the sound of the divine

We try to start our church meeting with something beyond just a cursory prayer. In Session meetings, this is a 45 minute time of study/reflection/thoughtfulness. In committee meetings it’s more a simple reflection of some sort. In the Nurture Committee, we try to do something somewhat interactive.

This last week, I followed a reflection from the Daily Feast: Meditations from Feasting on the Word from the Genesis text. The writer (Bert Marshall) points to Adam’s line, “I heard the sound of you in the garden…” (Genesis 3:10a), imagines how God might have sounded, points out that the God of the written word is silent, and wonders how we might hear the sound of God in our world.

I had everyone choose a colored index card and markers and write/draw how God might sound/how they heard God (tangentially tying it in to our trying to listen for God as we look at our education programs, but mostly I just liked the activity, and I had intel that the passage would be used in the service Sunday, so it would connect for those who had ears to hear). Sometimes when I do the reflection at the beginning, I have trouble getting responses, so I figured if they wrote it down first, they’d have something to say. After a few minutes, we went around the table reading what we had written and taping them to a big sheet of drawing paper.

People said a lot of things (and I wish I’d brought the poster home to remind me) from the ocean/waves to laughter to babies to each other to silence. Everyone had something to say, and there were some resonances, but everyone’s answer was a little different. It was good, I think.