Dear Friends,
During the Reconciliation Service on Wednesday evening, a second grader had a question for me. He said, “Before I tell you my sins I want to know something, how do you pray?” I said, “You want to know how I pray or you want to know in general how to pray?” He replied, “I want to know how to pray.” So I set off on a little discourse about how to talk to God about the stuff of life and when I was finished he said, “Yes, but how do you hear God? God is not there in front of you, how can you hear God?” He was very sincere and really wanted to know. I told him that it would take a little bit of practice to be able to hear God. He said he was willing to practice, “but how do you hear God?”
Then came the difficult task of trying to explain to a second grader the need to be quiet since the only way to hear the voice of God is to quiet our hearts and minds. God speaks very quietly and when our minds are full of other things, we cannot hear the voice of God. I told him that if we could get our minds and bodies quiet enough, then we would hear God say something to us. We would hear God’s voice deep down inside of us, and most of the time, God’s words to us individually would be an echo of the words God speaks in scripture. God tends to say the same thing because we humans have a hard time getting the message right.
The young boy was precious in his eagerness to know and in the sincerity of his thinking. Here, he thought, was a man who claimed to know God, he should be able to explain how it is possible to hear the voice of God. People were always talking about praying, but he was not hearing the Voice.
I might want to quote Kierkegaard at this point. “The present state of the world and the whole of life is diseased. If I were a doctor and were asked for my advice, I would reply: Create silence! The Word of God cannot be heard in the noisy world of today. And even if it were blazoned forth with all the panoply of noise so that it could be heard in the midst of all the other noise, then it would no longer be the Word of God. Therefore create Silence.”
The quest of the young boy has been humanity’s quest. Something made this immense universe and keeps it ongoing – ever expanding. The world, its creatures, its complexity is not an accident. Is it possible then to encounter the creator? Is it possible to talk to God? Can it be more than a one sided conversation, more than us shouting at the empty sky? Can we hear God? Like the young boy we need to practice the art of listening.
Part of what we remember at Christmas is that God respects us so much that he is willing to take on the humbleness of an infant so that he can touch our hard human hearts. Who can resist the smile of a baby? And, babies need some quiet…
Many of the Christmas songs we will be singing over the next few weeks will remind us of how quietly Jesus came into the world and how he still speaks to human hearts when they are silent. Let me leave you with the lyrics for O Little Town of Bethlehem, see how it speaks of silence:
