“During morning meditation God spoke to me, I think, by giving me the realization that peace is fully to be found in Him. I discovered this while waiting upon Him in reflection. Previously, I was forced by fatigue to pace the floor, a practice which has helped me of late to overcome weariness. So I experienced that, when God speaks, it is like the voice of no other.”

These words come from an entry in the journal I kept in the fall of 1953. Written so long ago, they open a window enabling me to look into my soul at that early stage of spiritual development. They unveil my personal history as nothing else could, even the photos that come from that era.

This journal passage now speaks to me of a time in my life when I was caught up each day in the search for a deeper knowledge of God. Through my morning and evening meditations and other spiritual exercises, I tried to sustain a dialogue with the source of my being. On this particular day, November 11th, I judged myself to have received personal attention from Him.

However, the words “I think” suggest that I was not entirely sure.  I was clearly hesitant to say that the voice of God and a feeling of inner peace were one and the same. I did not want to say that that I was definitely hearing a divine message. Reading these words now, I am glad to find in my younger self this lack of certitude.

And yet, the last sentence would seem to claim that I had heard the distinctive voice of God, since it is “like no other.” There is no point in trying to resolve this ambiguity now. I feel glad that I was not so sure about having located the divine who, in the great spiritual tradition, is above all human grasp.

My uncertainty may have shown some considerable degree of maturity in me even then. And yet, it was a difficult time in my life, as the reference to fatigue suggests. I was experiencing tension that would eventually lead to a long-lasting crisis. Many a time would I walk the floor during my meditations as I sought to grow toward God.

I also take consolation by seeing that I did not, fifty years ago, think I heard God speaking to me the way another human being would speak.  Even in my youthful fervor I recognized that the divine voice would not arrive in human words but rather in the interior movements of the heart and soul. To have located that speech in the presence of inner peace seems to me altogether appropriate.

Much of what I wrote in the 1950s makes me blush with embarrassment. My journal entries of those days are full of naïve sentiments and bad prose. It is penitential for me to reread them now.

The spiritual content of the passage under discussion here, however, pleases me. It expresses a mentality that I can identify with even now. Were I to enter a similar experience in a current journal, the words might be much the same.

This kind of continuity seems to me valuable. I take satisfaction in finding in the “spiritual me” of fifty years ago much of the same self that I know myself to be now. In a life otherwise marked by much discontinuity, this connectedness of younger and older selves comes as a consolation.

In particular I identify with inner peace being a sign of God’s presence. This peace I regard as one of God’s gifts so that I still give thanks for its presence. A deep assurance of all being well is a precious quality of soul and it does not seem to me exaggerated to call it the voice of God.

I also like the passage’s assumption that, in meditative prayer, we do not do all the talking. Rather, at best such prayer leads to a dialogue between God and ourselves with the initiative in the conversation being taken by God. My words of fifty years ago strongly imply that my prayer then was such a dialogue.

Similarly, the words “while waiting on Him” reinforce the idea that the initiative is God’s. Apparently, I was willing to be patient until He first spoke, as I try to be now.

Richard Griffin