Over the years I’ve often found myself in conversations with people who say, “I don’t hear God, He doesn’t speak to me,” when I’m sharing my own story or someone else’s story about a time God was leading. Whenever I hear it, I consider it my personal invitation to help them recognize how often God is speaking to them without their knowing it. It’s a great feeling seeing them light up when they realize they’ve been hearing God all along, and I’ve never met someone who hasn’t.
One night over dinner a friend told me God never spoke to her, so I asked her when she felt the most love or compassion. She told me that often, for no reason at all, she’ll be walking the aisles of the supermarket and will see someone elderly or in need and just start weeping with love. “I have no idea why!” she said. “It’s so random and embarrassing, but I just want to go over and hug them and tell them they’re loved!”
I could see in her face before she even finished saying the sentence out loud her realisation that it had been God “speaking” to her in some powerful way. “I’ve never had that feeling,” I told her. “I’m not sure that’s a normal reaction to an elderly lady in the fruit section!” God was speaking to her through compassion and probably inviting her to share His love with someone else. But because it didn’t sound like an audible voice, or come distinctly from how she experienced the rest of her life, she assumed it was random.
But God isn’t random; He speaks Eucharistically.
I’ve had similar conversations with countless people who feel they don’t hear God, and it causes real loneliness or a sense of disqualification for them. When someone stands up at church and says, “God told me …,” we imagine that to say something with such certainty means they’ve been let in on the secret of getting God to speak to them in obvious ways. But more often than not, it’s this Eucharistic voice they’re expressing.
God “tells” them through deep senses within, a gentle and persistent “knowing,” or a dream that strikes unusually in their mind until they contemplate it. All of it looks and sounds so ordinary until the moment you say, “Aha! I know now that it was God speaking to me.” Next thing you know, you’re sharing a story, skipping all those details, and simply saying, “God told me …” God speaks through our emotions, intellect, daydreams, imaginations, and unspoken longings because God is Eucharistic. He fills the bread of our everyday inner communications.
Of course, all of that can be confused by what the church fathers called the “three enemies of the soul”: the flesh, the world, and the devil. So it takes Scripture, community, and discernment—things that grow over time in our long journey of faith—to tell the difference. But what’s important is that often the sound of the Spirit arrives to us far more ordinarily than we expect.
So many of us live our lives assuming that God is so different from our experience that if He spoke, or if He were to live in us as He promises, it would somehow feel totally other. We separate the “spiritual” from the mundane and ordinary because we don’t appreciate how imaged after God we already are, and how natural it is for us to experience and know Him.
God speaks through our emotions, intellect, daydreams, imaginations, and unspoken longings because God is Eucharistic. He fills the bread of our everyday inner communications.
This is staggering to me because whilst we often spend so much of our lives seeking the spiritually extraordinary, God came to us embodied in our mundane ordinary and said, “Look! This is what divine life looks like! To live fully alive, in obedience to, and in pleasure with Me is to be more human, not less!” And every time we take Eucharist together, we get an object lesson in this very truth. Because not only is a special and tangible grace poured out over us when we take it together, but we’re also being reminded what a prayerful, God-soaked, and divine life really looks like.
This not only applies to hearing God’s voice, but to our entire lives. So often we’re participating in God’s activities without knowing it. Because as it turns out, just as with Jesus, God’s divine purposes are ordinary too. For thirty quiet years Jesus went about eating, cleaning, building, being a friend, being a son, being a participant in community. He lived this way because these are all good things God has made. And so is every aspect of our lives today.
When Katie and I found out we were having our first boy, we spent whole nights together talking and imagining what he’d be like. We knew he would look something a little like the both of us and so would his personality, but we couldn’t really picture what that meant. How do you create an image of a living person out of nothing in your mind, even with all the things you know about yourselves as parents?
It was both exciting and frustrating for it to be so elusive. Then, when he was born, he was both nothing and everything like what we’d imagined. We knew the stuff that was going to make up his person—his DNA would be ours, his personality would reflect ours in some way, he would have certain colored hair, skin, and size—but even with all that, we still couldn’t predict the wonder of his person. For that, we needed him to be embodied, to be born.
That’s what the Eucharist does for us. It lands our experience of God in our lives. We may know the theory of all the stuff that makes up a spiritual life, an encounter with God, or God’s nature itself. But until we land it in an experience, we have no real map for knowing what it’s supposed to look and feel like. Coming to the Eucharist with the faith that it’s Christ’s body and blood challenges our senses. Then we’re invited to see the rest of our lives in the same Spirit-enlivened way.
This is why the incarnation of Christ—God becoming human—is so magnificent. “No one has ever seen God,” wrote St John. “But the unique One, who is himself God, is near to the Father’s heart. He has revealed God to us.” That “unique One” is Jesus Christ, and it’s because of Him we don’t have to be lost when we think about the metaphysics or mystical reality of experiencing God. If humans experienced Jesus and passed Him off as just an ordinary person, we’re likely to make the same mistake in our own lives.
If it wasn’t for Jesus, we might imagine what God could be like, and we might take the commandments and the Old Testament and have a crack at embodying them our way, but in Jesus Christ we get an exact picture. And goodness what a picture! Because of Jesus we know how the commandment “Love your neighbor as yourself” looks in practice. The Eucharist reminds us that the miracle of ordinary wonder didn’t end with Jesus’ ascension.
Excerpted from Beholding by Strahan Coleman. Copyright 2022 by Strahan Coleman. Published by David C Cook. Used by permission.
