How God Speaks to Us

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In a blog back in 2014, I wrote about Tom Pfeffer, my sister’s brother-in-law. He was an extraordinary priest who was pastor of a mostly Hispanic parish before he died in April of 2004.

In my view, the measure of the man was demonstrated by the incredible outpouring of love and sense of loss at his funeral. Thousands of people attended. Long lines of people waited to touch his casket. Dozens of people accompanied his body to his burial in a rural cemetery, over an hour from the funeral. Singing songs in Spanish, they wouldn’t leave the graveside so the cemetery employees could complete the burial.

A while ago, I found among my family memorabilia a copy of Tom’s notes, originally on 3X5 cards, of a homily he gave in 1990. It was a commentary on the First Book of Kings in the Hebrew Bible in which the prophet Elijah waited for the appearance of the Lord, who was not in the wind or earthquake or fire, but in a “tiny, whispering sound.”

A Trip to Colorado
For Tom, that sound was that of my daughter, Maureen, who was 10 years old when she, her mother, Amparo, and brother, Sean, accompanied him on a trip to Colorado. He was on his way to make his annual spiritual retreat at the Trappist monastery in Snowmass; my family was on its way to visit my sister and her family. I couldn’t make the trip for a reason I don’t recall.

Tom had begun to study Spanish, and because Amparo is a native of Colombia, our family is bilingual. Tom saw that as an opportunity on the 11-hour trip.

“When we were traveling, I asked Maureen … if she had any Spanish comic books she could give me,” he wrote. “I figure comic books are good for learning a language because they’re all conversation or in ordinary speaking language.”

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Maureen replied that she had some she had acquired in Colombia the year before, and “started to dig them out of her carrying bag … and telling me about the stories in them.

“I could see she really loved those books and that it would be difficult for her to let some of them go. She said she liked them all but wanted to pick out the one that was her favorite.” Tom told her any of them would do, but Maureen insisted. Tom asked why.

“Because she enjoyed it the very most and she wanted me to enjoy it the very most, too,” she said.

“In those few minutes, in the bubbly voice of a generous and unselfish 10-year-old girl, God spoke to me as loudly and clearly as he spoke to me during the eight days of my retreat,” he wrote.

His homily ended with him praying that his listeners be open to hear God “as he speaks to us each day in whispers.” And,” he added, “may we learn also to whisper his voice to others by our simple actions and gestures and words, as Maureen whispered to me.”

Most us who are searching for God have asked ourselves questions like, “Where is God?” “Why is he/she silent?” “Why doesn’t he/she intervene in our lives?”

Placing Our Freedom at Risk
Fact is, God speaks to us in subtle, and not so subtle, ways all the time. But it’s never in an imposing, demanding, heavy-handed way – not in fire, wind and earthquakes. That would place our freedom at risk. No, he/she speaks to us in prayer, in reading God’s word in the Bible, in the liturgy (including  homilies), in nature, and, of course, in others. And those others could be those we least expect could be speaking on God’s behalf.

That God speaks through others is a traditional teaching of Judaism and Christianity, a derivative of the teaching that God is present in all of us. It’s evident in the Jewish teaching of Tzelem Elohim - that humans are made in God’s image - and in numerous Christian Bible passages.

One of the most explicit is from the First Letter of John: “No man has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us.”