The voice in your heart

‘The only voice that it is 100% safe to have, in your head, is your own.’ This was columnist Caitlin Moran’s conclusion in a recent piece in the Times Magazine. She was discussing the ‘inner voices’ which shape our view of ourselves, voices implanted by our parents and those we’ve allowed close to us. Where these relationships have been bad, the messages we carry away from them can be negative and destructive. The only voice which bears the truth we need to hear, Moran concludes, is our own.

But this prompts two thoughts. Firstly, our own voice can say more negative things about us than we’ve ever heard from anyone else. And secondly, what about the inner voice Christians claim is the voice of God?

When I was younger, I was mystified that Christian folk seemed moved by their faith, and in worship, and in particular their claim to have a ‘relationship with God.’ From what they said, this ‘relationship’ was more intimate and fulfilling than simply the belief that God created us, and sustains our lives moment by moment. They seemed to speak of hearing God’s voice not simply in receiving words from the Bible as coming from God, but in watching words sown from outside of them taking root in their hearts.

All this was foreign to me, burdened by negative thoughts and fears as I was, God unreachable. ‘Wasn’t that wonderful?’ an aged worshipper said to me after a communion service. ’Oh yes,’ I lied, miserably.

What was the story about Christian experience, I wondered. What should it feel like to be a Christian? I checked out the Religious Experience Research Centre looking for answers, but it explored extraordinary encounters with the Other, not the stuff of everyday Christian living.

I sought ‘the Baptism of the Spirit’ – a way of describing a deeper encounter with God, sure that this must be the answer. ‘Wasn’t that wonderful?’ someone said after we had stood up at the end of a service and been prayed over. ‘Oh yes,’ I lied, miserably.

I sought some dramatic event, a miracle, a healing which would fix me, make me feel as I was so sure I ought to feel.

Yet often, increasingly over the years (except when I’ve been numbed by anxiety and depression) I have been aware of a gentle flowering within me. A thought, an idea, a prompting, a reminder, a solution to a problem drops into my conscious mind, bathed in light, bringing its own energy.

I can imagine Caitlin Moran saying to me ‘Get real! That voice you’re describing is the same as the voice I wrote of – the voice of your deepest self, immersed in the teaching and language of the Bible.’

I acknowledge I may be mistaken in believing the experience I’ve described to be the voice of God, and that at times we need to check what we think we are hearing with wise and discerning friends. But in seeing God as the source of that inner voice, I follow the convictions of the characters in the Bible, and Jesus Christ himself, and Christians over two millennia.

Increasingly, as the tide of anxiety has receded, there has been a sense that God is there, with me and in me. I realise I can say what I never thought I would be able to say – that I have a relationship with God.

I realise it’s an amazing claim for anyone to make. That God, immense beyond our ability to conceive communicates with individuals so gently and appropriately that we understand, and are not simply annihilated by the power of the divine presence.

But I believe God speaks to all of us, regardless of our religious beliefs, calling us to goodness, to grace, humility and service, to an encounter with the divine. When I was young, I heard the voice, and not realising where it came from, mistook it for my own voice.

Which begs a question, of course. If God speaks to all of us, urging us to a better life, does it matter what religious language, which religious system we invoke to express our understanding of the God who speaks?

Christians believe it does matter, because the God who speaks to us gently and powerfully chose to come among us in Jesus Christ. Jesus is God’s message to us written in flesh and blood.  Jesus modelled the life we’re called to live and spoke the words we’re called to hear, and it is to Jesus that the voice in our souls ultimately directs us.

So if we interpret ‘safe’ not as ‘free from challenge, free from hardship, free from mystery’ but as ‘ultimately secure’ then ‘the only voice that it’s 100% safe to have, in your head, is God’s voice.’

(Christian Viewpoint column from the Highland News dated 16th October 2014)