Discernment: Recognizing God's Voice

Discernment:  How do we grow into recognizing the voice of God speaking to us? The Gospel for today, John 10: 22-30,  gives us the answer. Jesus says: “My sheep hear my voice; I know them, and they follow me.”  

When we think of parents knowing the voices of their children and vice versa, we know that the ability to discern those voices is built within human nature. It naturally happens beginning in infancy and even before that, namely in one’s mother’s womb.

 I believe that you and I existed in God’s womb from all eternity before we were conceived in the womb of our mothers.  That means, as in the natural order whereby we know the voices of our parents and siblings, so, too, in the spiritual order, we know the voices of God and of spirits, good and evil.  That knowing is built in our spiritual beings.  Humanly speaking, the infant begins in the silence and the darkness of the womb and then, outside the womb. A baby, at first, is all ears for months, listening to voices around him or her. The infant learns the voices of those close to him or her and can discern voices that are caring or non-caring, loving or non-loving, safe or unsafe, nurturing or non-nurturing. Spiritually speaking, from infancy on, we also grow to recognize the voice of God, the Beloved, the unconditional Love of the Holy One.  We can be taught to pay attention to God’s voice speaking within us, around us,  within the darkness, within the silence.  We need to learn to be “all ears,” so to speak, as we were as infants to human voices around us.  Only then is discernment of the will of God for us possible.