The Voice Within

Moses was shepherding his father-in-law’s sheep in the land of the Midianites when he heard a Voice through a burning bush.  Jeremiah was a teenager when he heard the Voice.  Amos heard the Voice while trimming his sycamore trees.  Elisha heard a Voice, not reading or praying, but while ploughing the field.  Isaiah heard the Voice speaking to him in the temple.  John the Baptist heard the Voice in the desert wilderness.  St. Augustine heard a childlike Voice speak to him in a garden in Milan, saying, “take up and read” [the scripture].  He later wrote, “Thou didst call…and burst my deafness…and dispelled my blindness.”  St. Francis of Assisi heard the Voice speak through the crucifix in the chapel of San Damiano, “Francis, rebuild my church.”  Mother Theresa of Calcutta  heard the Voice (what she called “the call within the call”) on her annual retreat in Darjeeling, instructing her “to leave the convent and help the poor while living among them.”  N. Gordon Cosby heard the Voice while conducting the funeral of his friend on the beaches of Normandy. 

This Voice is not restricted by any one book, or any one place, or any one historical period, or any  one religion, or any one nation, or any one race, or any one person.  Nor is this Voice audible in the sense that it comes through the organs of hearing.  It is heard from within— a “still, small voice” that calls us “to the tasks which He has to fulfill for our time.”  Thomas Kelly expressed it this way:  “Deep within us all there is an amazing inner sanctuary of the soul, a holy place, a Divine Center, a speaking Voice….”

Some will say that this inner Voice is a figment of the imagination or perhaps simply auto-suggestion.  It could be, I suppose, and, indeed, it may be, for all I know.  But what I do know at this moment and what I feel this morning, is that when on rare occasions I have heard this Voice, and in my feebleness responded to it, I’ve had a feeling of intimacy with the “Love at the heart of all things.”  

“Amidst the manifold and confusing voices heard in the world” and within us, there is one Voice, a “still small voice,” that seeks our attention.