Discerning the voice of God is about a settling. I remember in my younger years wanting to tell God stuff … which is fine. I remember as well wanting God to tell me the future … which is fine. And in some way hard to describe, in those fleeting and rarer moments of deeper prayer, I find a soul place where I want no-thing from God except His presence. Those moments spread in expansive ways. Richard Rohr, a far more skilled wordsmith than I put it this way.
Mystical moments may be described as a kind of emancipation. If it isn’t an experience of newfound freedom, I don’t think it is an authentic God experience. God is always bigger than you imagined or expected or even hoped for. When you see people going to church and becoming smaller instead of larger, you have every reason to question whether the practices or sermons or sacraments or liturgies are opening them to an authentic God experience.
On a practical level such experiences will feel like a new freedom to love, and you wonder where it comes from. Why do I have this new desire, this new capacity to love new people, to love the old people better, maybe to enter into some kind of new love for the world? I will find that even my thoughts are more immediately loving, patient, and compassionate.
Clearly, you are participating in a Love that’s being given to you. You are not creating this. You are not generating this. It is being generated through you and in you and for you. You are participating in something larger than yourself, and you are just allowing it and trusting it for the pure gift that it is.
Those moments are humbling. Emanuel Swedenborg was clear – humility and narcissism cannot co-exist. And maybe that is part of it – our “ego” even for a moment dies and we are born into something far larger. Thank you God!
