And Now...A Word from the Lord

"I became silent and began to listen. 

I discovered in the silence, the voice of God." 

-- S. Kierkegaard

What does it mean to say, "God spoke to me."?
To be honest, when I hear folks use that phrase,
I get nervous.
I grew up in a religious context where God was very, very chatty.
God told folks LOTS of things!

Sometimes God even provided fashion advice by indicating to the faithful follower which pair of shoes should be worn on any given day. Early on, I began to wonder if God really had time to help people make decisions about their footwear, since it seemed to me God must have much bigger chores to attend to -- like global warming, hurricanes, earthquakes, etc.

In that religious context, I also heard people quoting things they were convinced God had told them. Such conviction couldn't even be overcome by pointing out the inconsistencies between what someone said God said to her/him, and the sorts of things the God portrayed in the two Testaments had been credited with "saying" in ages past. The more people reported God's many comments, the more difficult it became for me to believe God was being accurately quoted.

And then I became an Episcopalian.

For the record, Episcopalians are lovers of words -- specifically, the words of the Book of Common Prayer. We also love the words of Scripture and the words of various and sundry hymns. We are a text-driven group. And we readily affirm every Sunday morning, when a reading from Scripture has been proclaimed, that we have just heard, "the Word of the Lord". Yet, in spite of our love of words and our belief that Jesus is "the Word" and our desire to pray "the proper words", the majority of Episcopalians aren't given to making any sort of claim that God "spoke" to them in any shape, form or fashion.

In the Pentecostal tradition, God is the ultimate stream-of-consciousness communicator, blathering away about all sorts of issues -- divine and profane -- to just about anyone who will take the time to listen.

In the Anglican tradition, God is barely audible -- sort of a heavenly mumbler who doesn't speak clearly or convincingly, but who is, at some level, "nice enough". Anglicans prefer to read the notes from God's many speeches (BCP, Scripture, etc.), which contain the appropriate, well-vetted, in-decency-and-in-order-words that will not create much interest, but neither will they offend anybody. After all, with God so busy running the universe, it's little wonder there's so precious little time remaining in God's day to chat with the likes of us.

What both streams of the tradition share in common is their nervousness in silence.

Pentecostals love to sing, clap, shout, dance, speak in tongues. In fact, God would struggle to get a word in edgewise. To be silent is to risk becoming "lukewarm" (which is far worse than simply being "damned"). Episcopalians, on the other hand, love to read silently to themselves and speak in gravely affected tones. While there are some of Episcopalians who are quite demonstrative in their worship, most of us are uncomfortable with the possibility that displays of emotion might actually break out among us!

Somewhere between those two perspectives,
I believe the path toward hearing from the God who desires to be heard is getting clearer.
I can't help but wonder...
What would happen
If we take some time pondering the silence?
Who knows what God might say?
And wouldn't it be awe-inspiring to hear such a "Word from the Lord." ?