By: The Rev. Jerrod McCormack
A few weeks ago, I got an email from a colleague who I have only met a couple of times. The email said, “Dear Jerrod, I heard about the virtual rosary gathering and I wondered if we could set up a time to talk?” The message felt somewhat innocuous on the surface. However, my anxiety heard it as, “We need to talk.” That dreaded phrase that no one wants to hear and that incites both fear and anxiety about the possible content…. I tried (somewhat unsuccessfully) to manage the anxiety, but we scheduled a time for a phone call. The day came and I rang the individual on the phone not certain of what I was going to hear on the other end of the line, but I was pleasantly surprised by the tenor of our conversation. She had laid out before me her own experiences of the holy and how she had heard God’s voice at work in her own life. It was a deeply spiritual moment.
We never know how or when or through whom God will speak. I have regularly found that it is through individuals that I most rub personalities with that God speaks into my life. Maybe that’s just me.
Earnest Holmes once said, “Life is a mirror and will reflect back to the thinker what he thinks into it.”
If life is a mirror and we see in the world what we see in ourselves, it raises a provocative question about how and where and why we find God in the places we do or in the places we don’t. When we find the prickly edges of ourselves that is when we are most prone to realize why they are prickly and attend to them. In the passage from First Samuel 3, God speaks but Samuel isn’t prepared to hear it. God calls out and Samuel being so limited in his scope of thought can only imagine that it is his master Eli. This passage is a beautiful metaphor for all of those places where God is speaking in our lives, but we haven’t yet tuned in to realize that it is God’s voice. God speaks in our lives through some pretty unsuspected people and situations.
This year has been so very difficult for all of us. We’ve been on lockdown. Businesses have folded, jobs have been lost, people have been sick and died from this virus. Trying is not a good enough word.
I work day to day as a hospital chaplain at the Alberta Children’s Hospital here in Calgary. In my work, we often talk about people experiencing a series of losses as “complex grief.” Anyone who has made it through this year knows well what complex or compound grief is. It is one grief stacked on top of so many others. We have had to adapt to a world where we can’t safely gather with friends, or family, or work family. A world where it seems like each day brings harder news not easier news. But it is important for us to remember that even in the midst of fears and anxieties God is still speaking. I know how hard it is to believe that in the midst of tremendous fear. God is still reaching out God’s arms in love to bring the whole world within Christ’s saving embrace.
I hope that as you look at this passage you will find the truth of God’s love stronger than the fear and anxiety that we might generate. Look into your own hearts and hear the voice of God. You might hear it in the cry of the baby behind you in church or in the neighbour who just can’t seem to mind their own business. If we look and listen for God’s voice God will make God’s self known to us as God has done for four millennia. Anytime God’s people were lost and couldn’t find their way, God called out. May you have eyes to see and ears to hear what the spirit of the living God is speaking to you today.
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