Inside Voice

“For whatever reason, God never seems to shout when trying to get my attention. God always uses his “inside voice,” as my mother used to call it. Shouting, and calling, and crying out, and throwing people off their horses is great stuff, but that’s not how I hear God. I hear God in a whisper; in a look; in a turn of the head; in a subtle expression on a face.”

—Br. James Koester, SSJE, in “Brother, Give Us a Word,” a daily email sent to friends and followers of the Society of Saint John the Evangelist, a religious order for men in the Episcopal/Anglican Church. www.ssje.org.

The irony here is that as we read this from Br. Koester about God speaking to us in God’s inside voice, I am practicing preaching with all my might with my outside voice. My voice is soft. It is a legacy from my father who was soft spoken. It is a blessing and an impediment. It is a blessing as I talk to people and can more easily relate to them as a gentle listener. But when I stand in the pulpit to preach the word of God or speak out to a group, I have always had difficulty projecting that message even with good amplification. My husband always sits in the back of any congregation or meeting giving me signs that I need to increase my volume. I have spent years working with an amazing speech pathologist, but still have to push my voice. Anyone with a hearing impairment may have special difficulty hearing me.

My present rector has taken me on as a project, helping me learn to increase my volume. He let me read a prayer outside at a burial office as an “audition” to see if I had an outside voice. Yesterday I preached at a church without amplification. I felt as if I were shouting the whole time.

So what is the point of all this in reference to our relationship with God? For me, I am just acutely aware of what an inside voice sounds like and what my outside voice sounds like. My connection to God does indeed come in the form of an inside voice quietly slipping in. I also know we hear these soft messages at moments when we least suspect the voice of God, usually in interruptions of our daily routine.

God also seems to speak most clearly in Advent in an inside voice—while the world is more than ever blasting at us in outside-voice mode.

I am wondering, however, if God also speaks to us with an outside voice, and we just never hear it because we have come to expect only the inside, quiet connection.

Does God’s outside voice also speak at the least expected times by least expected people we don’t usually listen to—or maybe don’t even want to listen to?

For the present, my best experience with God’s outside voice is in my dreams. Eventually my dreams become louder, insistent, and messy if I don’t pay attention to them.

Joanna . joannaseibert.com

Anders: The Tree of Life

“The tree of life, in God’s plan, is more than a figure of speech. It is a description of the physical branching out of families, one way through which God’s Word and his ways may be passed on. In this context, parenthood is both the most natural of callings and the most humbling privilege. It is important to remember how much God cares about physical life. For all my abstract thinking about images and ideas, my greatest task at the moment is to eat and drink properly to become a fit branch for the flowering of a new life. ‘It is not the spiritual which is first but the physical, and then the spiritual,’ Paul reminds us in 1 Corinthians 15:46.”

—Isabel Anders in Awaiting the Child: An Advent Journal (Cowley, 1987, 2005).

Guest Writer: Isabel Anders

As the foreshadowing of Jesus’ conception began with the first woman, and the promise was brought to fruition in Mary, so that tree, built through generations, out of the root of Jesse, is truly a Tree of Life, nurtured in the most human manner. Earthly lives and deaths are its tenuous branches, faithfulness and weakness are woven into its life, and God calls blessed those who choose to “abide” in him in order to bear the necessary fruit.

Human life, it seems, is never irrelevant to God’s plan. Instead, we are in the thick of it. We can enter into this design, this story, by accepting the joys and pains of our humanity and submitting them to the good of the kingdom. We can rejoice that participation in its growth is allowed, and cooperate by choosing those things that build and sustain life for our families, our communities, our world. As Moses urged his people Israel in the crucial early stages of the tree’s growth: “Therefore choose life, that you and your descendants may live” (Deut. 30: 19).

The tree has been a symbol of life from the very beginning. But we cannot forget that in the sweep of the continuing story, life and death converged on a tree—the cross of wood that both took Christ’s earthly life and won our redemption into ongoing life. As the seed for the tree begins as a very small entity, yet carries in it all the potential for the flowering of the whole tree, so Advent carries in it the seed of the whole drama of our salvation. The planting, the watering, the tending can be conscious acts in our lives, as we wait for God to give the increase, to bring about his purposes in the world and in our lives—in this place, in this hour.

—Isabel Anders is the author of Awaiting the Child: An Advent Journal (Cowley, 1987, 2005) as well as Managing Editor for Synthesis Publications. Synthesispub.com

Joanna . joannaseibert.com

Anders: Advent, Awaiting the Child

“Isabel Anders wrote these Advent meditations while waiting for her first baby to be born. I read them in my husband’s hospital room, watching him die. Now another Advent approaches, another time when birth and death draw close together and it is not always possible to tell which is which. As we move into Advent we are called to listen, something we seldom take time to do in this frenetic world of over-activity. But waiting for birth, waiting for death—these are listening times, when the normal distractions of life have lost their power to take us away from God’s call to center in Christ.”

—Madeleine L’Engle in her Introduction to Awaiting the Child by Isabel Anders.

Guest Writer: Isabel Anders

John the Baptist represents the call to radical preparation of one’s whole life for the coming of the kingdom. His is an extreme message, and his own story ends in an early death. Yet while he lived, he praised the Lord with his whole being, his habits, his reputation, his life—for all it was worth. He brought the messages of the Old Testament prophets, especially that of Isaiah, into focus, and validated the hope expressed so long ago. A way, a path to God, would be prepared. A voice cries, “In the wilderness prepare the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a pathway for our God” (Is. 40:3).

The call to repentance must always precede praise. Acknowledging sin clears the way for the truth of God’s deliverance, for the Messiah to come into his own. And praise naturally follows the revelation of truth. John was the last forerunner of the Lord, a close earthly relation of Jesus. As a baby he had leaped in his mother Elizabeth’s womb at the announcement that Christ would be born into the world, a foreshadowing of his prophetic mission to praise and acknowledge Messiah with his whole being.

The connection between repentance and praise that the Baptist exemplifies is a fitting one in Advent, helping us to hold the tension between joy-in-waiting and joy-set-loose. …

In Advent we talk of preparing, of waiting, and therefore it would be almost impossible to avoid mentioning what it is we are waiting for, and why. Yet our emphasis on repentance, intermingled with praise, can sometimes give our songs a minor key. In these days we need to consider our own condition, and dare to think, “What if he had not come?” Our redemption hangs in the balance, and “all lies in a passion of patience” as we wait.

We pray that he will come to our hearts, as he did in the lives of those faithful believers: Mary, John, Anna, Simeon, Elizabeth. Acknowledgment of our own unworthiness, yet acceptance of the gift—two distinct actions—are as inseparable in us as they were in those saints. Our belief, like their hope, is part of the ongoing story of redemption. We are brought into line with the whole event through repentance and praise.

—From Awaiting the Child: An Advent Journal by Isabel Anders (Cowley, 1987, 2005).

Joanna . joannaseibert.com