December 18 – Icon, Writing tablet: Zechariah’s story

Spiritual practices are something that ebb and flow in our lives. By that I mean that the practice is not the most important thing. Practices are lenses that pull our attention to God, helping us really see, hear and be present. And the Spirit guides us in finding and applying these practices, shifting them from time to time to keep us seeking and searching for more of God — at least this is how I experience them. For some years I was in the habit, at the threshold of a new year, to choose one spiritual practice to double down on. One year as I was casting around, considering this one or that, I “heard” God say: “Be quiet.” And for a while, a long while, all I can say is that I was shushed.

We all know what that’s like. We shush children. My mom would shush us when she was on the phone. My Dad would call for silence in the car on a trip. Sometimes our contributions to a conversation get lost in cross talk, or simply ignored. That’s a kind of shushing. Our words are important to us, but often less important on the whole to the bigger picture. Sometimes they get in the way our listening and even our being heard.

I love words, but that year in almost every possible scenario, God shushed me — out with friends, I’d tried to contribute something to a conversation and it would get cut off, not once but three times. I’d remember, on yeah, “Be Quiet.” And in prayer the same — not ever a feeling that my requests, or my concerns weren’t welcome, but that words weren’t the only conveyance of what I wanted to ‘say’ to God, nor he to me. I was being taught to stir up a different sense, to open a different gateway to my heart.

So, I have some imagination for Zechariah’s predicament following his encounter with the angel who foretold his son’s birth. He wasn’t just shushed, he was muted. (read: Luke 1:5-24) I imagine that his tablet, that was used to write and confirm the name of his son John to the relatives (Luke 1:63), was also used for other musings and messages. Perhaps even to craft the poetic declaration, his song (sometimes referred to as the Benedictus), which is just a hint of what God worked in his heart over the many months he observed silence as a forced spiritual practice.

What’s helping you listen these days?