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Friends United Meeting |
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May 2000
Is It the Voice of God, or Just Craziness?
By Joe Kelly
How do we know when we are hearing the voice of God? Dare we believe that the God of all creation is actually talking directly to us? Is it divine inspiration, supreme arrogance, or is it mental illness? Quakers in particular have to face the issue since we have made direct inspiration from God a major touchstone of our tradition. As a pastor and therapist, I am in a position to get asked this question approximately every other day.
Some time ago I was in a discussion with a man who had a history of a long and dramatic struggle with schizophrenia and addiction. At one point in the discussion he asked, "How can I believe in God when it was the voice of God that told me to drive off the freeway, through the guardrail and into that building? When it was the voice of God that so clearly told me to do so many of the things that ultimately led me to trouble."
At another time, another therapist referred a young woman to me who was suffering from paranoid delusions. She believed she was in hell. She explained that she had experienced a powerful conversion years earlier when she was in college. Since that time she had consistently experienced a state of what she described as sweet closeness to Christ. Now, the feeling was completely gone. The only reason she could imagine for the feeling being gone was for her to be in hell.
This belief had profound implications for her. It meant that all of the people who were trying to convince her that she was not in hell had to be devils because that would be what devils tried to do. The people who cared about her found themselves totally confused and helpless as she sank deeper and deeper into depression and despair.
Her logic was actually very good. If you believe that the perception of a sweet feeling in your body is evidence of closeness to God and that feeling is gone, it must mean that you are away from God. Where is the only place Christians can go where they are totally away from God? Hell. Who peoples hell? Arguing with this simply helps solidify the perception. The flaw is not in the logic but in the initial conception that the sweet feeling is evidence of God's presence in one's life. Feeling states are entirely ephemeral. They come and go as the winds.
Mental Illness Isolates
Mental illness is a terrifying condition with many negative consequences for those that suffer from it. Some of the most serious consequences are in the ways it isolates individuals from general society. People who suffer from mental illness know that in some profound way they are different. They cannot trust their perceptions to be accurate or consistent with reality.
We live in a world experienced through our senses. We learn to trust our perceptions of the world when to a great degree they agree with the perceptions of others we trust. People who suffer from mental illness live in a world where their senses lie to them on a regular basis and they end up feeling that they can trust nothing. The ultimate result is that the individual often ends up being able to believe in nothing. Or what they end up believing in is a part of the illness and that contributes to their isolation and destruction.
The struggle of the mentally ill, however, only mirrors the struggle of all of us in human society. When is the voice we are hearing the voice of God? When is it only our rampant ego? When is it, in fact, illness?
Many things in any life make it difficult to trust our perceptions, particularly when it comes to perceptions of God. Our own history of sin is probably the main one. We fall short again and again of the divine goal. Our hypersensitivity to our own fallibility has resulted in a worldwide epidemic of low self-esteem. If we ask those who suffer from low self-esteem about their gifts they will get shy and have trouble finding one. When we see ourselves as flawed and inadequate creatures it is hard to imagine that the God of creation would deign to speak to us.
Some years ago a prominent Christian celebrity announced to the world that God had spoken to him and said that if he did not raise some huge amount of money he was to commit suicide. What was this? Early Quakers developed the tradition of eldering after a number of people claimed God's leading for extreme acts like going naked in the market place to prophesy, or reenacting Christ's entry into Jerusalem. They and we tend to be frightened of extremes. Yet, the extremes mirror our own struggles.
From Isolation to Love
When you believe that God is speaking to you in some direct way it is a very good idea to share that perception with other individuals that you trust spiritually. Note that I did not say to share it with others who are predisposed to agree with you. In any spiritual community there are those individuals whom we know to be honest seekers after God. They may not always see things or interpret things the way we do. These are people, however, who have a history of living their faith in their lives. I have found that going to these people and asking them to sit in the quiet together and seek God's guidance around a particular message or subject is a very effective way to weed out the flotsam and jetsam. If God wants me to do something it makes perfect sense to me that God will direct others to that same end.
Our first defense against crawling inexorably over the edge of reality in the area of hearing God speaking to us is in our original concept of God. We are all human. None of us hear anyone totally accurately. We cannot even hope to hear the divine voice totally accurately. So the more we think with an open mind about the attributes of God, the more likely we will be to identify the voice.
I read somewhere that "God is love. They that love know God." It has become the keystone of my faith. When I believe I may be hearing God's voice the first thing I explore is, where is the love? Not, "is the voice loving?" but is the meaning of the voice consistent with "Love is patient, love is kind, and is not jealous, love does not brag and is not arrogant...," etc.
To me everything about God begins and ends here. If what I am hearing is not the essence of love then it is not God. Love for me, love for you, love for all the myriad of others-those that believe and those that do not; those that believe in things that seem foreign to me and those that profess to believe nothing. Is it loving toward republicans, democrats, communists and dictators, old and young, homosexuals and robber barons, those that agree with me and those that don't? If it passes this test then I believe it is the voice of God. If it doesn't, then I suspect that it is my devious and cunning ego expressing itself once more to my, and the world's, detriment.
If the message I am getting seems to be full of love and in the best interests of all involved, if it seems to be consistent with the spirit of scripture, and if I have sought affirmation of the message from others whom I trust spiritually, then I need to explore whether a way opens for me to follow through. God not only will provide the guidance, but will provide the assistance in clearing the obstacles.
In my discussion with the schizophrenic young man I mentioned earlier, I suggested that the last method the God-that-is-love would use to speak to a person whose disease included the hearing of self-destructive voices, would be another voice. As we laughed at the simplicity of that observation I said that if I heard a voice that suggested that I drive through a guardrail and through a building (and I certainly might some day), I would watch carefully for a gate to appear and an open garage door in the building.
I want to suggest at this point that the concept of literally hearing the voice of God may be the major "red flag" in this process we often call discernment. I believe the same thing about visions. It may be tempting to believe that God is speaking to us in a direct way different from those around us, but it is spiritually dangerous. I personally don't believe I have ever literally heard the voice of God. Rather than a voice, what has been very common is that God's message of instruction comes to me so clearly in my mind that it is "as if it were a voice." That phrase is meant to be a statement of the clarity of the message rather than a literal description of the vehicle of the description. What I read in John Woolman, Stephen Grellet and others seems to confirm this perception.
No matter how iron clad our faith, we are responsible for careful and judicious decisions concerning whether the message we seem to be getting is actually the voice of God or some devious trick of the inner self. Sorting out whether the message is from God takes time, thought, and a willingness to be vulnerable, to ourselves, others, and our God. May your future listening be careful and full of wisdom as well as joy.
Joe Kelly was recorded as a minister in Indiana Yearly Meeting in 1987 and has been a pastor in Traverse City, Michigan, area for 15 years. For 18 years, he has specialized as a therapist in issues of family, difficult children and adolescents, and addiction. He says, "God has been speaking to me since I was born but I have only been listening for the past 20 years."
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