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Dr Nicholas G Coleman, “Be still and know that I am God” (Psalm 46:10)
“Be still and know that I am God” (Psalm 46:10)
the importance of recollecting the mystical traditions
Dr Nicholas Coleman
Head of Religious Education
WesleyCollege, Melbourne
Some years ago I was asked a question that faced me with a religious dilemma. (This was actually at a DAN gathering, as I recall.) A chaplain wanted to know: what would I do, if I had to choose between the Church and God? How would I react if I sincerely believed the human institution that manages my faith-community no longer connected with the reality of my faith-experience? For openers, I’ll put that question to you. If you had to choose between walking in the way of the Lord and doing what you were told by the clerical authorities (of your Church, Mosque or Synagogue), what would you do – religion, or God?
At about the same time (although in a rather different context) a Biblical scholar asked me: what would be the only thing worth saying when standing face-to-face with God? I had to think about that scenario for a moment. In the direct presence of the Lord, what’s the only thing to say? Various options ran through my mind. Hello? Hallelujah? I’m sorry? I couldn’t think of anything to say that God didn’t already know. Then I realised that whatever I said would merely assert myself in the Lord’s presence. I wondered if that would even be possible – it certainly didn’t seem proper. So I said: I wouldn’t say anything in the presence of God – I’d be over-awed, still and silent.
The title of this paper, “Be still and know that I am God,” comes from Psalm 46. The advice of the Psalm, to be still, seems to me to go way beyond the mere avoidance of physical movement. Our limbs and tongue can be still, as we sit in frozen silence. Yet, our minds may be simmering with anxious ideas and our hearts boiling with desire to be somewhere else – doing anything at all – apart from sitting in stillness and silence. Outward immobility with inward turmoil hardly seems to be a way to know God. Surely, along with outer stillness, what we need is inner peace. Stilling our psychological activity as well as our physical movement, though, is an art and a discipline. As with all disciplined art, it’s an acquired taste – and we get better with practice.
Be still, and know God. The great Abrahamic faiths of Judaism, Christianity and Islam teach that God is always everywhere. God is right here, right now – that never changes. If we don’t see God then it’s probably because we’re distracted by looking at other things which do change. If we are only concerned with the constant flux of human affairs in which things move and vary and come and go, then it may be difficult to see the unchanging face of the Lord who is always everywhere, ceaselessly the same.
Looking for God doesn’t appear high on the agenda for most young people today – in due course we’ll wonder why not. Finding God (which is another matter altogether and has its own challenges) is usually off the radar of youth completely. Yet, our students aren’t likely to find if they don’t begin to look, and there’s no time to start looking like the present. That’s one of my reasons for commencing every RE class with a minute of sitting in stillness and silence –for those who need to sit with an idea, I suggest they think about reasons for feeling grateful to God for their heartbeat, breath and thought.
We should try that, right here right now. Just sit for a minute, still and silent, and seek to know God.
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Dr Nicholas G Coleman, “Be still and know that I am God” (Psalm 46:10)
No matter what period of the day and regardless of the year-level, a minute of stillness and silence at the start of class is no bad thing. The kids calm down, get focussed, clear their minds of distractions and are more open to engaging with the lesson. Although, Year 9 is an interesting age. A couple of weeks into this school year, Bridgette announced that sitting still and silent was the greatest waste of time in a completely useless subject. I asked who else felt that way. A few tentative hands went up. I wondered if anyone wanted to talk about it. Alex offered to speak for other people (not himself of course) and said that RE wasn’t compulsory after Year 9, so lots of kids had written it off their list of subjects to take seriously. Hmmm…
So I told them that sitting still and silent was a skill that might save their lives one day. That got their attention. On the whiteboard I wrote the first verse from Rudyard Kipling’s poem “IF” (I’m sure you know it):
If you can keep your head
While all those around you
Are loosing theirs
And blaming it on you…
Then I had the class recall the opening scene in Batman: the Dark Knight. People are in a bank and robbers enter; they shoot bullets into the ceiling and tell everyone to shut up and get down on the floor. Everyone obeys; except there’s always one person who can’t cope with the fear, and just keeps screaming until… sure enough, the robbers shoot ‘em. Again, there’s a scene in The Matrix when the good guys are caught in a room and they know the bad guys are coming. So our heroes hide in a narrow space between the walls. The evil agents enter the apparently empty room and are about to depart when one of the hidden heroes sneezes. Hearing the sound and realising the deception, the bad guys open fire at the wall trying to kill the good guys. Even our ordinary world can unexpectedly turn lethal. One day, when you’re faced with your own mortality and your survival depends on finding a depth of stillness and silence within yourself – that’s when you’ll thank God for RE classes.
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Be still, know God. Yet, few enough young people seem to be looking for God, at least by name or in a traditional fashion. Why is that? Various well-known reasons have been widely discussed by scholars and commentators. Most obviously, the ascendant world-view of humanistic science excludes serious discussion of non-physical entities such as spirit, God and the afterlife. Even if we are surrounded by an invisible spiritual reality, it’s a mystery we can’t measure with a metre-rule or study in a test-tube – so there’s nothing to know or say about it. Besides that, there’s the more pressing appeal of secular consumerism which promises personal fulfilment will materialise with the very next purchase – why bother with God when you can shop till you drop?!
Today’s secular humanism descends from the C.18 European Enlightenment. The Enlightenment promised to end oppression and produce happiness for people in the present world. The way to that goal was by getting rid of stale and crippling religious fantasies about some kind of fulfilment in a spiritual world to come and providing, instead, the immediate benefits of technological progress.
Now, without doubt, many gains have been made from the appliance of science. The trouble is, technology only provides certain sorts of nourishment.
“It can entertain us, but not make us happy. It can heal us, but not make us whole. It can feed us, but only in body. It offers defences, but does not make us feel secure. The double trouble is that technology is so good at this entertaining, healing, feeding and defending that it is easy to believe, or hope, that it can, or one day will, solve all other human ills too. … What is missing is meaning. Modern humanism finds it hard to address the questions of morality, values and spirit. Following the scientific rationalism it holds in high regard, it tends to boil it all down to a discussion of mechanisms, rules and laws. This may create an illusion of meaning and a sense of purpose. But meaninglessness keeps rearing its head because, well, mechanisms, rules and laws are actually not very meaningful. … This is why “Why?” is the cry of our age and we are no longer quite sure who we are”, why we’re here or where we’re going (Mark Vernon, After Atheism; p.4f).
The European Enlightenment hasn’t delivered on its promise of human happiness. After two hundred years of successfully pursuing material abundance, our economic structures are collapsing, the environment is burning up and we are still plagued by the absence of answers to the fundamental questions: Who are we? Why do we exist? What does life mean? To learn what the young think about it, just listen to pop culture lyrics – they lament a piteous state indeed. Shock Poets sing of “Checking out the new price tags in town/ And the hope that I’m thinking of/ Don’t come in plastic bags.” “I can cross the ocean/ for the sake of locomotion/ but I wouldn’t have a notion/ how to save my soul”, complain Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark. And who here hasn’t felt a melancholy chill with every lyric line of Lily Allen’s current song “The Fear”?!
I don’t know what’s right and what’s real anymore
I don’t know how I’m meant to feel anymore
When do you think it will all become clear?
‘Cuz I’m being taken over by The Fear.
But I don’t want you to imagine for a moment (well, not for more than a moment, anyway) that pop lyrics offer no remedies for the post-modern malaise. They do have solutions. Take the song “We’re all in this together” by Ben Lee:
I woke up this morning
I suddenly realised
We're all in this together
I started smiling
'Cause you were smiling
And we're all in this together
I'm made of atoms
You're made of atoms
And we're all in this together.
And long division just doesn't matter
'Cause we're all in this together.
Awaken and realise that all divisions are just surface features of one inclusive unity: that’s profoundly observant advice. Indeed, it echoes the central insight of every mystical tradition in the world, which is that “in reality, the All converges into The One.”
Spirituality and the search for meaning in life are as vibrant as ever, and young people seek food for their souls as they always have. Yet, when they do consult the traditional faiths, they rarely turn to their own institutions.
“The students in our Catholic, Anglican, Baptist, state-based, and other schools are mostly not Christian, Jewish or Islamic, in any sense of these terms - no matter how broad we wish to make them. I would say only about 10 or 20% fit into any one of these 3 categories. 80% at least are entirely secular, humanist, atheist, agnostic, and so on” (David Tacey).
Young people today, in our classrooms and staffrooms, increasingly belong to an un-Churched generation (John Collins). Their quest for the authenticity of spirit leads them away from the faiths they inherit. The idea of loyalty to one religious tradition and one religious community barely survives in this new century’s light. The young look for nourishment elsewhere, in other people’s religions, New Age trends, Eastern philosophies, or fundamentalist cliques. More and more, people create their own “tool-kits” of religious resources with which to address the challenges of contemporary life (Philip Hughes).
As religious pluralism becomes the social norm, institutions fall into competition with one another over gaining converts, shaping policy, and influencing liturgy, ethics and social justice. Competition extends to conflict over rights to religious practice, and even to religious existence – consider the opposition to building mosques and immigrating to the country. This mounting social diversity means that metaphysical feelings can find no point of contact with monolithic institutions (cf. Gary Bouma, 2006, Australian Soul). The vibrant impulse of spirituality seeks to affirm an inclusive unity – We're all in this together – yet traditional faith institutions seem devoted to protecting their exclusive communities.
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The Abrahamic “People of the Book” believe in one God who is creator of all things, seen and unseen. Yet, the institutions that manage those faiths often look competitive, confused and in conflict with one another, over how to worship God, and over whose God is the true God anyway. When the God of each faith excludes the God of all other faiths, then none of the offered God-images actually demonstrates true inclusive unity. To the innocent eyes of our young people, the answer seems clear: all such ideas of God are mere idols of human convenience.
The current dysfunctionality of religion discourages people from looking for God. The proper role of the religious institution is to connect the ever-changing world of human affairs to the never changing reality of the one God. Today’s religion, however, has quite lost touch with wider society. While our thought-world is post-modern, the beliefs and rituals of religion remain largely based in medieval supernaturalism. In a secular world, where ‘all that exists is physical,’ supernatural reality simply has no credible foundation. Religious talk of invisible souls, Holy Spirits, Father Gods and the afterlife is just superstition and fairy tale. Vague threats of eternal vengeance, wreaked upon a hidden soul, by an absent (yet angry and jealous) Deity, sound far-fetched to the free-thinking decedents of the European Enlightenment who have been bred to revere the current realities of capitalism, commercialism and consumerism.
The problems for religion and society will not be solved within the theological categories as set out by any one of the traditional faiths. For the theological categories themselves are the problem. Religious thought and talk about spirit, God and the afterlife remains imprisoned in terms that were forged during the Middle Ages, when the world was viewed very differently to the way it’s understood today. Spirit used to be regarded as the life of Nature and soul was the life of mind. Nowadays, however, students continue to be taught that Nature is just a physical mechanism and the soul doesn’t really exist. But that anti-metaphysical metaphysic is rapidly wearing out its welcome by producing more harm than good.
The solution, I suggest, is to reconnect to a more basic and central place in the ground of being itself, which is the place sought by the mystical traditions of all religions. The founders of the great faiths – Abraham and Moses, Jesus and Paul, the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) – were, after all, mystics themselves. They had direct personal encounters with the one God of the universe. Their original experiences kindled, in succeeding generations, a pure passion for seeking God with one’s entire being. The works of later luminaries, such as Philo Judaeus and Baal Shem Tov, Ps-Dionysius the Areopagite and Meister Eckhart, al-Ghazali and ibn Sina, helped crystallise this passion into the various mystical traditions. Yet, the language and imagery of those traditions needs to be updated.
Young people in our classrooms and staffrooms are looking for alternatives, and they are doing so thoughtfully. Their intellectual inheritance equips them with a formidable capacity for self-consciousness. They can think about ideas, make objects of their mental activities and manipulate abstract concepts. These skills enable them to directly explore the interior domain of their own minds, and there make contact with what the ancients knew was soul – the divine energy of consciousness that powers all movement in existence, life and mind, from God to dust and back. Instead of the static supernatural theology of earlier times, young people and other today are up for a dynamic psychology of the interior life that is readily accessible to those of any faith or of none.
Not only is such a psychology verifiable in personal experience, in many cases it has a voice and is already calling. Fr. Eugene Stockton alludes to such a psychologised theology in Wonder: a way to God. He says:
The setting of our wonder is the familiar world in which we now reside, but viewed again in unfamiliar light. As far as I know or am concerned, there is no order of reality other than the one I am experiencing now. While respecting other viewpoints and allowing their validity, I find no need to entertain the customary sets of dualities: material/ spiritual, natural/ supernatural, body/ soul, earth/ heaven, secular/ sacred. Likewise, unnecessary or unimportant to my way of thinking are several levels of being or consciousness, or a hierarchy of classes. There is simply greater or less profundity. Transcendence is felt to be not so much out of this world, an escape from reality, as deeper into it. So this reality I am experiencing now I can experience more deeply, and there, within it, I can touch God.
So, how do we find this more profound experience of (and, perhaps, come to touch God in) our present familiar reality? Well, ‘finding’ is a skill in itself; but certainly we can start looking by sitting in stillness and silence. Indeed, it couldn’t really be any other way; not just because that’s the topic of this address, but because the deep structures of our common metaphysical foundations point in that direction. Our faiths insist that the universe is more than a lucky accident of bits of matter in random motion. The reality of life is intentionally created by the spirit of God. That divine spirit is present in all things and lives and minds as the energy that animates their existence. The physical forces that bind together the bits of cosmic dust, the vital impulses that power natural processes and the self-activity of consciousness that gives freedom to human thought – these are all manifestations of the one divine spirit that sustains each and everything in existence. “We’re all in this together.”