Stillness
Sermon delivered at Hope Central Church on September 3, 2017
Ash Temin
Stillness is a slippery thing. As I was writing this sermon, I kept reaching for definitions. I wanted to create a neat box which I could carry up here with me, to open and share with you and say: “THIS is what stillness is.” But truthfully, I can only talk my way around it and offer words that carry a glint of it in their meaning. Because stillness is not something that we create. We can only open the space for it to enter, and to open the place inside of us where God speaks most clearly.
That seems, to me, why Jesus offers us this way of praying in today’s Gospel. I don’t think he’s shaming public prayer, because we need that too. We need the space to be together and to speak our prayers loudly into the community and to know that they will be held. We need to cry out in protest and to sing out in gladness. But if all we have are public words and constant action, we don’t have the chance to let things settle, to let the silt simmer down to leave some clarity behind.
In the last few years of his life, Jesus did a lot of public ministry. He did a lot of speaking out loud to groups of people, from the disciples to the crowds who followed him from place to place. But he was also often seeking solitude and quiet as ways to renew himself in the midst of those long and difficult days. He didn’t always get it – there always seemed to be someone interrupting him – but here he tells us how important it is to find the stillness, to go into a room and close the door to be with God, even if that room and that door are only metaphorical. To give ourselves the space to stop performing our roles as we want and need them to be. To drop all the parts of ourselves that exist as layers of protection and identity, to allow ourselves to be who we are in our deepest hearts, without fear of judgment. To step away from noise and step into presence – to ourselves, to our bodies in all their particularities, to God.
One of the metaphors I use for stillness in my own life is a sort of digestion process. We think about digestion when we eat, perhaps, but digestion is not just limited to that.We have to process ALL of what we ingest – food and drink, yes, but also information, images, sounds, encounters with the people around us. All of what we encounter we take in in some way, and all of it becomes some part of us.
I’m thinking of this so often these days, when my facebook feed unfurls its outrage, when the throbbing drum of fear beats itself out in 140 character bites, when there is so much to which we want and need to bear witness and so many calls to act for justice and peace. I think of it when the swirl of anxiety in my stomach starts to harden into a weight, while the safety of people of color, of queer and trans folks, of Muslims and Jews remains so very tenuous. This week, as I watched the catastrophic flooding aggravated by climate change descend on my home state of Texas, I found myself taking in more and more and more information, as though knowing more might protect me and those I love from the onslaught of things to fear. I fear being disconnected. I fear not knowing the daily outrages. The world is coming to an end daily, and I need to know it as it happens. But I feel the indigestion. Do you?
At a certain point, more information is just more information. It is not wisdom, or clarity, or the basis of just and sustainable action. What we need for those things to emerge is rest, and space. To step away for a moment, or two, or many, even as it feels like doing so is irresponsible or unfair. To allow ourselves the space to be in the presence of God without words, our truest and most naked selves. It’s a relief, isn’t it, to know that we can pray without all the trappings, with just our broken, vulnerable selves on offer?
What stillness teaches me, when I have the wisdom to seek it, is that there is a difference between wise consumption and burying your head in the sand. There is a difference between taking space to digest and process and allowing whatever privilege you have to insulate you from the suffering of others. There is a difference between stillness and silence in the face of injustice. And taking time to slow down and pause allows us to ensure that what action we do in the world is grounded in love rather than reactivity. It seems like as soon as anything happens in the world right now, there are a thousand articles and facebook posts and tweets about it within minutes, and we can feel the need to respond instantly, to add our own outrage to the many voices lifted in protest. But taking the time to examine how that thing is resonating for us, in our minds and hearts and bodies, prevents us from engaging in resistance and justice work as “acts of personal catharsis”. Ungrounded outrage is only exhausting and depleting in the long run. We can, instead, take the time and the space to know what deserves our attention and what is merely draining the energy we can be using for something else.
So stillness offers us a liminal space of rest between action, a counterbalance to all our work in the world. It looks different for each person. And I want to acknowledge that it may not always feel restful. It may feel like a different, and even harder, kind of work, for those of us (all of us) who are distracted and overwhelmed by a constant barrage of busy-ness and obligation. Taking time to step back can feel scary and uncomfortable and even vulnerable.
And it’s messy. You know that story I told at the beginning, about my professor and my thesis? That’s pretty much how I feel about my own practice of stillness. I set out with the best intentions, and it gets messy. It doesn’t look how I think it should look. I have to hold all the parts of myself and the world that I wish were more perfect and work toward loving them the way they are. But the Psalm says“Be still and know that I am God.” What it doesn’t say is “Be perfect and know that I am God.” Amen?
Stillness is about holding opposites, about creating the space where ALL of us can co-exist. It is about leaving room for the contradictions in our bodies, our minds, our souls, our communities. It is about knowing that the wild possibilities, the wonder and the beauty, can occupy the same space as heartache, as woundedness, as loss. That room that Jesus speaks of is big enough to hold the great worlds of contradiction and beauty that are in each of us. Stillness is a restorative act. A release. An intention. A process. Not an exercise in performed holiness.
In Celtic Christianity, there is the idea of the “thin veil.” The veil exists in places that are known and experienced as holy – sites where the veil between this world and the spirit world are more permeable, where spiritual experiences tend to proliferate. I imagine most of us have experienced such places. Places where the wildness of who we are in our deepest selves feels recognized and accepted. Maybe it’s a landscape. Maybe it’s a person. The place where God feels close, where the unnecessary particulars fade, even if just briefly.
I want to say that the spiritual work of stillness is not just individual work, though it is that. Each of us will cultivate it or find it in different ways. But if we seek stillness only for ourselves, we stymy the grace that exists in community. I think stillness in community can be its own kind of thin veil, bringing us together in a way that facilitates the love of God and brings us into a greater sense of connection with one another and with the Divine.
And though silence and stillness often work in tandem as co-creators of interior space, stillness is not a synonym for silence. Silence can be beautiful, and it can be an entry point into stillness. It is easy to talk about silence as holy ground, and I think many of us have probably had experiences of the holy that were surrounded by or facilitated by silence. The space and longing of the Good Friday services, the lighting of candles in the dark, a brief pause of breath before the start of a busy day. Maybe those blessed moments when the kids are outside or at school and you get to drink a cup of tea or coffee before it gets cold.
But silence can be fraught, and I want to call forth the shadow side of it as well. The side which meant we had to be silent to survive, lest using our voices bring violence upon us. The side which equates unquestioned obedience with lack of voice. The side which required us to swallow our experiences of violation or of abuse and hold them deep in our bodies because our families or communities would not tolerate the discomfort of exposure which our voices longed to proclaim. The side which allowed so, so many of us to be silenced by churches, other places of worship, families, society – because of our race, our gender identity, our physical expressions, who we love.
Stillness is not the silencing of difference or the refusal to acknowledge the voices of any, particularly those who have experienced and continue to experience oppression. Stillness is not the swallowing down of our own voices in obedience to capitalism and patriarchy. It is not the collapsing of our identities in a way that refuses to acknowledge dynamics of privilege and oppression. Silence is so often a form of protection, a way to avoid violence. And it becomes its own form of violence when we are unwilling to use our voices for justice. What we seek, rather, is a slowness and a space in which we come to know ourselves, that we may act more justly and more tenderly with one another.
Because we are all seeking wholeness. We are all seeking wonder. We are all seeking the deepest depths of love.
Jesus did not ask us to go into the room alone, shut the door, and never come out. He did not ask us to hide our particularities or our pain, to silence our voices to preserve a false sense of peace. He recognized the importance of stillness and even of being alone with oneself. But he used those experiences as the rich ferment from which to do his work in the world, as a way of being renewed from the onslaught of injustice which he was seeking to dismantle. We have his example, and we have each other. Let us move forward in stillness and in tenderness to repair the world.