I recall two childhood memories when I first heard God’s voice in my life. First, when my heart was burst open in joy and then in pain. The joyful memory was as a little girl of about five- or six-years old living in rural North Carolina, one evening driving with my mother at sunset. The sky swirled stunningly orange, yellow, pink, and lavender. With heart and eyes thrust upward I asked aloud, “Where is God?” I don’t remember what my mother said, and I realized years later that it didn’t really matter her response. The fact is, I already knew that God was in the sunset which is what inspired me to ask the question. I suppose as a little girl, I vocalized the question in the hope that my mother could affirm what I already felt in my heart. This sunset encounter with God is probably my first conscious experience of prayer that felt like spontaneous hearts in dialogue. It was an encounter of wonder and awe that at some deep level implanted in me my life’s vocation of discovering Love in all things.
The painful memory was a photo journal of missionaries in India. The book revealed dark and gruesome pictures of grown men reduced to skeletons, missing limbs and plagued with open sores, too weak to lift their heads from cots on the floor. Through the cracks of their broken bodies, I could see their light pouring out. The eyes of my heart had been opened (Ephesians 1:18) which stirred in me a deep longing to go out in love in the world and feel the warmth of the light that shines through the darkness.
I draw on these memories because they help me feel a closeness to Jesus as I wonder how he discovered and discerned his vocation. I’d like to imagine, and scripture would suggest it is the case, that Jesus cultivated a spirituality of listening to Abba, the people and the land as integral to discovering and incarnating His vocation. Through cycles and circles of prayer, dialogue, encounter, and surrender, Jesus gives testimony to the spirituality of listening, especially to voices that are obscured and marginalized. In particular, Jesus’ practice of prayer, dialogue, and encounter with nature illuminates for us, in the context of the current global ecological woundedness, just how integral the voice of all living things, especially other-than-human voices, is in revealing God’s mission for all of creation.
|
|
