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    The Seven Whispers: A Spiritual Practice for Times Like These
    The Seven Whispers: A Spiritual Practice for Times Like These
    The Seven Whispers: A Spiritual Practice for Times Like These
    Ebook96 pages1 hour

    The Seven Whispers: A Spiritual Practice for Times Like These

    By Christina Baldwin

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    About this ebook

    The Seven Whispers

    Maintain peace of mind
    Move at the pace of guidance
    Practice certainty of purpose
    Surrender to surprise
    Ask for what you need and offer what you can
    Love the folks in front of you
    Return to the world

    In The Seven Whispers, journal writing pioneer Christina Baldwin teaches us to listen to the inner voice that originates from each of our souls — the voice of spirit. Though we may call this voice by whatever name has meaning for us — spirit, intuition, or God — hearing it is a universal human experience. Built around seven phrases, or whispers, Baldwin’s book is a personal guide for finding and listening to that voice. A powerful call to reenvision our lives, told in the voice of a trusted friend, The Seven Whispers delivers a wonderfully inspiring yet practical spirituality.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherNew World Library
    Release dateOct 5, 2010
    ISBN9781577318040
    The Seven Whispers: A Spiritual Practice for Times Like These
    Author

    Christina Baldwin

    Christina Baldwin has taught seminars internationally for more than twenty years and has contributed two classic books — One to One: Self-Understanding Through Journal Writing and Life’s Companion: Journal Writing as a Spiritual Quest — to the field of personal writing. She is also the author of New World Library’s Seven Whispers: A Spiritual Practice for Times Like These. Christina is co-founder of PeerSpirit Inc., an educational company, with author and naturalist Ann Linnea devoted to building and sustaining a culture of conversation.

    Read more from Christina Baldwin

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      Book preview

      The Seven Whispers - Christina Baldwin

       Introduction: A Spiritual

      Practice for Times Like These

      Prayer is not a pious gesture at all. It is a response to the One whose heart beats with ours.

      — Joan Chittister

      I love you, I love you. That is all that has ever mattered. Live your full life and I will always be with you.

      — Cell phone call, September 11, 2001

      I have believed all my life that there is a necessary interaction that occurs between a person and the Divine. This interaction does not come only to prophets, bodhisattvas, and other great spiritual masters, it comes also to us: ordinary people in our ordinary lives. It is part of our natural human capacity to call out one of the thousand names of God. And it is part of our human capacity to perceive and interpret the response.

      Call and response is perhaps the oldest impulse we know. Humankind has always looked up and bowed down before the mysteries of the universe and asked God to become present. Moses, Buddha, Jesus, Mohammed

      — religions arise from a lineage of trembling prophets who understood that, if summoned, God might actually appear. Their stories say these were ordinary men and women who were pulled out of their ordinary lives into the service of what they summoned forth. Knowing this, we stand in our own ordinariness and surmise that God might also actually appear to us and break us open to the life of service hiding within everyday details. What an amazing opportunity we have, to discover our own language of call and God’s own language of response — and to take responsibility, that as the times we live through become less ordinary, we ourselves become less ordinary in response to the needs of the times.

      My family tells a story that when I was a girl of five or six years, I set about scribbling furiously on a large sheet of paper my mother had put down on the floor. Crayons scattered around me, tongue stuck out in concentration, I worked the colors onto the page. The texture of the linoleum came up through the paper, adding surprise designs to my drawing, which seemed to appear like magic. My mother wandered by and asked me, What are you drawing?

      A picture of God, I replied.

      My mother knelt down to deliver her disappointing news as gently as possible. Oh honey, you can’t do that. . . . Nobody knows what God looks like.

      I hear that I did not even lift my gaze from the enthrallment of my artwork as I informed her, They will, as soon as I’m done with my drawing.

      Connection to what theologian Joan Chittister calls the One whose heart beats with ours is part of our natural human capacity. And though children often have a natural and confident connection with the Divine, in the long journeys through religious training and enculturation, many people become adults no longer sure what they think about God, whether they know what God is or what God looks like.

      In my own journey, the more I read, and the more I experience, the more mysterious the Divine becomes. I grew up a Protestant Christian with the Lord as my shepherd and little squares of white bread and grape juice served once a month in church. I marveled over the elaborate prayers of playmates who wore white veils to their first communion and prayed to Mother Mary and a host of what I called the saints and saintesses. Down the road, if I stayed till Friday dusk at Howie Bernstein’s house, his mother sang exotic prayers, lit candles, and sent me home with a piece of warm challah in my hand.

      In my twenties, I grounded my spirit in Quaker Meeting and social activism, followed by eclectic reading in world religions, and adult confirmation as an Episcopalian. My religious training has been augmented by insights from indigenous spiritual traditions; studies in shamanism and Celtic spirituality; practices in yoga, chi gong, and vipassana meditation; and long walks in nature with my dog. All I know is there are a thousand faces of the Divine, and a thousand ways to pray. Every minute of life presents an essential choice: to avail ourselves of this relationship, or to close up in isolation.

      We know there is power in spirit that can answer our prayers and change our lives, but we may not be sure what to pray for, or how ready we are to have our lives changed, thank you very much, God. We know there is power in spirit that can decode the mystery of life, but it’s Tuesday, and we have a long list of things to do. We put off our willingness to entertain spiritual transformation day by day. Yet, no matter how ambivalent we are, no matter how liberal or conservative our religious and spiritual views, our longing for active relationship with something greater than ourselves cannot be forever denied. This longing may be the capacity that saves us in times like these. It is not a movement toward a specific religion, or away from religion: it is a movement to reclaim a personal relationship with the Divine.

      Among humankind are millions and billions of good-hearted, good-natured, well-meaning people. I believe these people — including you and me — can redirect the course of history. We have already started. Millions of us are willing to reappraise social and personal values, and even change core beliefs, based on new and increasing information and insight about the world. Millions of us contribute to the common good through billions of small and yet significant acts of kindness and compassion. And millions of us are looking for some connection to spirit so real, so unmistakably authentic, that it will release our capacity to make an enormous shift in how we treat each other and the world.

      Sometimes I think of the connection to spirit as being like a phone line. The connection is always open: it’s our half of the relationship to stay available for incoming calls. Sometimes I turn the ringer off. Sometimes I ignore the ringing. Sometimes I pick up the phone with suspicion. Sometimes I hang up in anger. Sometimes I get impatient at the interruption. Sometimes I have no idea how to respond. The problem is not in the sending, but in the receiving. And unlike a lot of other calls, the one from spirit is the one we are hoping to receive.

      One time, having tea with a friend, we were deep in conversation when the phone rang. I ignored it, thinking I was being polite. Jerry stopped his thought mid-sentence and asked, Aren’t you going to get the phone? Maybe God is calling you. I looked at him in amazement, reached for the receiver, and tentatively said, Hello? . . . I don’t remember who was calling, but I have never forgotten Jerry’s message to stay curious, to see if I can decode the Divine in everyday interactions. We have in ourselves some mysterious ability, in ordinary moments and moments of extreme, to speak with the voice of God — like the man who phoned from the World Trade Center with one last, brilliant message.

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