Peace Within The Storm

Peace Within The Storm

One of my favorite Biblical passages is 1 Kings 19:11-13. Elijah, after facing down 400 enemies on Mt. Carmel, has fled to Horeb. There God proclaims that He will appear to Elijah. Elijah encounters a windstorm, a firestorm, and an earthquake but, we are told, God was not ‘in’ any of these. And then a gentle whisper comes to Elijah, and in this whisper Elijah finds God.

Religious experience is rarely something overpowering. God is self-emptying, as Jesus Christ is self-emptying, and as such He does not overpower or overwhelm anyone. God always gives us the power to say ‘no’ to Him. This is simply the nature of Suffering, Self-Giving Love. Alfred N Whitehead, the philosopher and mathematician said of religious experience that it is “equally individual and general, equally actual and beyond completed act, equally compelling recognition and permissive of disregard.” And that is the paradox. God’s word comes to us as something of supreme import; it calls us to not only response but action. Yet, it is always permissive of disregard, it always allows us to choose who we want to be.

The problem is that in this world, there are so many other voices, and those voices are not subtle, not quiet, they scream to us all the time, and they are terribly distracting. This is especially true of young people, bombarded as they are by all kinds of media and social influences. And it is not only external voices that are distracting. We are so often pulled in so many directions by our impulses, our instincts, and our desires. It is so often hard to even HEAR God’s voice, and even harder to trust in it the way we know we should. And again, if this is true for all of us, it is especially true for those in the formative stages of their adulthood. So the question arises, how can we learn to listen to and trust the still small voice that IS our very encounter with God?

First and foremost, we have to learn to recognize what God’s voice sounds like. To do that we have to spend time with scripture, we have to learn what other people hear when they hear God’s voice. Without community, tradition, and a study of scripture, we will never be able to recognize God’s call to us when it comes. Second of all, we have to learn to still the other voices, if only for a moment. Prayer and meditation help. So does getting away from all the input. That is what Elijah did: he went away from the crowds to a mountaintop all by himself. Obviously, there is a tension between the need for solitude the need for community, and finding out how to balance is something that takes a lot of time and work.

These are the ways, which I’m sure many of you are familiar with, by which we learn to HEAR God’s voice. But I wonder how much of our trouble is not an inability to hear but an unwillingness to listen. So many of those other voices are that of the stranger, the adversary, the one who wants us to doubt God’s love, God’s goodness, God’s existence even. In those moments when you are pressed upon to walk AWAY from the still small voice, to doubt, it what is so often needed is resolve. You have to reach out to God for strength, and make a decision that right here, right now, you are going to give yourself over to that vague sense that you are called to something better. So, ironically, that freedom that God is giving us BY keeping His voice small and still is also the very key to our success in following Him. The Way is not always smooth and straight, sometimes you have to crawl on your hands and knees and fight for every inch, but in that whisper calling you forward, you can find genuine peace within the storm.