Learning to Listen to the Voice of God
My sheep hear my voice.
I know them, and they follow me.
When I was growing up as a young boy in Ireland,
you might remember that I am one of twelve children,
and my four eldest brothers and sisters had already left house,
but on any regular night, there were eight boys for dinner
You mothers think about that!
Eight boys for dinner every night!
My mom had rules to keep order in the house.
There were certain rules that were non negotiable.
One of them was that she would make
one call for dinner and one call only.
Whoever sat around the table got a plate of food,
whoever did not show, did not get food.
That is just what happened.
If there was food left over at the end of the meal,
all the other brothers shared the leftovers.
So there was there was nothing left at the end of any meal,
and whoever was not there,
their food was divided among everyone else.
I learnt this lesson one particular night.
We used to have a lane at the back of our house
and we would play ball in that lane.
My mom would stand at the kitchen door at the back
and shout that dinner was ready.
This particular night I remember I was playing ball,
it starting to get a little dark
and my tummy was being hurt as I was hungry.
So I stopped and went in,
and the kitchen was completely cleared.
My brothers had eaten everything and the table was clean.
I asked my mother, “Is dinner over?”
And she goes, “Yeah. I called you but you did not come.”
I said, “I did not hear the call.”
“Well, that is not my problem.” She quickly added.
I pleaded, “Is there any food?”
She insisted without emotion. “No. You know the rule. I called.
You missed the call. You missed dinner.”
I never missed the call ever again!
Let me tell you, my mom could have whispered,
and I would have heard it in the next town.
You know, hunger has a way of focusing your attention.
Now the irony of it is that, I always heard my mother call for dinner.
She could ask me to go put the trash out
ten times in a row and I would not hear that.
The danger is we hear what we want to hear,
but there are times even when we want to hear it,
we do not hear it because we are distracted even with good things.
Things like playing playing ball in the back is a good thing.
But I missed the voice of my mother calling.
This is a great metaphor for today's feast of the Good Shepherd
and what we hear in today's gospel.
We all just know our mother's voice.
It is not that we are not unfamiliar with it.
It is just that we may not always be
paying attention to our mother's voice
In the same way, we all know God's voice in our own life.
We may just not be paying attention to it.
We may not be hearing what we are called to hear.
And here is the interesting thing,
just like me playing ball in the back lane, which is a good thing,
we can be busy about many good things in this world
and still miss still miss the voice of the Lord,
because we are not attuned to it.
We are busy with lots of good things.
In today's world more than ever before,
we have so many distracting and alluring voices
that can draw us away from the Lord's voice.
A lot of this stuff is good in and of itself.
It is not that most of this stuff is evil,
but when we are taken away from the voice we are called to hear,
then there is a negative consequence for it.
We just do not hear what the Lord is asking of us.
With the cacophony of voices calling out there
trying to get our attention.
Some of them are trying to sell us something.
Some are trying to convince us to
to watch something, to entertain us,
but they are really selling our eyes
and our attention to someone else with advertisements.
There are others who are trying to convince us of their way.
Some of us are trying to convince us to vote for them
in one way or the other.
There are not a lot of voices that sound like the Lord.
Not a lot of voices are saying
“Come and be in my presence.
Come and let me love you where you are.
Come follow me and be with the Lord.”
So you see, just like our mother,
and we celebrate Mother's Day today,
so it is particularly appropriate
as the the first voice we ever heard in our life
was our mother's voice.
It is most likely that it was our mothers
who helped us recognize the Lord's voice,
and introduced us to the Lord.
So we owe a great deal of gratitude and debt
to our mothers for helping us recognize the voice of God.
We should continue to pay attention
to our mothers pointing that way.
But I think our mothers would have us listen to God directly, too.
To come to know the good shepherd's voice in our life.
In a sense, that is the primordial voice
that we that we knew even before we were born.
We will recognize that voice
that leads us back to the Father,
but we have to attune our hearing to it.
We have to desire and want to hear it
because of just so many distractions.
And that in a sense is a development and a skill
because while we have it innately, it is like a muscle.
We need to use it so that we can remain strong,
that we can remain attentive to that voice in our life.
So the question, what does that look like?
We put on many different things in our parish
to help you to become men and women of prayer.
In fact, Pope Leo mentioned in his first address to the cardinals
that it was important for us as priests around the world
to teach people to pray.
It is important for us to have them listen to that good shepherd's voice.
It is often a still, quiet voice that speaks into silence.
And this skill is something that we need to work at.
It does not come without work.
It is like working out with weights.
You have to lift the weights.
You have to do some workout.
When you do that workout, you get stronger,
and then you are able to hear the voice
despite or even in spite of all those other voices out there.
This week, we are coming to the end of a program
that we have been running here all year called
the Spiritual Exercises in Everyday Living (SEEL)
of Saint Ignatius of Loyola.
We have had 44 people each spend an hour of prayer
every day learning how to listen.
And then meeting with a spiritual director
for one hour a week to learn the skill of listening
to the Lord in our life.
As they come to the end of this thirty two week period,
their hearts are full of gratitude
because they have learned how to listen
better and deeper in the core of their being,
and they are more settled, more peaceful.
In some ways, nothing has changed in their life.
In other ways, everything has changed their life
because they have learned the voice of the Good Shepherd.
And hopefully next year when we launch
this program again in August,
we will have another 50 or 60 people
from this parish join us on that journey.
But many of us will not be able to commit
to that huge commitment of an hour a day every day.
Yet we can all find some way to pray,
some way to still our heart and to listen
to that gentle voice of the good shepherd
who calls us back to him to hear
that deep message of God's love for us.
No matter what happens in life,
God's love is always there.
My friends, let us find a way
to commit just a few moments each day
to put away all the cell phones,
the music, the television, even the conversations,
and to pause in silence and listen to that voice of God,
that voice of the Good Shepherd who calls us back to him
and says, “Come, come follow me.”
Today, we listen to that Good Shepherd,
and we say yes to the Lord who promises to love us every day.
My sheep hear my voice.
I know them, and they follow me.