Listening to Your Life

Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery it is. In the boredom and pain of it, no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it, because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace.

— Frederick Buechner

A young couple I will call Davis and Linda were members of a congregation I once served. They met after college while serving in the Peace Corps in Guatemala. Love bloomed, and they married upon their return to the United States. As both had been raised in Episcopal households, when they had their first child — perhaps pressured somewhat by both sets of grandparents — they came to see me to discuss the baptism of their newborn son. Adam was duly baptized, and after that Davis and Linda became a regular part of our church community.

When Davis made an appointment with me, telling me he had something he needed to talk about, I hoped it was not something like an upsetting medical diagnosis. He arrived at the appointed hour and moved quickly to the point. "It's about God," he said. "God seems so distant ... like an abstraction. I say I believe in God, but where is he?"

Davis, who was a teacher at a nearby Quaker school, told me he was regularly exposed to the worship that was part of school life. There he experienced the periods of reverential silence. He said that during those times he felt that some force beyond himself was tugging at him. Then, when he came to church on Sunday, the formal language of the liturgy felt stilted and foreign to him: Our Father ... Creator of Heaven and Earth ... Hallowed be thy name ...

Davis was struggling and restless in his spirit. He was describing a state common to many. They — we — have a sense something very significant is going on, perhaps under the surface of things — something they might name as life force, energy, mystery, or even coincidence. He longed to connect with some external force he named as God, but it eluded him. We sat quietly together. After a time I suggested that his very questioning was a sign that God, who seemed so remote, was the One provoking him to seek God. I told him we somehow get the idea that a relationship with God means we have to strain toward something cosmic and other. Not so. God is close at hand, clothed in the events that constitute our personal history. Frequently the Divine is lurking unseen under the cover of things that seem utterly mundane.

"We seek you, O God, because you have already found us," observed Saint Augustine. And where does God find us? God finds us in the ebb and flow of our own lives. I told Davis that God is closer to us than we are to our own selves, and perhaps God was inviting him through his very questioning to look for God not in the elevated language of the liturgy but in the immediacy of his own daily life.

Saint Augustine also asked, "How can you draw close to God if you are far from your own self?" For Augustine, self-awareness and knowledge of God are one unified experience. Thus, when we are out of touch with ourselves, it is very difficult to get in touch with God. And, how do we know ourselves? One way is to pay close attention to what is going on within and around us, as I advised Davis to do. We know ourselves by reading the scripture of our own lives.

Just as the Bible is a collection of stories recounting human encounters with the Divine, our lives too are a series of stories in which the ordinary has the potential to reveal the extraordinary: intimations of the presence of God. What seasons have we passed through? What joys and sorrows have overtaken us? What accomplishments and failures have we experienced? God has been present in all of this, though possibly hidden and unacknowledged.

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Surely, this commandment that I am commanding you today is not too hard for you, nor is it too far away. It is not in heaven, that you should say, "Who will go up to heaven for us, and get it for us so that we may hear it and observe it?" Neither is it beyond the sea, that you should say, "Who will come to the other side of the sea for us, and get it for us so that we may hear it and observe it?" No, the word is very near to you; it is in your mouth and in your heart for you to observe. — Deuteronomy 30:11–14

Hearing the intimate word that is already present within us, waiting to be born into consciousness, involves being intensely present to our own lives, intensely present to the events that are daily making us uniquely who we are. Hearing this intimate word means accepting that the hidden treasure of God's intent can be found in the soil of our own existence, in the field of our own heart. If we are not present to our own lives, then we cannot be present to this word.

Sometimes we cannot hear the word because of our own anxieties, our own self-distancing, our own unwillingness to welcome the word as it is present within us. Yet, if we are faithful, the Spirit turns over the soil more and more deeply, and the word finally can emerge into consciousness and be lived in a whole-hearted way.

The word of God planted in all of us is one of creativity and boundless vitality, and appears throughout scripture and in the life of the early Christian community. As recorded in the Book of Acts, it grew and prevailed, confounding a group of ill-prepared disciples who were trying to catch up with it, presenting them with new situations that required their response. The word constantly pulled them forward, expanding their notions of what it meant to be persons of faith, enlarging their previous notions of God's ways, obliging them to embrace something new.

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In the Abrahamic tradition, speech is a medium of divine self-disclosure. Therefore, the fundamental stance of the person of faith is to listen. In scripture we read: Hear O Israel ... Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening ... Be it unto me according to your word ... Hear what the Spirit is saying to the churches.

The Hebrew word dabar means not only word or speech but also event and circumstance. Divine speech, therefore, is not only spoken: it happens. We experience and live the word, in ways both trivial and remarkable.

And the Word became flesh and lived among us ...

Perhaps the Incarnation — the Word taking flesh in the person of Jesus — is the most dramatic instance of word becoming an historical event. The Divine Word, who spoke creation into being, took flesh in the person of Jesus, and inhabits, as Spirit, the whole of creation, including all of humanity.

A sentence I sometimes say to myself in an effort to remain open and available to God's ever-active word comes from James Finley, who was a disciple of Thomas Merton. "A simple openness to the next human moment brings us into union with God in Christ."

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"Obsculta, o fili ... Listen carefully, my...