Judging from our first reading and our Gospel, wind is a central feature of our readings for this Sunday. At the beginning of the first creation story in Genesis chapter one, life begins to emerge after a “mighty wind” sweeps “over the waters.”1 In Saint John’s Gospel, Jesus teaches that, like the wind, the Spirit blows wherever he will.2
In our reading from 1 Kings, how Elijah the prophet came to be on Mount Horeb is because that is where he fled when Jezebel, wife of Ahab, the king of Israel, the Northern Kingdom, sought to kill him. Once there, after finding safety and solitude in a cave, the LORD inquired of his prophet “Why are you here?”3
Elijah, being honest in prayer, tells the LORD that he is there as a result of his obedience. The people of the Northern Kingdom, during this particularly wicked time in their history, Elijah tells God, have forsaken their covenant with God, destroyed God’s altar, and set about killing the prophets. In fact, Elijah is the only one left alive. In short, Elijah says to the LORD “I am here because of you.” He’s not wrong.
How does the LORD respond? By telling Elijah to get out of his cave and onto the mountain where God will pass by, revealing himself. As he emerges, Elijah experiences a violent wind so strong that it breaks rocks, then there is an earthquake, and after the earthquake, a fire. But the prophet did not see or experience God in any of these powerful forces of nature. Nature, after all, is not divine- something many people today, as in Elijah’s day, could well be reminded of.
Finally, Elijah heard “a tiny whispering sound,” or “a light, silent sound,” or, as it is translated in older English versions, “a still, small voice.”4 Through prayer, fasting and faithful prophetic ministry, the prophet was spiritually attuned enough to recognize this “tiny whispering sound” as God passing by. If you follow our passage to the end, Elijah’s response, appropriately enough, was awe.
As for the rest of the story, God did not let Elijah stay on the mountain. Instead, he sent him on a mission with the words “Go back!”5
Like Elijah, to hear God’s voice, to discern God’s call, to live in obedience to the living God requires communication, communion with God. My dear friends, there is no substitute for personal prayer. Unlike the general term “prayer,” “personal” prayer is not an umbrella term for a variety of spiritual practices.
Personal prayer, while it may arise from and/or lead to meditation and contemplation, cannot be confused with those practices, as valuable and even as indispensable as both are. For a Christian, personal prayer is a conversation with God. Conversations consist of an exchange: speaking and listening; asking and answering.
At the end of each of the exercises that together comprise The Spiritual Exercises, Saint Ignatius of Loyola set forth a colloquy. Colloquy is just another word for conversation. For the colloquy found at the end of the first exercise of the first week of the Exercises, Ignatius bids the exercitant to imagine Jesus on the cross and “begin to speak with him, asking how it is that though He is the Creator, he has stooped to become man, and to pass from eternal life to death here in time, that thus he might die for our sins.”6
After providing some questions for the exercitant to ask herself, Ignatius then directs that this conversation “be made by speaking exactly as one friend speaks to another.”7 Rather like Elijah speaks to the LORD in our first reading.
To really listen to the Holy Spirit, you first need to hear the Spirit. Especially in our present cultural moment, the noise can easily drown out the signal. The only way to learn how to hear and then heed the Holy Spirit is through personal prayer, which requires eliminating as much noise as possible. That said, it needs to be noted that listening and speaking to God in prayer, while rooted in fixed times of prayers, cannot be limited to just those times. Our communion with God needs to be constant, not just daily but hourly, at times even minute-by-minute.
Perhaps the biggest take-away from our readings this week is that the Lord is in the storm with you. He is not over and above it or even through it. He is there in it with you and for you! While true, the main lesson is not when you’re sinking Jesus will save you. Hence, the corollary to the big take-away is that you shouldn’t wait until you’re sinking to call on Jesus. This means not deceiving yourself into believing that you can do it without him.
During the Last Supper Discourse in Saint John’s Gospel, Jesus tells his disciples “without me you can do nothing.”8 In our Gospel for today, the Lord admonishes Peter for his lack of faith. Jesus doesn’t rebuke him for not believing in himself enough. Peter is admonished for his lack of faith in God, for not trusting enough in Jesus Christ.
I’ve heard it said and maybe you have too that God doesn’t care what happens to you as much as he cares about how you respond to it. Well, I think that God cares immensely about what happens to you and how you deal with it. God wants you to encounter him, not through life’s storms, but right smack in the middle of them. This where God is really God. Jesus’ moment of exaltation was when he was lifted up on the cross. It is from the cross that the glory of the Lord shines forth.
As the words to a wonderful contemporary worship song goes:
To see you high and lifted up/For some people, sadly, either for a lengthy season or for its duration, life is a storm. For most of us, life can be seen as a series of storms separated by periods of calm. Especially during extended periods of calm, we tend to imagine we have more control than we do. Like Peter, a storm quickly exposes our delusions of control. At those times, it makes all the difference in time and eternity whether you place your trust in Christ or exclusively in yourself.
Shining in the light of your glory/
Pour out your power and love as we sing Holy, Holy, Holy9
Maybe because of the wind and the waves or the dust, it’s easy to miss Jesus in the storm. But there he is, hand outstretched, waiting for us to call to him, to look at him. Why does he wait? This is where we can benefit from a deep insight from Msgr Luigi Giussani:
Jesus Christ did not come into the world as a substitute for human freedom or to eliminate human trial. He came into the world to call man back to the depths of all questions, to his own fundamental structure, to his own real situation. He came to call man back to true religiosity, without which every claim to a solution of the human problems is a lie10Too often we are content with the lie, with the shortcut, the quick fix that will get us out of a fix. Our “real situation” is that we exist for a reason. This reason is stated clearly at the be-ginning of the First Principle and Foundation of The Spiritual Exercises: “Man,” meaning all human beings, “is created to praise, reverence, and serve God our Lord, and by this means to save his soul.”11
As each of you know, everyone experiences life’s storms, usually sooner rather than later. And salvation happens in the midst of the storm. The Christian attitude is captured well by Saint Paul, who knew a thing or two about weathering life’s storms. In his letter to the Church in ancient Philippi, the apostle wrote: “I have the strength for everything through him who empowers me.”12 Experience is the difference between this being a call back to your own fundamental structure, an empty slogan, or merely a pious platitude.
1 Genesis 1:2.↩
2 John 3:8.↩
3 1 Kings 19:9.↩
4 1 Kings 19:12- See King James Version.↩
5 1 Kings 19:15.↩
6 Saint Ignatius of Loyola. The Spiritual Exercises, sec. 53.↩
7 The Spiritual Exercises, sec. 54.↩
8 John 15:5.↩
9 Michael W. Smith. "Open the Eyes of My Heart."↩
10 Luigi Giussani. At the Origin of the Christian Claim, 97.↩
11 The Spiritual Exercises, sec. 23.↩
12 Philippians 4:13.↩
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