I’m hearing voices!

I’m hearing voices!

“Abraham, Abraham,” calls God’s angel, and then again, “Abraham, Abraham!”

Then in our Gospel, Peter, James, and John think they see God when they actually see Elijah and Moses. But really they are only in God’s presence when they hear God’s voice.

These passages made me think about voices. You know that feeling when you learn a new word or idea, and then you start hearing it everywhere? I’m having that sense since I started to be aware of the #MeToo movement. It has to do with voices.

One of the early comments about #MeToo was, “If this abusive behavior happened so long ago, why didn’t she speak up?” It is because something happened to take away the survivor’s voice – some anger or power or violence that scared her into silence.

Then I thought about kids. We can probably think of situations where we have shouted at or reproached a child right into silence. But it does not even need to be that scary. I was ushering at my church not long ago. A ten-year old I know stopped me, asking if I had seen her grandmother. I told her I had not and then went on with my chore instead of finding her grandmother as I should have. I have since tracked down this little one and apologized, but what I did took her voice away!

A long time ago, one of the first people I met when I joined the parish was Margo Butler, a founder of Evanston Area Black Catholics. She for sure left her imprint on the parish. When we first met, she would send me on errands, usually to the pastor asking him to do something she wanted done. It was a while before I figured out that she was using me because as a white woman with a theology degree, I had a voice to the ears of the pastors that she did not.

Then I thought about another couple of hundred parishioners worship here every week, the half of our parish whose primary language is Spanish. Every one of them has a loved one in danger of deportation or has children who are Dreamers. Every one of these families has, in some way, already lost their voice. And those of us who do not raise our voices to support them bear some responsibility.

You can tell by how many announcements you hear about them that we are working hard to engage youth and young adults in parish life. One of the leaders is a smart, engaging, funny young woman you would want to encourage towards college and a great career, but she is a DACA kid. She lives with that reality of deportation every waking hour. Talk about something that will take your voice away!

This week, I thought a lot about prisoners. Illinois must hold the record for wrongful convictions, mostly involving men of color. This past week, a man was released who had spent 23 years in prison for something he did not commit. We took his voice from him for 23 years, and I bear some responsibility for not lifting up my voice in more effective ways against this injustice.

In Florida this week, we saw a big group of children trying to exercise their voices toward a ban on assault weapons. We are beginning to see the gun lobby cannot silence these young voices.

Closer to home, we take away the voices of children and spouses through anger, fear, belittling, or scary silence. And there’s a new term called a “microaggression.” It describes the way a dominant culture takes control of interactions, and deprives others of their voices. There is nothing “micro” about it.

And of course, close to my heart, I think about women in the church. I think especially of those women, like me, who are called to the priesthood. We struggle with how we find and use our voices, too.

So this week of Lent, let us be conscious of our voices.

Let us think about the ways we have used our power to silence the voices of our kids, of our spouses, of our employees. Let us make amends where we can.

And let us think about how we use our own voices to empower those whose voices we should be hearing. Let us use our wealth, our race, our intellectual and physical abilities, our gender, our legal status to give voice to those without these privileges.

Let us use our voices to raise up the voices of others, so that when we, like Abraham, are in the desert longing for God, we can finally hear God’s voice. We can honestly say, “Here I am. Here I am.”