Towards Sunday, June 19, 2016

Reading:  I Kings 19:1-18 (Elijah is on the run from Queen Jezebel's vow to avenge his publicly disgracing and murdering 450 prophets of her god, Ba-al.  He flees to the wilderness and is ready to give it all up and just die.  In response, God leads Elijah to Mount Horeb, the mountain of God, where Elijah is promised he will see God.  Elijah witnesses a wind great enough to break rock, an earthquake that shakes the mountain, and after that a great inferno -- but God is in none of these.  Then there is sheer silence -- the sound of silence -- a still, small voice -- the exact translation of something so eerie and unusual is difficult.  And it is in that silence and still, small voice that Elijah knows he is in the presence of God and is hearing God's voice telling him what to do next and giving him hope for the future.)

I wonder -- and sometimes worry, about people who hear still, small voices.  Didn't John Hinkley hear voices telling him to kill John Lennon?  Or was it the man who shot President Reagan?

I wonder if Omar Mateen heard voices inside the silence of whatever space he inhabited, telling him to open fire without warning with an automatic weapon on patrons of a gay night club -- leaving fifty dead and that many again severely injured.

I wonder at times about myself.  I don't mean I hear voices telling me to murder.  But what does my brain at different times tell me to do and to see as the best or only thing to do right now.  What addictive or habitual urges do I simply listen to?  Or even things that my conscience seems to tell me are the good and right thing to do or say, which later I come to see as gravely mistaken -- even hurtful and destructive?  I know enough now about the brain not really to trust everything it sees and says to me.

I also don't really trust folks who are super-confident about God and God's will.  They just seem too sure for my liking.

And you don't even need to bring God and religion into it.  With more and more people getting news and their perception of the world from Facebook and other social media, because of the way the algorithms work it's easier and easier to be more and more reinforced in one habitual way of seeing everything.  There are so many little self-enclosed caves for us to inhabit now, that it seems harder, rather than easier, to know what is the voice of whole truth, and what is just the echo of our own little cave.

• So how do we know, what ways do we have of testing what we hear?  Of doing what faith traditions call the discernment of spirits?  
• Do you have a way of knowing God's voice from lesser voices in your life?
• Is there anything in the story, or in your experience, that helps provide a way of being truly open to God's voice, to the silence that is truly holy?