God Speaks To Me In Prayer

 ... for real, I am sure of it. But those conversations, I believe, are limited to those things about which I have direct, personal knowledge.

A good friend of mine, we'll call him Andy, recently fell while hiking a local, canyon trail. The trails can be uneven and steep. My friend is in his mid-60s. He braced himself with his hands and when he fell, he badly injured both shoulders, possibly damaging his rotator cuffs. He's been in pain since then.

Andy's life is defined by active service for others. He is the ultimate handyman having worked as a mechanic for decades and, through enforced frugality, having repaired, rebuilt or constructed everything in his house and his children's houses. He, with family help, recently did a moderately-sized remodel of his own house, doing almost all of the work himself.

Andy cannot watch a movie without discomfort and would never watch a sporting event all the way through if not doing so at one of our dinners or parties where the game is the excuse for the get together. His entire being is defined by his productive, physical activity.

The fall and injury took that away from him, at least temporarily. Andy and I don't have a whole lot in common - we can't discuss sports, theology or most of the things on this blog. Still, I see him and his wife a couple of times a week, so we socialize quite a bit. I like Andy and enjoy his company.

During my morning prayer recently, I thought about him as I spoke my thoughts out loud to God*. I believe that God or the Holy Spirit or Jesus or whatever pointed out to me that Andy is going through excruciating, psychological pain right now. Andy, being Andy, doesn't show it, perhaps not even to himself. What I needed to do was use my gifts as an ENFJ and draw out his feelings and thoughts about his injury, his recovery and his inability to do the things he normally does. I needed to give him a place to talk about it.

I needed to love Andy in the way he needed to be loved.

I believe this was divine because, at the time, my thoughts were consumed with my ongoing war with the bottle, the presence of the pit bull puppy and the way it was wrecking my life, the lack of the Alabama river house and any number of other self-pitying introspections. There is nothing more important than me, you understand. What I heard was gentle, loving, compassionate, true and perfectly suited to my nature and gifts.

The next time I saw him, the interaction was only brief, I asked him about how he was doing and he brightened visibly as he told me how he was feeling.

Bingo.

Going back to the recent theme on this blog where I rage against the Eccliastical machine, I don't believe the Holy Spirit would tell me to vote for JD Vance when he responded to me in prayer. I don't know JD personally and while I may think he'd make an excellent president, he very well may be a self-serving crook in ways I can't see. It would be a form of insider trading for the Holy Spirit to give me divine guidance to direct my voting.

Similarly, the Holy Spirit isn't guiding the Catholic bishops or the Pope, for that matter, to support open borders and the "migrants." Those issues are hopelessly complicated with winners and losers no human can hope to estimate. For the Holy Spirit to give such guidance would be to imply that Heaven has run the numbers and they come out squarely on the side of mass migration. The bishops, being fallible humans of no particular skill in macroeconomics, cultural assimilation, political science, environmental studies, etc, certainly couldn't run those numbers themselves.

To believe that the Holy Spirit is guiding our prelates to support mass migration is to believe that the Holy Spirit is engaging in insider trading at the highest levels.

As Aquinas said, to love is to will the good of the other. In the case of mass migration, the "other" is absolutely everyone. Even AI run on supercomputers would have no hope of working out those equations reliably. The question of what is "the good of the other" in this case is hopelessly complicated.

While I have direct, first-hand experience of divine guidance and intervention in my life, I simply cannot believe that Heaven is handing us the answers to questions as cosmically difficult as that.

Yeah, I don't think it works this way.

* - I've learned to follow Andrew Klavan's dictum - when you pray, speak out loud because it forces you to speak in complete sentences and think clearly about what you're saying. I also follow the teaching of many, many Catholic teachers who say that prayer is conversation with God.