The art of practical spirituality involves keeping one ear inclined to our duties on earth and one ear attuned to the inner voice of wisdom that is trying, sometimes desperately, to get our attention. That inner voice can come to us as a direction from our Higher Self or a signal from our soul. But if we constantly surround ourselves with noise – whether it is music or TV or phone conversations – we may be drowning out the valuable voices of the spirit that tend our soul.
Brother Lawrence, a seventeenth century monk, made the art of listening the centre piece of his spiritual path. He called it the practice of the presence of God. Brother Lawrence said he liked to keep a “simple attentiveness and a loving gaze upon God”, even midst the noise and clatter of the kitchen where he worked. He described this practice as a “habitual, silent and secret conversation of the soul with God”. In other words, God is with us everywhere, not just when we are meditating or walking in nature or attending a weekend retreat. We just have to tune in.
In the third century, the renowned Christian theologian and mystic Origen of Alexandria taught, “Do not think that God speaks to us from outside. For those holy thoughts that arise in our heart, they are the way God speaks to us”. St Mother Theresa of Calcutta talked about hearing a distinct call from God at the start of her mission. It happened while she was in quiet, intimate prayer as she was travelling on a train to Darjeeling. “The message was quite clear: I was to leave the convent and help the poor whilst living among them,” she said. “It was an order.”
The sixteenth-century mystic Teresa of Avila said her life was guided by the directions, revelations and rebukes she received from God. When God wants the soul to know something, she said, he often makes it known “without image or explicit words.” Another mystic, Therese of Lisieux, said the same thing, admitting that although that she never heard Jesus speaking to her, “he is within me at each moment; he is guiding and inspiring me with what I must say and do.” Most often, she said, these moments of illumination came to her not when she was in prayer but “in the midst of my daily occupations.” She too was practising what Brother Lawrence described as the soul’s habitual, silent and secret conversation with God. When we converse, we do not just talk; we also listen. “The art of conversation consists of the exercise of two fine qualities,” Benjamin Disraeli once wrote. “You must possess at the same time the habit of communicating and the habit of listening. The union is rather rare, but irresistible.”
So much of our day is spent in an active mode expending energy to get things done that we do not always take a moment to consciously move into a receptive mode. Sometimes this takes shutting out the noise of the world and moving out of the way of the people, places and circumstances that are not conducive to our ongoing communion with that inner voice. St Mother Teresa of Calcutta believed that it is when we are alone with God in silence that “we accumulate the inward power which we distribute in action.”
