How are you conversing with God?

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This past Sunday my sermon centered on how the word “Logos” is translated in the opening of John’s gospel.  We have heard it as “Word” but some scholars suggest “Conversation” would be more accurate.  To be fair, it is daunting to capture God’s incarnation into human form with a single word. Still, I am drawn to the idea that God is in conversation with all of life. After all we are interconnected and interdependent.

Which raises the questions: 

  • How do you converse with the Holy?

  • If God speaks through all creation, what are you hearing?

When I was younger, I wished that God would talk to me as God does people in the Bible, speaking directly to Abraham and to Moses, sending angels to Mary and those shepherds in the field.  As I got older, I began to understand that God was speaking to me through other people, and through my experiences.  I began to pay attention to synchronistic events—what some might call coincidences.  So, on Tuesday this week I was in a group where we were looking at a poem that opens with these lines:

He said
our music
looks for us.
That which
is our essential
gift, our work,
hungers for us
as much as we for it.

 As I listened to the poem, I was struck by the line that our essential gift hungers for us as much as we hunger for it.  I thought, this is an invitation into conversation. Conversing between the voices “out there” and internally in me.  And I remembered that when I went to seminary, they highlighted a quote from Frederick Buechner: “The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.”  It is easy to think of this as receiving a revelation about what you want your life’s work to be, but I think it is also an ongoing, maybe even daily conversation, what is calling to me and how is my heart responding?   

I would love to hear from you about your conversations with the Holy and the things that make your heart sing.  (By the way, if you want to hear the whole poem come to the Tuesday Renewal Group where we will be exploring it.)