Small Listening is Big - the paradox of our hearts growing big as we listen to God’s small voice
Owls help me remember to listen still and small.
If I sit very still, no footsteps, no rustling paper, no pen across the page, no warm air blowing from the furnace, not even my breath or tucking hair behind my ear, I can hear a pair of owls hooting in the dawn. It is a moment of awe, joy and resilience. They are calling to one another about nesting, lands, and family.
With our loud, fast world and the clamor of voices speaking over one another to get my attention, I wonder how many mornings have I have missed the owl cries of home and love?
Hearing the owls outside my window has trained my ear to listen for God’s small, still voice, the one of home and love. At first, I had to lean in to hear God’s beautiful voice over the noise of the world - over the shouting, name-calling, power-tripping, deal-making, truth-twisting, image-preening chaos, over my own insecurities and fears. But the longer I practice this delicate listening, the more I understand it is a listening underneath the strife and strike rather than over the top. It is listening low and small and spacious.
This is what poet Annie Lighthart calls the Second Music.
The Second Music by Annie Lighthart
Now I understand that there are two melodies playing,
one below the other, one easier to hear, the other
lower, steady, perhaps more faithful for being less heard
yet always present.
When all other things seem lively and real,
this one fades. Yet the notes of it
touch as gently as fingertips, as the sound
of the names laid over each child at birth.
I want to stay in that music without striving or cover.
If the truth of our lives is what it is playing,
the telling is so soft
that this mortal time, this irrevocable change,
becomes beautiful. I stop and stop again
to hear the second music.
I hear the children in the yard, a train, then birds.
All this is in it and will be gone. I set my ear to it as I would to a heart.
You might call this the music of the spheres, a kind of song reverberating in the cosmos. But who is singing it? I tend to think of the second music as God’s own singing voice. Quakers call it our inner witness. Whatever you call it, it deserves our rapt attention and yet we often only gets hints. And those hints can sound fuzzy.
Writer and poet Maggie Smith describes our challenge this way,
Life’s everyday activities create static - a constant hum of responsibility, news, reminders, encounters - and our work is to dial past that static to hear the quiet voice inside us.
Maggie Smith
The call of God’s still, small voice is a pattern found throughout Scripture. In Psalm 46, God says – Be still and know that I am God. The boy Samuel woke to God’s subtle voice in the night in the sanctuary. (1 Samuel 3) The prophet Elijah heard it when feeling alone in following and acting for God, he went to sleep in a cave. God graciously came to him there,asking, “What are you doing here, Elijah?”.
When Elijah’s answered, “I’ve been working my heart out”, God invited him to stand still in God’s presence as God moved. What happened next seemed to surprise Elijah. First, a violent wind shattered the mountain, but God was not in the destructive wind. Then an earthquake rattled the land, but God was not in the rumbling quake. Next a fire burned the terrain, but God was not in that fiery destruction either. Not until a still, small voice came to Elijah, was it God’s voice. Notice God came near first. And then, God’s whispered for Elijah to come closer. Only then did Elijah come to the mouth of the cave and hear God speak to him. (1 Kings 19)
Like Elijah, we may know how to run and work and expect God to speak in mighty ways. How is our racing around and frenetically working keeping us from hearing God? In what ways are we listening for God to speak only in mighty ways, in or above the roar of power and destruction? How can we let God speak quietly, tenderly, and non-competitively?
We might have grown accustomed to life coming at us loud and fast with big effects. Our culture, rarely if ever, whispers. The 24-hour news cycle doesn’t speak quietly or small. Not politics either. Even our churches rarely quiet down and get small enough to listen deeply. And our minds race with things to do and places to be. In our effort to make a difference, to count for good, we often look for the big ways.
Perhaps God was enlarging Elijah’s capacity to hear God’s quieter ways by introducing his small voice – a paradox worth considering. Small usually refers to quantity, capacity, or power. But it can also mean young, poor, or humble. God’s still, small voice comes from a Hebrew phrase kol demama daka which means the “sound of a slender silence”. It carries with it a fullness of listening, hearing, heeding and responding. Before we think generous listening is without a call to action, God’s still, small voice speaks with an invitation to act.
I read a library book recently that took my breath away. I read it in an afternoon and promptly bought my own copy. Then, I discovered the excellent movie of the same name starring Cillian Murphy. The book is “Small Things Like These” by Claire Keegan. As I read this slender book, I realized my body had had gotten quiet, still, and small. I was hearing those morning owls. I was hearing that second music.
Bill Furlough is an Irish coal man. He is a laborer working from dark to dark to support his family and keep his five girls in the local Catholic school. He owns the fuel business but chooses to do many of the deliveries himself and in doing so, he stands on many doorsteps. He sees his small river town from front and back.
Bill is a looker.
He sees the surfaces of things and below. He sees hidden things, dark things, small things and big things. On his rounds, he cannot help what he sees – a boy drinking milk from the cat’s dish behind the priest’s house, another boy picking up twigs far from town, and young girls working in the convent laundry where clothes are washed and pressed spotless and smooth. Bill comes home every day dirty and exhausted and washes up in a sink just inside his front door. At night, he talks about these small things he sees with his wife. They can’t be helped she says.
All the while, Angelus bells ring clear and bright three times a day calling the town to pause and remember Christ’s incarnation. At the noon bells every day, Bill and his employees pause to share a hot meal.
In the end, Bill pushes aside shame and the status quo and does a kind and local thing, one of the small things that couldn’t be helped. One of the things that will likely cost him something. It was an act of generosity in the face of greed, an act of love among hate and indifference, an act of freedom in the face of imprisonment. This might be a good time to ask, was it small or was it big?
As he walks through town with a barefoot child, Bill asks himself,
Was there any point in being alive without helping one another? Was it possible to carry on along through all the years, the decades, through an entire life, without once being brave enough to go against what was there and yet call yourself a Christian, and face yourself in the mirror?
How light and tall he almost felt walking along with this girl at his side and some fresh, new, un-reconisable joy in his heart. Was it possible that the best bit of him was shining forth, and surfacing?
Some part of him, whatever it could be called – was there any name for it? – was going wild, he knew.
The fact was he knew that he would pay for it but never once in his whole and unremarkable life had he known a happiness akin to this, not even when his infant girls were first placed in his arms and he had heard their healthy, obstinate cries.
Bill Furlough
I notice his deep happiness and where it came from. And Furlough’s questions are still ringing in my heart,
Was there any point in being alive without helping one another? Is it possible to carry on along through all the years, the decades, through an entire life, without once being brave enough to go against what was there and yet call yourself a Christian, and face yourself in the mirror?
If we are willing to still ourselves in God’s generous presence and risk what we hear, then we might become more than veneer Christians. We will be listening not for windstorms, earthquakes or fires. We will be listening to God’s beautiful whisper where small is tender, humble, and spacious, so spacious it becomes big, generous, life-giving. We will be listening for the second music.
Bill continues his reflections,
He thought of Mrs. Wilson, of her daily kindnesses of how she had corrected and encouraged him, of the small things she had said and done and had refused to do and say and what she must have known, the things which, when added up, amounted to a life.
I wonder how we might listen, hear, heed and respond if we made room for God’s whisper in our hearts. I wonder what daily kindnesses we might offer to our neighbors as well as ourselves.
What small thing could we do that might add up to a life?
What good risk might we take on behalf of another?
What daily kindness might we share with our neighbor?
As we listen for God’s presence stirring in our interior landscape, we can come alive and find deep happiness. Only the slender silence of a loving God capable of slipping between bone and marrow, between us and others, can tell us who we truly are and call us from there to act kindly in a mean world.