Those Who Hear Voices
In a previous post, I told the story of my mom hearing a voice that told her to marry my dad, a little over 40 years ago. This is not a unique experience to my mom. I’ve been thinking about this lately, and remembering the people I’ve met and the stories I’ve heard recounting “hearing a voice”. Their backgrounds, genders and nationalities vary but they share this distinguishing characteristic.
Working in the medical world I’m fairly acquainted with mental illness. Despite swearing in nursing school that Psych was one area I would not venture, I’ve found myself in the ER for over a decade. And the ER is like a psych unit without adequate resources. Here also, I have encountered many people who hear voices.
A lot of existence seems to be trying to sift out what Reality is. We only have our senses and the personal processing center of our brain with which to make sense of it all. Looking through that limited lens, how can we possibly? Yet we can’t help trying. So I’ve been comparing and contrasting the experiences between the people I’ve known personally and the people I encounter in the ER.
Hearing voices is most common in Schizophrenia. The voices tend to be persistent, creating a background of mental noise. Most often the voices are disturbing and disquieting. They whisper terrible things into the hearer’s mind- insults, accusations and suggestions of violence. The person who hears these voices mostly suffers.
In contrast, there’s the other voice hearers. There are at least 5 people I have known personally who claim this experience, and I’ve read several books where the authors do. These people have no other experience of mental illness. The voice they heard they heard once or twice. It was an interruption of their thoughts and was in the moment understood to be God speaking. What they heard offered reassurance, insight, or changed their trajectory.
My grandfather, as a completely irreligious boy, was walking through stretches of empty field practicing his swear words. He was startled and terrified when he heard a voice beside him say “Don’t take my name in vain“. Prior to becoming a Christian (many years later), hearing people invoke the name of Jesus gave him great discomfort. As an adult he heard the same voice in a room of people say “preach my word.”
A friend’s dad heard this voice tell him he would be a great grandfather. Another friend heard it on the streets as he contemplated the poverty he saw and how to help, hearing “you can’t do this without me“. Another friend of mine was praying in the mountains of Colorado when the voice told her she would find freedom when she gave up trying to have control. A quiet, gentle man from India told me he once heard the voice of God crying over his country. Martin Luther King claimed to hear a voice he identified as Jesus say “I will be with you” when he was wracked with anxiety about his and his family’s safety at an upcoming rally. I could go on.
As often happens when I pursue a train of thought I discover someone else has already chased it. In writing this post I discovered the book “When God Talks Back” by anthropologist TM Lurhmann who researched this phenomenon in the American church. According to her findings about 22% of people who do not have any documented mental health problems claim to have heard a voice in a similar manner as the people I’ve known.
Reality is complicated. Our processing systems are imperfect. Maybe the people hearing voices they identify as God are just experiencing a trick of our purely material world in a gentler way than those who suffer schizophrenia. But even in all my own questions and doubt I just can’t believe that What Is is only what I can pin down with my limited understanding. Without God the world is still beautiful, like a fall tree is beautiful on a foggy day. But the world with God is like that same tree when the sun breaks out behind it – illuminating every color and vein and making it seem alive. One is lovely – the other transcendent. And I can’t help but long for transcendence.
