Listening for the voice of God – who does not shout.

Decided to arrange the following paragraph from Nicholas Lash into a prose poem, to allow for slowed down reading.

"Good learning calls,
no less than teaching does,
for courtesy, respect,
a kind of reverence:
for facts and people,
evidence and argument,
for climates of speech
and patterns of behaviour
different from our own.

Watchfulness is, indeed, in order,
but endless suspicion and mistrust are not.
There are affinities between the courtesy,
the delicacy of attentiveness, required for friendship;
the single minded passionate disiniterestedness
without which no good scholarly or scientific work is done;
and the contemplativity which strains,
without credulity,
to listen for the voice of God –
who does not shout."

Nicholas Lash, Believing Three Ways in One God (London: SCM, 1992), pp. 10-11.