Two things have I heard (essay)

Photo by Cody Ryan My toes, legs, and knees were shaking. Although I was standing on warm stone, I felt the wind could have lifted my feet and poured me over the edge. In the distance, red tables and towers of stone stood crooked over the Arizonan desert. Twenty feet below, the bright river was foaming and hungry. “Do we go head first?” I said. “No, you’ll want to pencil it.” Dustin held out two fingers pushed together pointing down. We counted from three and jumped.  Like a pencil, I thought.  My feet smacked blue and I slipped into the shadows of the Colorado River, the waters surging around me, first cold and then warm. I felt like Jonah must have felt just before being hurled out of the great fish. I pushed my arms down and surfaced, we made some kind of sound like laughter, and the wind was strong against our faces.  * Four years ago, I began attending a Quaker seminary. Quakers believe the light of God shines in all people, and if we listen, we can hear when Christ speaks to us. Quakers listen together through a form of worship called “open” or “waiting worship,” in which a gathering of people sits in silence waiting for the Spirit. When someone believes God is giving them a message for the group, that person is encouraged to stand and speak.  During my first semester, when I began sitting in waiting worship, memories of jumping into the Colorado River would come to me. Now, though, the river I was looking into was darkness and silence. Although I would try listening for God’s voice, I would often wonder what God sounded like. How could I distinguish between God’s words and my own thoughts? Later that semester, I read a story which helped. It’s about when the prophet Elijah heard God’s voice. Then a great and powerful wind tore the mountains apart and shattered the rocks before the LORD, but the LORD was not in the wind. After the wind there was an earthquake, but the LORD was not in the earthquake. After the earthquake came a fire, but the LORD was not in the fire. And after the fire came a gentle whisper. When Elijah heard it, he pulled his cloak over his face and went out and stood at the mouth of the cave. (1 Kings 19:11-13, NIV) Once during waiting worship, I thought I heard God speak. A paraphrase of Psalm 62:11-12 swirled in my mind: “One thing God has spoken, two things have I heard: That you, O Lord, are strong, and that you, O Lord, are loving.” Is this God? I wondered. Should I stand and speak this? I reasoned that among the three others in the room, probably none of them needed to hear it.  During my inner wrestling, someone walked out of the room, and then the prompting left me. I felt like Jonah might have felt when he was swallowed by the great fish.  * I’m not sure why, during those first experiences of waiting worship, I didn’t think about the other time I cliff jumped. It was the summer after visiting the Colorado River. I was in Kansas celebrating a wedding, and for the bachelor party, about eleven of us drove to Two Buttes, Colorado, where apparently we were going to jump off a cliff. “There's different ledges,” said Erik as he drove a carful of us between corn fields into the sunset. “You can jump it from thirty feet, forty feet, or even sixty feet. But we'll only jump from forty feet.” Someone asked about the possibility of rocks. “An underwater current connects the lagoon to the sea, so there’s no bottom,” Erik said. Tall trees loomed over the campground. At the end, shadowed by cliffs, black ripples shimmered beneath a large moon. One by one, the guys swam to the other side, where they heaved themselves onto a bank, climbed a cliff, and jumped into the darkness. I couldn’t see them; I could only hear feet scraping dirt, a stretch of silence, and then a splash. Afterwards they yelped to let us know they made it. Along with a few others, I didn’t jump the cliff that night (I did the next morning, though). One guy’s ankle was sprained, making it risky. Another said, “There’s no way I’m jumping off that.”  As Quakers might say, Friend spoke my mind. When we returned to the campground, Erik invited us to climb the nearby Two Buttes. We all drove a few miles away and parked beside a field of shrubs and rocks. Two silhouettes of stony, sandy pyramids rose skyward. We hiked around cacti, clambering over boulders.  When we reached the top, we each found a spot on which to rest. Some guys shouted. The land stretched before us like the ocean. We could barely see our cars parked below, beside the wiry road. Beyond them, red lights from steel towers pulsed. Up there, the wind was almost as strong as water. I stood straight with my arms sticking out. If I had tiptoed, the wind would have pushed me back. Then for a few moments, we sat and stood, facing the moon and wind in silence.