The Voice of Many Waters

"The voice of many waters" describes a moment of prayer when the ear of the soul catches the still small voice of the Almighty. The Apocalypse, the unveiling, begins and ends with this prophetic description of God's voice from Ezekiel 43. This is the voice of the Messiah who has conquered sin and death and who is coming to judge on Judgment Day. The Book of Revelation starts and closes with Christ's pronouncement of divine love on broken humanity. The Voice of the Risen Lord is "as many waters" suggesting all at once an ocean's rhythmic chant of waves, the timbrel of rivers clashing against rocky banks, a downpour's deafening torrent, a waterfall's thunderous crash, a surging flood's eerie roar, a silent splash of a dew drop at sunrise.

We experience this Voice in the liturgy of the Church. Just as Christ prayed the psalms all the way to his passion and death, He still gives voice to them through His mystical body in the Liturgy of the Hours. Every psalm is alive with the tidal thunder of His Voice and this sacred strophe after sacred strophe, day and night, year round for the glory of the Father. Indeed, the Voice of many waters in liturgical prayer builds until it crescendos in Eucharistic prayer.

Yet, the voice of many waters is not limited to liturgical prayer - it flows from it and raises up to it in many devotions including the Rosary or even the solitude of mental prayer. More than one soul has asked to hear this sound in the silent solitude of their own room. Discipline and perseverance prepares one to silent worldy cares just enough to hear this voice. With practice and over time, one can even learn how to recollect all of one's conscious powers and surrender them to this Voice even when its reverberations remain deeper in the conscience that consciousness can go.

There is a moment of prayer for which all the Church's liturgy and one's own spiritual discipline prepares but can never produce. This moment comes only in the form of a sheer gift. Here, as a shower in Springtime, the polyphonic currents of this Voice break over heaven's banks and flood the soul in a way that it has never known before. By this longed for but always surprising gift, the Voice of these waters flood even the most arid wasteland of the heart. It is called mystical contemplation. More meaningful and much deeper than any psychological experience in prayer, this symphonic contemplation of the Gospel of Christ is rooted in a whole new outpouring of truth, of life, of love.

The Risen One's canticle of praise pours into lethargy's empty noiselessness and fills it with a silent fullness of meaning. The Voice of the Bridegroom causes this receptive to fill the soul - where the Voice ends and the silence begins, no one can tell. This is a completely different kind of silence than the mere absence of noise or thought. This silence has a specific gravity. It grounds the soul in its deepest center. This silence is alive with receptive readiness and a kind of yearning for the many waters. This living silence baptizes the soul in a new finality. It awakens the soul to the eschatological, that is, to an eternal New Day.

The Word of the Father, though ever ancient, rings with this eternal freshness, This Voice is the first new thing this tired out world has heard since the dawn of creation and it has the power to make new the innermost recesses of one's own being. The Voice sings in eternal canticle and causes all the choirs of heaven to pick up the strand. The enchantment of His canticle quickens hearts with melodies filled with the unfamiliar harmonies of this new life. These melodies unfold in unexpected exotic chords of power preserving from peril when all seems lost. All of this is carried by a gentle but undaunted rhythm of obedient filial love that, beat by beat as steps along a journey toward even greater purpose. Down this solemn path, the Voice raises up in terrible wordless cry reaching such sacred pitch as to be only fully heard in the Silence of God and God hears this cry all the way to the end with a love that is stronger than death.

Yes, God does hear all the humanity in this human cry of His Eternal Son - for in those waters live all the cries of every human heart from the dawn of history to the end of time. In all this groaning is the ever deeper groaning of God Himself, the Living God who weeps over our plight. Yes, no one ever weeps alone. There is always Someone who for love's sake has gone even deeper into the sorrow that afflicts the soul than the soul itself has gone, and grieved with the soul more than the soul can grieve. Great as this sorrow is, it cannot overcome Him and He is not content to allow the evil to go unaddressed. He longs to bear away what grieves this soul. So the Voice of many waters bears away the sins of those who listen for it by faith. Though hidden in weakness and suffering through to every kind of catastrophe, this Voice constantly puts the eternal plan of the Father into motion for the soul that will entrust itself to Him. His saving action comes in the form of a surprise, the happy ending we always wanted but did not know could still be ours, the flooding forth of an unconquered canticle of praise.

This eternal hymn floods the soul with such primordial, salvific and heavenly truth that it bears away sin. Surging, rushing, engulfing, the Voice of this water shakes the indifferent with the most inconvenient miracle and refreshes the discouraged with the most unexpected strength. Drowning out the cacophony of senseless violence that would shatter a heart's only hope, this still small voice resounds: saving, restoring, rebuilding, raising up, providing, protecting, perfecting all manner of new life. Waves of untold courage issue forth, the birth waters of a new day flow. Christian contemplation also rises from this river and in the flow of its currents, heavenly anthems touch its very substance.

The most radical of all forms of contemplation of any religious tradition, prayer that welcomes the this "Voice of many waters" claims the total transformation, not only of created intelligence, but of human nature itself. This is a transformation by glory and for glory into pure and ceaseless praise. Predestined in Christ, filled with every heavenly blessing, in the world but not of it, this is the humble prayer that is unto the praise of God's glory.

The new and saving truth such prayer contemplates renews every aspect of one’s life. It does so without harming our nature in any way but instead restores it to integrity and raises it above itself, in its very weakness and imperfection. It is thus a real transformation in which one's unique individuality is not absorbed by some abstract absolute. Instead of surmounting one's own woundedness by sheer force of will and self-reliant technique, by the grace of this kind of prayer, one finally accepts his imperfections and personal challenges to make of them an offering to God. It is clothed in this very frailty that divine power raises humanity above itself until a soul begins to live the life it was always meant to know. Here, in all of one's own glorious unrepeatability and fragile contingency, one discovers the joy of a divine friendship so meaningful that not even death can seperate what love has joined.

This gift of prayer hears the Voice of many waters in a manner that takes up its whole humanity and sets it on fire. In this mystical contemplation, the loving knowledge of this friendship and its bond of love rise up from places deeper than our natural spiritual powers. Even before we first notice them, secrets of the heart are at work in us, sewn into us by that Voice. Although one's natural capacity for love and knowledge cannot even begin to exhaust the limitlessness of the saving truth revealed by Christ, one's intellect, one's will and one's self-awareness are all raised up into a whole new creation, one in which the whole Trinity is possessed by the soul in an embrace of mutual intimacy and fruitfulness. To say that in this mystical prayer one's whole humanity is on fire means that the Eternal Love that burns in the Heart of God burns also in this embodied soul until he becomes a fiery icon of love in the world.

Within the limits of time and moments subject to duration, this mystical prayer brings to birth eternal thoughts until one’s whole memory burns with hope. To say that this prayer "hears" the "Voice of many waters" to this degree means that the soul is so transformed that it notices and feels the movement of holy desires caused by an Uncreated Love mysteriously at work in the secret depths of its own being. Such desires, such secrets of the heart, are none other than a sharing in the jubilation and sorrow of the Voice of the Lord. Yes, joy and sorrow. Though it is a true jubilation, this gift of prayer is always cruciform: stretching out on the misery and mercy that collide in one's own heart, casting all that is false, rash and callous in the abyss of love’s agony while raising up all that is tender, beautiful and noble in pure divine fire.

This mystical prayer is a burning bush. This kind of contemplation is a baptism in fire. In this prayer, the Voice of the Lord becomes a hidden mountain and secret garden. One's own psychic energy falls silent before this hidden mountain and one must remove the sandals of one's own self-reliance to tread in this secret garden. Put differently, this kind of prayer finds holiest ground of understanding, ground on which one may stand, but only barefoot and empty handed, vulnerable and in solitude.

The "Voice of many waters" received in this contemplation causes the soul to to lift up its own voice in a way it never has before. This is to say, this soul is moved to dare to praise with a fullness of its own being it did not even know it had. For indeed, we are mysteries unto ourselves. The spiritual beauty of the Voice sheds light into these depths, enough to notice "thoughts of the heart" that rise up from depths unaided consciousness cannot know. Indeed, Pascal is right - the heart has its reasons that reason cannot know, and these reasons make our prayer right and just. This is why the Voice evokes and stirs those reasons until we notice them and realize that they cannot be ignored. St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross (Edith Stein) explains:

[Thoughts of the heart] are not outlined, arranged, or comprehensible constructions of the thinking intellect. They must pass through various formulations before they become such constructions. First, they must rise out of the ground of the heart. Then they arrive at the first threshold where they become noticeable. This noticing is far more original manner of being consicous than is perception by the intellect. It too lies before the splitting into faculties and activities. It lacks the clarity of purely sensible perception; on the other hand, it is richer than a bare grasping by the intellect. That which arises is perceived as bearing a stamp of value on the basis of which a decision is made: whether to allow what is rising to come up or not. Science of the Cross, (Washington D.C.: ICS, 2003) 158.

What is this secret place in our souls where the Voice of many waters evokes these movements of heart? St. Teresa Benedicta reminds us that we are using "place" metaphorically, because the soul is spiritual and therefore simple and not divided into parts. The innermost place of the soul has to do with the act of creation that sustains it in existence. The Father wills us into existence in space and time by an act of sheer gratuitous love for no other reason than the very thought of us has delighted Him to do so. This source of our existence can be described as a "place." St. John of the Cross calls this place the "substance" of our soul. He also refers to this as the "deepest center", a depth of being where our freedom and love for God rests.

This kind of description is not unlike the most inner chamber of St. Teresa of Avila's Interior Castle. The mysterious light that fills that chamber yearns to shine through the whole of the crystal castle and then to radiate the whole cosmos. The Light is Christ Himself. This image helped her explain how, the closer we draw to Him, the brighter He shines through us. But we draw close to Him because we are drawn by Him - His beauty fills us with wonder and we ache to possess and be possessed by the One who desires our most intimate companionship. Ever deeper capacities for communion with others are hidden in our hearts and we discover them the more that we love - because love draws us to Him.

In St. Teresa's Interior Castle there is also the innermost chambers, our deepest capacity for love, a capacity so deep that it is hidden from from our own consciousness. Only the Voice of many waters can help us find it. This deepest place is one of mutual co-inherence, mutual possession, mutual recognition - a place where Christ longs to dwell in us as loved and known so that we might dwell in Him. We could say that once the soul "hears" these many waters, a need to respond (that is a desire for communion) wells up from its deepest depths and at the same time, a soul's love has found these depths and yearns for them to be completely possessed by the Lord even as it yearns for eternal possession of the Lord, for in this prayer, His beauty completely captivates the soul. The soul for its part is unaware that it has completely captivated the Beautiful One.

Here, the Voice of many waters occasions a crisis, the terrible realization that before this beauty, nothing can ever be the same again. The beauty of this voice challenges the soul to an excellence beyond itself that it cannot attain on its own but nonetheless is offered it. Not to sanction this inner movement of gratitude and wonder before such beauty is to be diminished. To accept and respond to this Voice is always a humble step towards a more meaningful life, a new kind of agency, a deeper kind of freedom, a fuller personal maturity, a profound encounter with a Someone who is awaiting me with love.

Perhaps a 20th Century Benedictine Nun has described this more powerfully that we have been able to do up to this point. In her work Song that I am: On the Mystery of Music. Sr. Élisabeth-Paule Labat OSB offers a profound reflection on the relationship between music and the soul. Her exploration takes her to sacred music and then to the music that awaits us in the world yet to come. She offers this insight into the apocalyptic mystery we are trying to describe as "voice of many waters" and presents it as the ultimate reality our whole humanity is meant to be swept up in:

Upon the chorus of the redeemed, whose members are beyond counting, it pours out the utter rapture of love that sees the Beloved and is in possession of Him. If we speak of harmonies, it would be of such that bring the praise of the highest angelic hierarchies into accord with the praise of transfigured creation’s lowliest elements. In a concourse of voices at once distinct and wonderfully blended, all these harmonies would echo, and thus make explicit, the great short of trinitarian praise which for fundamental has the Father, for dominant has the Word-Son, and for mediant, the note by which the other two unite and interpenetrate: the Holy Spirit. The Song That I Am: On the Mystery of Music (Monastic Wisdom Series, vol 40, Cistercian Publications, 2014). 119-120.

If, in this passage, Elisabeth Labat brings us into the very heart of the life that awaits us in the world to come, she is also presenting us with a standard, a rallying point for our prayer here below. The "Voice of many waters" is a symphony of love and truth that those who behold the Lord face to face hear with the very substance of their soul. But this eschatological symphony is already drawing life in this world into its finality - an utter rapture of love.