Where have all the prophets gone? What has happened to the wise, the sages and the gurus? Where are the voices that cry out from the wilderness preaching reform and penance and peace? Is it that our society locks them up in a failure to respect what was once recognized as a message from on high, or are they simply no more?

I guess these questions first arose for me when I was taking my first Hebrew class and we noted that the Jewish prophetic tradition seemed to die out in the last couple centuries before Christ. No one really knows why, though many Christians will assert that the obvious answer is that with the arrival of Christ there was no longer need to herald the coming of the messiah.

My curiosity was further piqued when studying the Hebrew Scriptures (in English this time). My professor asked us to name modern day prophets. While several mentioned Mother Theresa and the Dalai Lama and various local sages, he noted that no one mentioned the Pope. Yet, one eminent rabbi has said that the only world figure to speak with the same message and authority in this age is, in fact, the Holy Father.

I had begun to consider the voices that speak to us as college students in a materialistic society, wonder which might have prophetic quality. Certainly not the voices that have said it is better to amass things for oneself in disregard of or even competition with others, or those that have stated as Cain did that we are not our brotherŐs and sisterŐs keeper.

Neither are they prophets who say (as members of our own Notre Dame family have) that it is more important to write papers and meet deadlines than to counsel friends or feed the hungry; that the main purpose of a Catholic university is to train financial leaders; or that the awareness raised by victims of crimes such as rape is self serving and that everything would be better if they all just kept quiet about what had been done to them. These are the voices of the servants of demons, not of God.

Rather I think that, short of the voices of world leaders, we are first called to listen to those that cry out from the wilderness of loneliness or true faith in our very midst. Those who speak for victims, those who remind us we are here to be Christians first and students second, those who question the invasion of the profane, secular and material into this, a sacred institution.

Where have the prophets gone? They no longer address the nations, for the nations have long been lost, but they are addressed to communities and individuals. When we are ready again to hear the voice of national and international prophecy and wisdom, we know that time has neared its end. But until then we are called to lend our ears to the small voices of our public conscious that will be humiliated by the majority, ignored by the press and belittled by our social leaders. For in that quiet call to repentance, penance and peace is the voice of God.

• Where are the sages?