I Am the Lord your God: Hear My Voice
"Rule 4 - Discernment of Spirits” By Mindy Indy
I Am the Lord your God: Hear My Voice
By Marissa Papula
I am the Lord your God: hear my voice.
My depression arrives unbidden (who would ever bid it?). He knocks on my door, disguised as everything I desire. He slips by my defenses, makes himself at home within me. A destructive, unwelcome houseguest, what overwhelms me most is the noise: the din, the static, the ear-ringing drone that drowns out what I know to be good and true and hopeful.
A relative once suggested depression was “the devil” and could be kept at bay with prayer. Perhaps they take comfort in this, though I find their understanding incomplete. Hear me when I say that my depression is not a moral failure. It is a confluence of the physical, the psychological, the spiritual. It is the cocktail of chemicals that courses through my bloodstream, and it is my circumstances, and it is the substance of my soul. It is my teacher, and a lesson I should have never learned. My depression is chronic, and it demands my commitment, and despite my defenses — medication, sometimes; counseling, even when I’m well; movement, stress management; sleep; socializing — it will shape-shift, show up anew, find me vulnerable, and dominate. Its voice is loud. I can’t hear myself, or hear God, over its shrill cries. Sometimes it shrieks about nothing. Most of the time, it plays a soundtrack of my deepest shame on a turntable loop with the volume dial twisting farther and farther right.
Today’s Psalm offers a gentle paean, a mantra steady enough to rise through the cacophony of suffering:
I am the Lord your God: hear my voice.
Let not the din of despair domineer. Let fear not have the final word.
I am the Lord your God: hear my voice.
My labor was induced when I delivered my son. My contractions, therefore, burst in intensity from barely noticeable to the searing, panting, shrieks of pain others have described more eloquently elsewhere. I had established a steady rhythm of breathing and swaying to see my way through, but after having to transition rooms and walk down what felt like an interminable hospital hallway, I lost my pacing, untethered my focus, and was set adrift in a sea of distress. Unmoored, it wasn’t the pain that became unmanageable, but my inner narrative: at the crest of my contractions, when my body twisted itself tightest, my vision would darken, and my ears would ring, and the soundtrack of my shame roared at full blast. Every worst thought I’ve ever had about myself, every heavy regret, every fear about who I am and who I’ll never be hissed into my consciousness. I surfaced from the depths of my labor scared, shaken, and unsteady.
A sharp nurse noticed where I was going when my eyes winced and my breath caught, and when I emerged next from the farthest recesses of the cave of my agony, hers was the first voice I heard: you’re safe, you’re safe, you’re safe. She knew it wasn’t a matter of pain management or breathwork to return me to myself. I needed a reminder — a mantra, washed over me again and again — that I was here and I was held. Her voice brought me back.
I am the Lord your God: hear my voice.
I can still picture her thick-rimmed glasses and hear her whisper in my memory as I recall my bloated frame hunched over a toilet, my hospital gown askew, undignified. Her voice, an anchor in reality. Her voice, a clarifying force in the fog.
I am the Lord your God: hear my voice.
When the din of suffering drowns out the music of truth, of hope, of light, God’s voice remains faithful to the goodness we are promised. Steady, unceasing, may we meet this holy clarity with the resolve to quiet what crowds out God’s voice and listen.
I am the Lord your God: hear my voice.
When mothers wail as their children are ripped from their arms and detained unjustly because of their status, their skin color, their subjection to racist, dehumanizing rule of law:
I am the Lord your God: hear my voice.
When bombs rain from the sky, collapsing buildings, reducing cities to rubble, and the thunder of destruction echoes for miles:
I am the Lord your God: hear my voice.
When ego and power rage from the podium, warping the word of God for selfish agenda, for the privilege of the few over God’s beloved many:
I am the Lord your God: hear my voice.
This Lent, as we again confront our mortality and face our sinfulness, may the practices of prayer, fasting, and almsgiving cut through the overgrowth of our human realities toward clearer paths to God. When the noise of Good Friday overwhelms us, when the rising cries of our world eclipse the song of hope, may the fidelity of Easter joy allow the voice of God to emerge from the chaos, steady, soft, strong, bidden, unbidden. And may we hear it.
Marissa Papula is a writer, spiritual director, and retreat facilitator whose work has appeared in America, The Christian Century, the Jesuit Media Lab, and more.
Melinda Steffen / Mindy Indy lives in Brooklyn and has illustrated the God's Superheroes children's book series for Our Sunday Visitor.