Hearing voices

Then the temple police went back to the chief priests and Pharisees, who asked them, ‘Why did you not arrest him (Jesus)?’ The police answered, ‘Never has anyone spoken like this!’ (John 7:45-46)

Hearing voices

Call it a coincidence, but maybe there is no such thing. Maybe people, places events and memories co-incide because the Soul of the Universe is trying to tell you something you need to hear.

For no obvious reason, three voices from long past woke from sleep and spoke within me on successive days. The first is Evie. She phoned Craig, my internship supervisor, one Monday morning and offered to take us to lunch, but first we were instructed to meet her at her favorite nursery.

Under a gray Seattle sky, she led us among tables crammed with plants and flowers spilling over each other, raving about the colors and textures that delighted her senses, hoping we might catch or be caught by the joy that possessed her.

“There’s so much beauty in the world,” she gushed. “You got to stop and see it,” obviously convinced we were spending too much time wallowing in the darkness of our negativity. She was right.

Then, there’s Art who told the same groaner about my Datsun every time I visited him. He either repeatedly forgot he’d already told the joke, or he was so tickled by his cleverness that he had to revisit the painful punch line again.

Finally, there is Albert, dying of cancer, sitting in a worn lawn chair in the yard of his Nebraska home, watching his neighbors harvest the wheat he’d sown the previous fall, combines cutting wide swaths across a field he’d worked most of his life. He had to see it one last time—the beauty of the earth, the graciousness of its bounty and the kindness of his friends gathering it in before he was gathered in.

Disease stripped 50 or 60 pounds from his ample frame before it finally took him. Having lost his padding, he joked that the church should buy cushions for the pews with his memorial money because they were “so damn hard.” Which is exactly what his family did.

Three long ago voices, living deep within, speaking their truth, each moved tears of loving recognition and gratitude for having known them. And what do they say? At least this:

Seek beauty; it is the light of God. It will save you from your darkness.

Laugh at bad jokes told by those who want nothing more than for you to laugh with them. They are God’s angels telling you to lighten up.

Love the earth with its rhythms of winter and spring, seedtime and harvest—and love those who love it to the very end of their days. Gratitude will ignite freedom and joy within you, and you will become a flame of the Love who is stronger than every death you will ever die.

When the powers of the day sent the police to arrest Jesus his words arrested them. They couldn’t fulfill their assignment. “No one has ever spoken like this,” they were reported to have said. What they heard in him was the Love, the Presence who filled his being, not to mention the being of old voices who speak at unpredictable moments of Love’s living nearness.

David L. Miller