In her book Listening For God: A Minister’s Journey Through Silence And Doubt, Renita Weems writes bravely about the struggle of living a spiritual life in the long stretch “between epiphanies.” The book challenges the idea that the spiritual life is a series of ecstatic experiences with the divine. More likely, the spiritual life is learning to recognize the profound reality found in our everyday lives.
One of the questions I have gotten a lot recently circles this idea. People have asked me a lot about prayer, specifically, what is prayer? There are plenty of good definitions of prayer, and some not so good. The answer I come back to repeatedly comes from my Episcopal/Anglican tradition of Western Christianity. “Prayer is responding to God.” The assumption here is that God is always trying to reach us. It is we, not God, who have a hard time listening. Prayer is recognizing the various ways God attempts to reach us and responding accordingly. There’s a famous story in the Bible about the prophet Elijah. After fleeing for his life from the tyrannical rulers of Israel, King Ahab and Queen Jezebel, he finds himself in a cave. While in the cave, he experiences a dramatic storm and violent earthquake, but only hears the voice of God “in a still, small voice.” We think God only speaks to us in over-the-top, sky-splitting divine pronouncements. What changes if we recognize that God is always whispering to us?
Imagine if our ordinary days were shot through with messages from God. What if we saw the sprouting bulbs, melting snow, and auburn sunrises as God’s attempt to get our attention, to get us to pause our never-ending hurriedness? Imagine if every kind word we received was spoken by God through others (and each time we speak a kind word, we allow God to speak through us). Imagine if every breeze upon our cheek was God’s loving touch. Imagine if we recognized the moments more throughout our day. Over time, it may be that we experience less despair, doubt, and anxiety because we are regularly reminded that we are quite literally surrounded on all sides of love.
Robert Farrar Capon says, “Life’s grand ordinariness must never go unsavored.” We will have many grand moments in our lives: births and deaths, orientations and graduations, marriages and divorces, new jobs and retirement parties. Still, the vast majority of our lives will be lived in between those moments: waking up, meeting friends for coffee, taking a walk outside, reading, trying to figure out what to watch on Netflix. God speaks to us in all times and places. It is up to us to stop long enough to listen, lest we miss God’s quotidian voice.
