However, my musings as of late have steered my thoughts in quite another direction: what a tricky, evil little monster discouragement about one's voice can be. I remember reading (also in high school) an article by Carol Gilligan called "In a Different Voice" that was about how young women's process of moral decision-making tends to be different than men's and tends to be overlooked or dismissed. The use of "voice" in this manner has certainly been abused, trivialized, and made cliched and deathly boring in a multitude of ways . . . and yet "abuse does not negate proper-use". I was forced to begin to rethink my dismissal of this concept (or at least, the phrasing of this concept) some months ago when I began to have a rather peculiar experience in prayer.
A moment of explanation: inner healing has been one of the most important ways Jesus has shown me that he is real and has power over absolutely everything and that he knows me and knows what he is doing with me. He has healed me from stuff that I never expected to be healed from and didn't even think was broken. One of the ways in which He sometimes shows me what He's up to (He doesn't always and that's His prerogative) is by giving me a very particular physical sensation that localizes what is wrong and what he is doing about it. For example, a few years ago I heard a sermon on the parable of the sower and was challenged to discover what things in my life were falling on good soil and what was falling on rocky soil or being choked out by thorns, etc. In the weeks that followed, when I prayed I had the recurring sensation that there were these huge boulders in my soul that Jesus wanted to take out and deal with. That should have been my first clue to go to counseling! But alas, 21 year-olds are often proud and stubborn and naive about their ability to handle everything and I was no different. Jesus certainly dealt with that rocky soil and those "stones" are now gone. But it wasn't pretty because I tried to do too much by myself.
In this case, the sense I had was of vocal constriction. When I prayed sometimes, my vocal cords felt tense and tight and when I was praying about certain things the feeling worsened. And I knew instantly what it meant: I knew that it meant that I was having trouble speaking--that I was compromised in my ability to speak the truth about myself of all things. In short, I knew Jesus was revealing to me that I was having trouble with my voice--and as a singer, that meant something doubly significant to me: it struck home as a metaphor dramatically for me because I have spent years working to make something beautiful come out of my mouth when I open it. The meaning here was inescapably obvious to me: I was having trouble with voice, I was having trouble with myself and that this was a problem Jesus wanted to address.
Address it he did: The first thing Jesus had to tell me was that he actually liked what I will call "the prophetic personality". The truth is, there is no such thing as a prophetic personality and that all Christians are called to embrace the call and sacrifice of a prophetic to one degree or another when we do everything we can to proclaim Christ's good news to the world and are hated and rejected for the sake of His name and His word. (It goes without saying--though I will say it anyway--that when we are hated and rejected because we do hateful things, that certainly has nothing to do with prophetic suffering.) However, it is also true that Jesus makes us all different and He makes some of us much more comfortable with external conflict, external resistance, going against the grain, going against the status quo, resisting the system and ignoring the crowd. There are many different definitions of what it means to be a "contrarian". I am a purist on the subject. Some people think being a contrarian means simply "doing the opposite of what everyone else is doing". I have always thought the true art of contrariety consists in refusing to be moved by the crowd--meaning, if the crowd is right, you engage with it, if it is wrong, you resist it. Contrariety is about being full engaged and being fully alive and not resting on your laurels and waiting for someone else to tell you what to do or how to think. It is about embracing one's responsibility to find the whole truth not just the part of it that we are partial to or comfortable with.
Yet, the contrarian lifestyle has its drawbacks. People really resist being made uncomfortable and they will do everything in their power to create space for themselves to be wooed back into dogmatic slumber. And they will call you names and if you are a Christian they will tell you that you aren't meek enough or humble enough or gentle enough (and if you are a woman) submissive enough . . . just to get you off their back and to get themselves back to their comfty-cozy nap they were taking when they were undisturbed by your rabble-rousing after the truth. What's worse is that they will undoubtedly be at least partially correct--if you are a true contrarian (or any sort of human being at all) you will have your virtues and your vices and your weaknesses and some of them will be that you aren't extraordinarily gifted with meekness and gentleness. Regardless as to whether you are passionately devoted to loving your neighbor, it may not look like the kind of love that someone who is invested in their own comfort wants to receive. We are so picky, after all. Its not good enough that love be love--it has to look the way I want it to for me to acknowledge it or receive it or heavens help us--appreciate it. We are very fragile creatures.
C. S. Lewis once said something about the lot of us not being strong enough for heaven--how the joy in heaven with God is much too powerful for us to bear. That is why we must be changed into God's own image and participate in His own life--so that in Him we do have enough strength to bear all the goodness of God. Without becoming partakers of His divine life, we wouldn't have a chance. Instead of being the bush that burns but is not consumed by the fire (which is the destiny of Israel in the Exodus story and our destiny in Christ), we would be consumed. This is why we are so often threatened by the virtues of those who are different from us. We are not strong enough to bear them yet. Moreover, if someone--like a prophet--has the power and Spirit of Christ in them, they don't just have virtue, they have supernatural virtue, they have "spiritual superpowers". Spiritual superpowers are hard to bear--which is exactly why the people who hated Jesus when they saw him make the lame walk or the blind see or wipe away the tears of the grieving--that's exactly why they hated him as much as they did. Jesus had all the power of God to do good in the world, to do supernatural good--and it was too much for their feeble flesh to bear. They had a choice: they could either let the fire invade and consume all their dross and stubble and be saved only by the power of God working in them or they could resist and close themselves off to it and save their lives only to lose them. We are confronted with these choices nearly every moment of our lives and are oftentimes tragically oblivious to this.
All to say, there is something about trying to be the kind of contrarian that Jesus himself was. Some of us don't have a choice. Some of us are like Paul--we are a fiery, driven, dangerous mess of wrong until Jesus gets a hold of us and turns us in the right direction. Then we are on our way to being a fiery, driven mess of the Holy Spirit dangerous only to the powers and principalities of this world and this age, though that transformation is the work of a lifetime. Jesus takes us each on different journeys to become like Him. Who can say what that will be until you walk down the path after Him? And we ought to stay close behind: there are twists and turns that we cannot possibly anticipate from the beginning.
In the beginning of this post I mentioned that discouragement from one's voice is a "tricky, evil little monster". Until sometime after college, I was a happy little contrarian, oblivious to the world of self-doubt and discouragement until something happened that sent me spiraling downward into Cartesian-grade skepticism about who I was as a person and what I had to offer to the church, to the world, to my friends and family, and to God. Looking back, it is a real shame that I got bamboozled into that kind of radical skepticism about myself. Not only was it a real waste of time, its just a shame to doubt God like that. But the kicker for me is for much of that time I was questioning and doubting some of my best qualities and refusing to engage with them because I was scared it would be fruitless or that I would hurt someone. Some of my friends and family members tried to talk me out of it, but I was committed to my Cartesian methodology.
One of my favorite things that the Lord ever said to me about this that helped shake me out of it was (and this is for the philosophers out there), "You are a figment of my imagination. If I had not loved this idea, I would not have have reified it." (Reify=to make an idea concrete or real.) Granted, God does not love my sin. But he does love and delight in all my feistiness and in every gift that he breathed into existence in me, from the smallest bit to the largest. And He will save and redeem every aspect of my personality that he made and turn it to His use and for the glory of His name. So he will do with all of us. This is also the reason we must seek to love the good in our neighbor without qualification, no matter how tempting it may be to be threatened by it or indifferent to it.
We have to fight for this perspective, I think. A friend of mine has a thing about "magnanimity"--"great-souledness": the call of us all to love and serve our neighbor so they can be the greatest and best creature under God that they can be. I have a thing about absolute freedom: to learn how to so embrace the freedom of Christ that we fear nothing and are set free to be and to do absolutely everything Christ has for us. But this is war, peeps. Spiritual warfare, in fact--of a more intense variety than even The War of Art. The last thing that those spiritual powers that fight against God want is for God's creatures to rise up in the full power of Christ knowing who they are and how they can be Christ for the world with everything they have. So they will take advantage--if that means getting you lost in fear or self-doubt or whatever. It doesn't matter what it is, the enemy takes every advantage.
Now the question is, do I have my voice back? The answer to that: Jesus is working on it. Every once in a while, I feel something in my throat that reminds me of ways I need to learn how to speak again. And I say to myself: "I can't do that, how on earth is Jesus going to do that?" He manages--even through my cowardice and sloth and weakness, he miraculously manages to lead me to a better way of doing things, to being stronger and whole and not so ruled by fear. "For freedom Christ has set us free; stand firm therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery." There are many "yokes of slavery". Galatians 5:1 was talking about the slavery of the law. Fear is another yoke, and so is thinking that change is up to me or that one can set oneself free. We don't fight the spiritual battle with our own power and we don't have to know or understand how God is going to change and heal and save us. We just have to trust that He can because of what He has already done and ask so that we may receive.
