Do you hear God speaking to you?
I am increasingly persuaded that “hearing back” from God in the life of prayer involves an analogous process. It involves a practised prayer life that matures our perceptions to hear him right. For it’s not as though God was ever truly silent. And it’s not that we are at too great a distance from the one in whom we live and move and have our being to hear his voice. On the contrary, as G. K. Chesterton suggests with characteristic paradoxy, it may be that “the laughter of the heavens is too loud for us to hear.”1 If such things are so, then Silence “Be still and know that I am God” (Ps. 46:10) . Being still, or practising silence, is my first suggestion in a course for retraining perceptions. My primary focus isn’t so much on literal silence (though it can’t hurt); it’s on quieting our voices and hearts enough to listen. Those who would truly hear any other, and indeed the ultimate Other, must relinquish control over what’s said. They must render themselves vulnerable to hearing someth...