FIVE SIGNS THAT YOU ARE HEARING GODS VOICE (NOT YOUR EGO) IN PRAYER

 

This article is excerpted from Learning to Pray: A Guide for Everyone, now released in paperback.

This is an edited version of the original article in America Magazine.  The complete excerpt is available as a handout at Church.

Words and phrases can sometimes arise in our prayer. Not every word or phrase that pops into your head while you are praying is coming from God, however. To be clear: I’m not talking about hearing words in a physical way but rather intuiting them, having them enter your consciousness. This has happened enough times in my life, that I trust it as authentic.

But it is rarer than experiencing the other fruits of prayer, for example, emotions, insights, memories, desires, physical feelings and images.

It may be rare, but perhaps not surprising. If we are thinking about God’s communicating with us in prayer, why wouldn’t God use words from time to time?

Also, if we open ourselves to words, we can end up talking to ourselves. If we are seeking an answer to a specific question, like “Should I move to a new job?” we might be tempted to manufacture an answer (“Did I hear a yes?”), which would be incorrect to attribute to God. Overall, we are usually not free enough to allow God to speak to us in that way. Our desire for an answer usually gets in the way.

God’s voice, Vinita Hampton Wright once wrote, has the “ring of truth.” It sounds like something God or Jesus would say.   

The next day, on the bus another pilgrim told me that he had “heard” words in his prayer while our group was praying silently in the Garden of Gethsemane. Again, that “hearing” is not audible, but akin to recalling a line from a song or poem; the words just arrive and are felt or intuited.

After we returned to the United States, when asked, my fellow pilgrim wrote me about that experience: 

How can we be sure that these words are coming from God and are not simply something we have manufactured? Well, we can never be 100 percent sure. But in my experience as a spiritual director these words or phrases often share certain characteristics. Think of these more as guidelines than as rules:                                                                                                       

First, they are short. The words are not usually a series of long sentences, but rather are aphoristic: “More than you know.” “What is that to me?” “Your prayers and attention.” My unprovable theory is that, since we are so hardwired to embellish and question, if these experiences were longer than a few words, we’d start to overthink them. Also, our openness to this kind of communication usually lasts only briefly. Once we become conscious of our thinking, our ego usually starts to get in the way.

Second, they are surprising. They nearly always catch us unawares.  These moments surprise not only in timing, but in content.

Perhaps the most noticeable attribute is that these words do not seem to come from us. “There is no way,” people often say, “that I could have come up with something like that.” There is a sense that they come from outside of you; there is an otherness about them.

If the words are authentic, they strike your soul in such a way as to make an indelible impression.

 

Third, they make sense. The words fit your situation, the question that you have been asking God, or your needs at the moment. If someone else had heard the words I heard, “What is that to me?”, they would have said, “Huh?” Granted, sometimes prayer is mysterious, but in the case of “felt” words, they usually make sense. And they are also true. My problems are nothing compared to my vocation. God does love my mother more than she knows. And God does want my friend’s prayer and attention. They are both tailored to the situation and true. In short, they make sense.

Fourth, they get to the point. A few years ago, I was praying with the passage in which Jesus is reading from the Scriptures in the synagogue at Nazareth. In essence, Jesus tells all who are assembled that he is the Messiah. In response, the infuriated townspeople boot him out of the synagogue, drive him to the brow of a nearby hill and try to throw him off.

In my prayer, I was wondering how Jesus could proclaim his words so boldly to all the people in his hometown, when he could probably anticipate that they would find his words offensive. Were it me, I would be worried about what people might think. So how was Jesus able to be so free?  Suddenly, I felt him say, clearly, “Must everyone like you?”

Generally, words that come in prayer go to the heart of the matter. In fact, in their directness, you could say that these words sound like Jesus. Now, the way Jesus “sounds” varies considerably throughout the Gospels. In the Gospels of Mark, Matthew and Luke, Jesus often speaks in punchy sayings or simple parables, while in John’s Gospel he often talks in long-winded, oracular and sometimes repetitive sentences. But often the directness of the words intuited in prayer puts one in mind of Jesus’ short, pithy responses.

Fifth, they leave their mark. If they are authentic, they strike your soul in such a way as to make an indelible impression. I have been thinking about the words “Must everyone like you?” for the last few years. It was probably the same with the disciples around Jesus, who never would have forgotten his words.

When hearing or feeling or intuiting words, these characteristics are helpful ways to discern if they are coming from God, or from you.

James Martin, S.J., is editor at large at America. He is the author, most recently, of Learning to Pray: A Guide for Everyone, now released in paperback, from which this article is excerpted.