Learning the Art of Listening by Learning to Listen to Art

On the VOICE of God

“Exposure to the freely given and immeasurable outpouring of divine light relaxes the mind’s self-defeating grip on its own small certainties” Mark McIntosh, Discernment and Truth: The Spirituality and Theology of Knowledge

“He is not unwilling known, but only (if so) unwilling that, knowing him, we should attribute the achievement to ourselves.” Austin Farrer, The Glass of Vision

I was once talking about the voice of God with a podcast host, and he made an observation that didn’t make it onto the recording. After I had shared my story, he said, “You are very hesitant to say, ‘God told me…’ Instead you say things like ‘I felt like God said’, or ‘I had the sense that God was leading me.’”

He is right. I have always been reticent to say in any unqualified way, “God told me X.” Part of this has to do with my temperament. I am by nature a cautious person and speaking on behalf of the Divine makes me, and I think rightly so, a bit nervous. But part of this has to do with my upbringing. I grew up in a charismatic church where people were all too happy to say, “Thus saith the Lord.” They spoke, it seemed to me then, with the authority and cadence of the King James without any trace of blush on their cheeks.

It was the idea of a VOICE that tripped me up. In all likelihood, my mind was too literal (my parents have certainly said this was the case). I thought that VOICE meant voice, meant audible sound. If voice meant voice in this way, and I never heard a voice, then I never heard God. By extension I doubted that others did too.

Beyond that, I do know that I was overly scrupulous, terrified of getting anything wrong, so how might I dare to speak on behalf of God? Which makes my being a priest deeply ironic. As a preacher, I have confidence, whether it’s justified or not, to say “This is what God’s word says.” Speaking for God in this way has always felt different because there was a basis of agreement that the Bible was God’s word. In the context of corporate worship, I am always trusting that the Spirit is at work through the reading and preaching of the word, despite my best or my worst efforts. Even though I am preaching, the Scriptures themselves and the Spirit who not only inspired the Scriptures, but who illuminates them to the people of God, do the heavy lifting together. At least this is what I tell myself. I try to bear my contradictions lightly.

But what I’ve come to realize—it wasn’t just that my understanding of VOICE was too literal. My understanding of listening was too. Before I could have any chance of hearing God, I had to learn how to listen. If voice didn’t mean VOICE, then maybe listening meant something else too. I had to learn how to listen, and in my life, it was learning about and encountering art that taught me how to listen.

The teacher who first exposed me to art and to the art of listening was a grump, a curmudgeon by any standard, and almost impossible to please. He was also available to his students in a way I had yet to experience in school. So while he tore apart our writing with a potent mix of disgust and glee, he always made himself available to read our drafts line by line.

He called it Wendy Works. A week before our papers were due, he would post himself in a booth at the local Wendy’s and then proceed to read our essays line by line. And you had to sit there and watch him do it. As he read, he would sometimes wince at an unsupported claim. Every instance of the passive voice landed like a body blow. He would pour every ounce of his displeasure onto the page with furious swipes from his red pen. But our writing was better for it. We were learning how to take our own thoughts seriously because he took the right expression of our thoughts so seriously. He taught us in word and in deed that the translation of thought to page was a battle. We had to wrestle those thoughts to the page, which was itself an act of listening—listening first to our subject, but also listening to our writing, even in its nascent form, to learn what it might be trying to say.

In addition to teaching American Lit, he also taught a senior level Humanities course. And for me this was a world of wonders. We spent our class time pouring over the great works of Western culture—paintings, sculptures, buildings, symphonies, epics, novels. It was the study of painting in particular that opened my “ears” to listen. The lights would go out, and we would work through a carousel of slides, filled with pictures he had taken himself of the great masterpieces of the world. I especially remember the up close shots of Jan van Eyck’s “Adoration of the Mystic Lamb,” the impeccable, almost imperceptible brush strokes, the sorrow of Eve’s face as she held her pregnant stomach, her gaze directed somewhere else and then, next slide, in the grandeur of the full altar piece, we traced the downward angle of her gaze to behold what she beheld, the mystic lamb at the center of it all, slain from the foundation of the world.

And that was one lesson on one day. Day by day, slide by slide, I was initiated into the world of art and into the art of perception, of paying attention, of learning to see and to hear. This mode of perception, this slow, contemplative world, was what I had not yet learned about hearing the voice of God, that it too was as much an art as a science, and that growing in it required a master teacher too, someone skilled in discernment, someone who had learned to listen and look well, standing next to you, looking and listening along with you, helping you learn what to pay attention to, what to ignore.

When it comes to understanding the voice of the Lord, such instruction, I realize now, was available to me. I could have asked what those who spoke of hearing the voice of the Lord actually meant. I could have asked to be trained in the ways of spiritual listening. There were people who would have been not only been glad to guide me but equipped to do so. What I realize in retrospect, is that when you ask people about what they really mean by the voice of God, then you will quickly come to understand that impression, intuition, and instinct play enormous roles in this kind of listening. But these things—impression, intuition, instinct—were things I first learned by attending to beauty in art. I realize now that for most, the declaration of “Thus saith of the Lord” was not necessarily disingenuous or performative, but a phrase that summarized a dynamic process.

As it happened for me, my humanities teacher initiated me into this kind of listening. By first learning to listen to art, I came to understand three things about the VOICE of God. The VOICE of the Lord is allusive, effusive, and elusive. It is allusive because the voice of creation speaks of the glory of the creator, effusive because it is everywhere all at once all the time, and elusive because it can at times be hard to find and hard to hear. The three characteristics parallel three dimensions of learning to listen to art and to beauty more broadly. In the next few posts, I plan to take up these three characteristics in turn and to tease out what I came to understand about beauty and about the VOICE of the Lord.