A Joyful Abandon to Love

On Listening to the Inner Voice

Some people are lucky enough to grow up in environments where they are nourished, cherished, and loved. They learn to love and value themselves into adulthood. The rest of us, not so much. Our mental wiring is set to a channel of constant self-sabotaging chatter. In his book of daily meditations, Bread for the Journey, the late Catholic priest Henri Nouwen described his experience this way:

Many voices ask for our attention. There is a voice that says, “Prove that you are a good person.” Another voice says, “You’d better be ashamed of yourself.” There also is a voice that says, “Nobody really cares about you,” and one that says, “Be sure to become successful, popular, and powerful.”

Nouwen was Catholic and gay at a time when those identities provided fertile ground for deep conflicts in his heart and mind. Although he grew up in a comfortable home, he never felt good enough for his father, and he later admitted to an addiction to others’ approval and affection. He suffered a deep depression from December 1987 to June 1988 triggered by the breakup of a close friendship. Looking down a long, loveless, and lonely tunnel of celibacy, he questioned his faith and his life. Nouwen was able to go on retreat to receive therapy, and there he kept a journal that was published four months after his death in 1996. The book, The Inner Voice of Love, is the most direct depiction of his struggle to reconcile his inner turmoil with his faith and regulate his emotions.

Nouwen found divine assistance with faithful attentiveness to the Voice Within. The excerpt above from Bread for the Journey continues:

But underneath all these often very noisy voices is a still, small voice that says, “You are my Beloved, my favor rests on you.” That’s the voice we need most of all to hear. To hear that voice, however, requires special effort; it requires solitude, silence, and a strong determination to listen. That’s what prayer is. It is listening to the voice that calls us “my Beloved.”

To Nouwen, the voice of love (or God for him) was a prayer of the Presence. He was referring to the voice that spoke to Jesus early in his adulthood, as described in Matthew 3:16–17: “After the baptism of Jesus, just as he came up from the water, the skies opened and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove, and alighting on him, and from the heaven there came a voice which said: ‘This is my dearly loved son, in whom I delight.’” There was no such sudden miracle for Nouwen, but in his darkest moments, he clung to the small voice that spoke to him as it had spoken to Jesus. The discipline of listening to love and ignoring the voice of disapproval helped him overcome his feelings of inadequacy, loneliness, and futility. It made him feel loved and lovable.

The story about Jesus in Matthew 3 has two parts: the baptism and the promise of union with divine love. Christianity institutionalized the baptism part, while the first generation of Quakers embraced the spiritual embodiment part. Early Friends believed that divine love and grace flowed into Jesus not through his own merit but simply because he was a beloved child of humanity, and that they could also embody the Divine as an outcome of their convincement.

Later in his ministry, Jesus recalled his spiritual embodiment when authorities asked him what the greatest commandment was, in Matthew 22:34–40:

When the Pharisees heard that Jesus had silenced the Sadducees, they collected together. Then one of them, to test him, asked this question: “Teacher, what is the great commandment in the Law?” His answer was, “‘You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the great first commandment. The second, which is like it, is this: ‘You must love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the Law and the prophets.”

The first commandment is unequivocal, but the second commandment is ambiguous. To many Friends, it means loving our neighbors as much as we love ourselves, and we are pretty good at that. However, there is a reverse meaning that Jesus intended as well: divine will is for us to love ourselves as much as we love our neighbors. That is the discipline of spiritual embodiment.

How do we learn to love ourselves if we did not learn it in childhood? One way is to change our interior script by attending to the Inner Voice of Love. The voice may belong to God, Gaia, Christ, Oneness, the Great Mysterious, or the universal force of love that Martin Luther King Jr. described this way: “Love is the greatest force in the universe. It is the heartbeat of the moral cosmos. He who loves is a participant in the being of God.”

Accessing the Voice Within is not limited to a specific time or location; it can comfort us, console us, re-parent us, and help us regulate our emotions anytime and anywhere. To do so, love must become a new soundtrack playing within, a discipline of unceasing prayer.

My own Inner Voice had acquired no vocabulary of love, so I looked to the writings of early Friends and found they knew about the power of love. In 1663, Isaac Penington wrote about how love can be transformative:

What is love? What shall I say of it, or how shall I in words express its nature? It is the sweetness of life; it is the sweet, tender, melting nature of God, flowing up through his seed of life into the creature, and of all things making the creature most like unto himself, both in nature and operation. It fulfils the law, it fulfils the gospel; it wraps up all in one, and brings forth all in the oneness. It excludes all evil out of the heart, it perfects all good in the heart. A touch of love doth this in measure; perfect love doth this in fullness.

I latched onto the florid style of George Fox, in his Epistle 270, which I personalized and memorized to think and hear in constant communication with Spirit:

The light that shines in my heart gives me knowledge of Divine.
I know the heavenly treasure in my earthly vessel.
The day star arises and the day dawns in my own heart.
I am a temple of Christ.
Christ dwells with me, walks with me, and sups with me.

I also took the liberty of adapting Thomas Kelly to my needs, from a passage in the “Holy Obedience” essay in his A Testament of Devotion:

I offer my whole self in joyful abandon to Love Within.
Turn in humble wonder to the Light, faint though it may be.
Breathe a silent prayer for forgiveness and begin again.Admit no discouragement, but ever return quietly to Love.

Over time, and with discipline, the repetition of words like these reset my mind and heart, and rewired my patterns of thinking. It is still a constant prayer of the Presence that flows into me with love, and it never leaves much room for the nagging voice of self-hate.