Today at Mass we hear, “If today you hear his voice, harden not your hearts” (Ps 95:8).
What does the voice of God sound like? How will I know that it is him when I do hear it? Does God even have a voice?
One reason why we want to know that God is speaking to us and to hear his voice comes because we want to know why we or others suffer. We want to know that we are not alone in our pain and that God really does hear us. And in the end, we simply want the pain to go away and that hearing God speak to us in human words will accomplish this goal.
Notice: we want God to speak to us on our terms. We are doing things to try and hear God. We want God to speak to us when we say so. It is our quick fix.
We need to begin by stop trying to fit God into our silver bullet to save the world. We need to recognize God as the author of life, joy, and peace. He is the author of all good things.
This means that every good thing we encounter is the voice of God. The voice is silent, but the very existence of these things working in harmony speaks, if we are really listening.
What can we draw from this? God is in us, and he is speaking to us in our hearts. Cardinal Robert Sarah in The Power of Silence says beautifully:
God has sealed my heart in his heart. God dwells in my heart. From now on, man and God are in league, because they have the same heart and the same eyes: what God sees and hears, the believer can also see and hear.
So when we realize that this is how we are bound to him, through our Baptism, then we can embrace the silence of God as God inviting us to cling to him.
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Photo by Leborski Project