The story of Balaam is the story of coming into greater alignment with God’s will.
We are often like Balaam, struggling against our divine destiny. We hear God’s voice faintly in the night while the guests are sleeping and the external world is quiet – a part of us discerns what our path is – but we still feel the tug in the morning of the expectations and invitations of these important kingly messengers who promise to honor us if we follow their way. The voice of God inside us is a whisper. The voice of the world is loud and persistent and seems to offer to feed us and to fill all the holes and wanting we have ever known.
And so we are confused. We go forward on a path that is not entirely ours, and we suffer. Like Balaam, we encounter impossible obstacles; we get stuck; we veer off the path in confusion and frustration; we become self aggressive towards the “donkey” parts of us that are being stubborn and resisting moving forward; we feel the stress and pain of having our legs squeezed against a wall, of being stuck in a tight spot which doesn’t fit us and causes us to suffer. We are fundamentally not in alignment with the divine, and so we are disoriented and at war with ourselves; everything feels difficult and stressful.
It’s not that the path of alignment has no obstacles and no stress. Of course, even on our true path, there will be obstacles and difficulties, as there were for Avraham on his divine-led journey. But when we are aligned, there will also be a sense of flow despite the obstacles, a sense of positive easy movement, a sense that the universe wants to help us along the way, even if it is not always easy.
One of the main clues of misalignment is a constant need for force. Balaam kept forcing his way. His donkey refused, but he kept pushing anyway, not listening to the clues. How much of a sense of forcing is there on our journey, and how much of a sense of ease, of natural flow?
In the end, Balaam, too, achieves this flow, this divine alignment. He learns to say and to mean it when he says: Everything that God says, I will do. This is a position of surrender, like that of Avraham when he says: Hineni. Here I am. Here I am right now. I don’t know the right way. I ask for Your guidance in showing me the way, my way, the way that You intend for me, and I give myself fully to You and Your will in this pursuit.
The divine spirit enters us when we surrender in this way, when our whole soul’s desire becomes simply to align with what God wants from us. On his third try at speaking, the Torah tells us that Balaam no longer used witchcraft and God no longer “happened” upon him. Rather, “the spirit of God came to rest upon him (Numbers 24:2),” and there was flow, the creative flow of beautiful poetic words pouring out of him, more and more, so that everywhere he looked, there were prophecies to speak, blessings to bestow.
What happens when we are aligned is that we become, like Balaam, a vessel for divine blessing in the world, the particular vessel that we are meant to be.
This is no simple task. Discernment is the art of a lifetime. We will know for a moment what God wants from us, what we are meant to do, and then we will be lost and confused again, wandering off the path, having no path, stuck in a path with obstacles before us. This will happen again and again. But if we can pause and return, each time again, pause and return to that quiet inner place of knowing and surrender ourselves fully to aligning with the divine, asking for help and opening ourselves to receiving it, we will begin to know. And we will begin to walk with peace on our way. Not without difficulties, of course. But still in the peace of knowing that we are aligned, that we are on the path God wants us to be on, that we are on our path.
Photo by Gratisography at Pexels
