c. 2003 Religion News Service
(Tom Ehrich is a writer and computer consultant, managing large-scale database implementations. An Episcopal priest, he lives in Durham, N.C.)
(UNDATED) After a noisy year in religion, politics and the economy, many might join one reader in asking, “How do I learn to quiet my busy mind so that I can hear God speaking to me?”
Good question. With an election year promising more cacophony, with religious leaders clattering on about sex, with a selective recovery benefiting the wealthy but few others, with jobs quietly slipping offshore, with show trials in Iraq unlikely to end bloodshed there or to deter terrorists anywhere, maybe it is time to “zip it,” as the saying goes, and to hear what God has to say.
Year-end seems a good time for trying. Schools are closed. Many offices are closed. Crowds are diminished at the malls. Homeowners have little grass to mow. Discretionary income has a previous engagement.
We each have different ways to quiet our busy minds. Some read, some sit, some walk, some garden, some paint, some make music, some meditate, and some dive into work.
As one who is energized by activity, not by quiet, I find myself drifting into sloth. I meant to plant forsythia on Sunday, but the Times crossword puzzle beckoned, as did the golf course and a book on sports cars. Several projects being saved for vacation remain undone.
On Monday my homeowner intentions got derailed at breakfast with a visitor from Texas. We got to talking about children. I realized I wanted to spend the day with my 12-year-old son, rather than plant shrubs. Off we went on a cross-country drive.
My idea of quiet time won’t work for everyone. Driving rapidly around tight corners on vacant country roads might not soothe all souls. Neither might chatting with a 12-year-old boy over soggy food at a diner.
The Epiphany story from Matthew suggests two more ways to prepare for hearing God. The first is sleeping. After wise men honored the baby Jesus with their gifts and left for home, Joseph went to sleep, and an angel spoke to him. In that dream, Joseph heard what he might have missed during the noisy day: a warning that Herod was hunting for his son.
We moderns tend to sleep less than we need. We crowd more into our days, but we also miss that dreaming with angels which God’s people have found important.
For Joseph the second way to hear God was to leave Bethlehem and to journey to Egypt. His family’s exile was driven by danger. But as an avenue to God, the point was to leave the familiar and to seek a new place. That is an ancient biblical theme: leaving home in order to find God. Even when Joseph brought his family back to Israel, they settled in an unfamiliar region.
Joseph had Herod on his tail. Most of us don’t face that kind of danger. But there is an evil force that would claim our lives, killing our hopes and integrity, if not our bodies. Much of the noise we hear around us is the clangor stirred by that evil one.
Christian religion has tended to build shelters to keep evil out _ churches with thick walls, interiors promising serenity, narrow-gated communities of the safe and moral, predictable activities grounded in the certainty of code. But our inward-focused ways tend to become precious and to leave us weak.
Jesus lived on the road, always on the move, and he sent his friends to do the same. They would draw closer to God in the course of serving lost humanity and in resisting evil’s domination of human affairs. They would hear God’s voice by listening to the cries of God’s people.
Leaving the familiar is probably a more critical first step than shutting the doors. Not even the sturdiest doors can mask the noise of warfare, greed and self-righteous hatred, for that noise finds echo in our own hearts. But we can dare the unknown, even in exile, in order to hear whatever new word God would say.
Then we can sleep _ not the drugged sleep that hides, but that rest at day’s end in which we hear God’s explanation of what transpired and God’s guidance for what should come next.
DEA END EHRICH
