I DON'T DO VOICES

The other night, I awoke around 3 a.m. as one tends to do at my age, for a natural function, and couldn’t get to sleep again. I was turning over in my mind a situation that was deeply bothering and full of complications, and that the hour of night was (as so often happens) making worse. I tried every meditative technique I know to chase it and go back to sleep, but with no success. Then, after about an hour of this, I turned to God and said, “Lord, help me to stop thinking about this”; and on the instant I heard a smiling voice – really: it was a soundless voice, but a voice – in my head that said “What took you so long?” Five minutes later I was asleep, and awoke refreshed at 7:15.

OK, I said to myself, being a fidgety intellectual: what does this mean? Autosuggestion? I know several people who from time to time hear voices, but I never had, and I figure I just don’t do voices. But if it was autosuggestion, why didn’t all the other techniques work that I’d tried? Yoga, breathing, even some Biblical meditations taken from St Francis de Sales -- so it wasn’t a turning to religion that changed things. If one is prepared to accept the existence and the possible presence of the Deity, then the key in this case was perhaps the simplicity.

I think that sometimes we over-complicate the deeps of our life. We twist and turn, mentally; we confuse conscience and consciousness (very easy in French, as they are the same word); we worry about theology, and morality, and the resistible rise of R*ch*rd D*wk*ns; we stress out about never being quite good enough, not being able to explain the ills we see in the world around us, not spending enough time and/or money on the less fortunate, not going to church, so forth. What we forget is the five-year-old who, crossing the road beside her mother, automatically and without looking sticks her hand up, knowing it will be grasped by a large parental one.

This, I think, is what is meant when we are told to be like children. And when, on occasion, we do react with that simplicity in dependence, when we stick our hand up or say “Lord, help me do this, or not do that”, it sometimes happens that we hear a voice saying “What took you so long?”