Still, Small Talk with That Still, Small Voice (an excerpt from a longer SHH reflection)

I hang on to the feeling and the blessing too much. When I don’t get the high from a spiritual encounter, I get discouraged. When circumstances are not as abundant or conveniently arranged, my fangs show. Where is my inconsistency coming from?

The still, small voice then asks me, “What are you after? Are you after God’s blessings? Are you obsessed with the emotions, the peace and comfort that are associated with God? Are you after God himself?”

Further, the still, small voice asks, “Are the blessings God himself? Are the emotions, the peace and comfort God himself? How would you recognize that it is God Himself?”

I don’t understand, Still Small Voice. Please explain. (love you.).

And so, Still, Small Voice tells me, “In your relationship with your boyfriend…”

I don’t have a boyfriend, I interrupt Still, Small Voice. But I give in anyway.

“In your relationship with your boyfriend, did you invite him in your life because you were after his money (blessings)? Or are you obsessed only with the feelings you get when you are alone with your boyfriend? Or are you after your boyfriend for who he is, in fortune or failure, and that even when he turns up with bad breath or awful shoes, his presence would be enough for you?”

“Is the money your boyfriend himself? Is the intimacy your boyfriend himself?”

Ah, okay. Long, hard, pregnant, life-changing pause.

Still, Small Voice continues his speech. “Let’s say, you have a long distance relationship with your boyfriend. If he calls you on the phone, how would you recognize that it is him on the other end of the line?”

I know his voice, of course, because we talk every day, and at every opportunity. (I thought you said you don’t have a boyfriend?)

“If you didn’t talk to him often, would you know him deeper, let alone recognize his voice?”

No.

“There you go. Now you know what to do.”

Get a boyfriend?

“No,” says Still, Small Voice, ever patient. “Find out if it’s God or the blessing or the feeling that you’re really after.”

In The Tempest Most Severe

I get a lump in my throat as the First Friday Mass opens with this song.

Heart of Jesus, meek and mild –
Hear oh hear your feeble child
In the tempest most severe
Heart of Jesus hear.

I had not known how to pray or what to feel before a supertyphoon. Admittedly, there had been a squeak of worry in my prayers, and many flashbacks of my Roxas and Tacloban days.

But where I fail to be a Christian of strong faith, God comes to the rescue with this love song. He sends the Holy Spirit for the right words. Gently, the Holy Spirit transforms the worry into surrender. Through a song so often repeated on a First Friday, He shows his face as the God of Eternal newness.

He prods me to call on Jesus whose heart, meek and mild, can never ignore anyone who begs and reaches out to him. By giving up his divinity to become human, Jesus identifies with my being feeble and vulnerable in a constantly shifting and threatened world. Jesus can never ignore or misinterpret or oversimplify any kind of feebleness because no one has ever become as feeble as he was on the Cross.

“In the tempest most severe,” this is where the lump in my throat weakens its hold and bursts, remembering the words of Edgar Allan Poe:

“Beauty of whatever kind, in its supreme development, invariably excites the sensitive soul to tears.”

In this case, the beauty that excites my sensitive, feeble soul is that today, in the threat of “the tempest most severe,” God is not silent.