Hearing God’s voice amid the bustle of Christmas
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The Rt Revd Christopher Herbert, Bishop of St Albans |
Some voices are unforgettable. If I mention the name ‘Edith Piaf’, a whole generation will straightaway recall the haunting, desolate beauty of her voice. In our own time the voices of Bryn Terfel and Katherine Jenkins have similar effects - that spine-tingling “something”, indefinable, never to be forgotten.
Other voices, less famous, remind us of childhood, or adolescence, or times when we were either extremely happy or very sad.
Imagine now the voice of God. In the Bible there are times when the poets compare God’s voice with the sound of an earthquake (the ‘foundations shook’), or the sound of ‘many waters’. The effect is of awesome majesty and power.
At other times, however, the voice of God is described as quiet, intimate and very close.
This Christmas, as indeed every Christmas, God speaks to us through the stories of the birth of the Christ-child. The voice of God is tender, and very, very beautiful, calling to each one of us to enter the truth that the stories reveal.
Let me put it like this. When I hear a voice from my own place of birth - on the Welsh borders, I experience a pang of homesickness; a deep and sudden longing for the place where I was born and the people with whom I grew up. The place has, of course, changed and many of my family are no longer alive - but the sounds of that place, the sounds of those voices, continue to lie deep within my memory, and the yearning, the longing, are stirred. The Germans refer to this longing in their word ‘Heimat’, and the Welsh in their word ‘Hiraeth’. It is a deep and poignant longing for a place and a people.
Such a longing does not always look backwards: think of the voice of your husband or wife or child or a friend. Their voices too are vibrant with the same kind of intense beauty; the same haunting loveliness.
And so it is with God. At Christmas, amongst all the noise and hullabaloo, if we listen deeply to the silence of our innermost souls, we shall be met by God. He calls us to simply be with him as he is with us in Christ Jesus. The voice of God is the voice of one who calls each of us to our eternal home.
He is the source and the destiny of the longing in our souls.
The Rt Revd Christopher Herbert
Bishop of St Albans
