”A Small Whispering Voice”
[“And behold, YHWH was passing by. . . .YHWH was not in the wind . . . earthquake . . . fire; and after the fire a small whispering voice. When Elijah heard it, he wrapped his face in his mantle and went out and stood in the entrance of the cave” (I Kings 19:11-13). The power of this text is enhanced by the blogger’s memory of having spent a night in St. Catherine’s Monastery at the foot of Mount Sinai nearly fifty years ago.]
O Lover,
The first reading on the 19th Sunday of ordinary time was the account of You intercepting the prophet Elijah while he was hiding in a cave on Mount Horeb (Sinai) in the aftermath of the confrontation on Mount Carmel. Elijah experiences fear, defeat, despondency, loneliness, and abandonment in the face of Queen Jezebel’s threat to kill him despite Your triumph in the contest with the prophets of Ba’al. He would subsequently appeal to You to take his life (vs 4), but in that effort too he failed. And on two occasions in the account (vss 10 & 14) he self-pityingly trumpets his zealotry for You. Indeed, to be human is to have experienced his cry de profúndo (“out of the depths” [Ps 130:1]).
Elijah is instructed by one of Your messengers to exit the cave, because You will be passing by. What follow are three scenarios, each chaotic, cacophonous, and violent: wind (“rending the mountains and shattering the rocks” [11]), earthquake, and fire. But, counter-intuitively, You are not encountered in any of this supersized fanfare. Then Elijah hears a “small whispering voice” (12). Protectively shielding his face with his mantle, he moves to the door of the cave where he is instructed by You to resume his vocation as prophet.
O Whisperer, this text is for me a rich metaphor with multiple landing sites. First, it is artful reminder that You are Immanuel (“[You] with us”), ubiquitously present without qualification or exception. Neither external calamity (including the possibility of death) nor internal collapse can separate us from Your loving abidingness (Rom 8:35-39). You are as present in Horeb’s remote cave as on Camel’s cultic heights.
Second, You surprisingly, counter-intuitively, shockingly self-disclose in ways outside of how we ordinarily look or listen. Amidst our reconnoitering in the precincts of the magical, paranormal, and/or flamboyant, You oxymoronically ambush us with Your “small whispering voice.” On Sinai Elijah thus became an ambushee, the prey of You with whom less is so often more. It is not surprising that Juan de la Cruz, one of Elijah’s distant mystical progeny, would write that “Silence is [Your] first language.”
And third, for eight centuries the text in point has been viewed as buttressing the case for the strong contemplative impulse among the Carmelites, especially those of the Reform (OCD). Juan, for example, who writes in his Ascent (II,8,4) of Elijah with his mantle “blind[ing] his intellect,” both wed Discalced Carmelites’ contemplative prayer with the apophátic (“beyond intellect” [& other faculties]) and also schooled us to recognize a “small whispering voice” as an audio eíkon of You, actually a self-subverting un-eíkon. Given the severe limitation of our faculties, we are repeatedly blind-sided by You.
O You of the “small whispering voice,” in a manner not totally unlike the central character in Nicholas Evans’s 1995 novel The Horse Whisperer, Your Self-disclosing Presence is characterized by silence, gentleness, patience, and communication beyond the human toolkit. In our planetary corner of Your cosmic garden, a corner so often characterized by clamorous and distracting noise, both at the exterior/cultural and interior/consciousness levels, You are the Human Whisperer.
