Memorial of Sts. Basil the Great and Gregory Nazianzen
We hunger for God, we desire to belong to God, we long for light and life, to see the face of God…at the very root of our human nature there is a longing that only God can satisfy, as though every part of our body finds fulfillment solely in Him. The appetite is not sated except by God, the heart, the eye; so too the ear.
Priests and Levites came from Jerusalem to see John, for they had heard about him and wanted to know who exactly he was. Perhaps the things they were hearing kindled hope in their hearts that the Messiah had at last come? For ages the people of God had heard only echoes of His voice, heard the divine accent on the tongues of prophets and other messengers of God. Imagine their disappointment when John denies being the Christ or even a prophet, rather claiming to be exactly what they were tired of: an echo, a voice…crying out in the desert.
Often we have the same desire and meet with the same disappointment: we yearn to hear God’s voice, to have that assurance and clear direction. At various points in our life we ask God in prayer, “What do you want?” Rarely do we get what we feel is a “straight answer”; rather we receive God’s reply through other means, hearing the “echo” of His voice bouncing off other tongues and events. We yearn to hear the voice of our Father as it is, yet too often we are met with silence.
We must bear in mind that God loves us and that everything He does is for our benefit, even if we cannot understand it at first. If He chooses to be silent, it is not that He has abandoned us but rather knows that His silence is how we will best hear Him. Is not the silent Word of God, hanging upon the Cross, the most beautiful syllable ever spoken? Think also of those silent years of Christ’s infancy, when the first sounds uttered by Him were not words at all but rather the cries of a hungry infant! Imagine the joy of the Holy Family when the Christ Child spoke His first word, a Word with such potential as to create whole realities, yet there in the beautiful normalcy of human life it simply brought joy to Joseph and Mary.
There is a tendency to attune the ear of our hearts only to the words we desire to hear from God, becoming deaf to the words He wishes to speak to us. Would not even the simplest word from God be a consolation and a grace? Let us be attentive to “every word that proceeds from the mouth of God” (Dt. 8:3), that we may come to recognize the sound of His voice regardless of the noise of the world around us, following every echo back to the Source.