Listening

Listening to near silence, becomes an invitation to hear the voice of God. As I awoke early this morning, in my mother’s house, the world was nearly silent, save a few birds and the rumble of the surf on shore. An occasional dog bark is about all that interjects itself into this symphony of morning silence. Here, in this morning quiet moment, is the capacity to listen to the voice of God, the Creator in the voice of creation.

In the past, I have sometimes mistaken quiet and silence for the absence of God’s voice responding to my needs. I might have reacted as a neglected and angry child at times. This morning, as the birds sing their morning praises and I listen in the quiet, I am overwhelmed with what I hear. Too often, I have hidden myself in the safe cacophony of noise so as not to encounter the gentle and constant voice of the Creator. I have much to listen to, and now must learn a language that I have little capacity for due to my own lack of training my ear to the near silence. There is a symphony in the near silence and I want to learn this music.

God gives each of us an opportunity in our own time, to listen, to hear and to be swallowed up by the soft but tender love found in creation. The voice print of the Creator is majestic in its magnificent whisper and tenderness. It is not in the loudest prophetic screamer but in the giggle of the smallest child. I want today to have the patience to listen in the silence, live in the near silence and bask in the sweetness of the constancy of the Creator. It has been here all along and I ask for the strength to recognize it more deeply every day.

During so much of my life I have been surrounded and overwhelmed by noise. Many of us are surrounded by such overwhelming noise, so many warring voices, so many conflicting signs and loud demands that the voice of the loving Creator can be missed in the mess. I pray that we can each have a moment of breathing, inhaling and exhaling the love of God, who invites and bids, constantly whispering our names on the air and the wind and in the birdsong. God is reaching out in the world, may we in the world listen for the comfort of a quiet Creator who capacity to love and forgive is boundless and offered every day in the midst of all the dissonance that surrounds us.