sharing of surviving domestic abuse. Reading his story reminds me that God is not only always with me, but is with me in all ways, and at all times. I find this especially true when life gets difficult, and it seems there’s no way out. When I feel overwhelmed with negative emotion, I close my eyes, breathe, and hear that “still small voice” saying “Be still.… I love you all ways.”
—Roger H.
