Post 5: Stillness to receive
The Notes of Rest Fellowship
Hi everyone,
Thus far we have talked about Salvation, Sabbath and Sleep. I pray they are helping you rest. However, all of these practices are hard to maintain because our society encourages hyper-activity and constant distraction. How often have you or someone else answered the question “how are you?” with “busy”? That answer feels so normal because busyness is a state of being in our modern world. Our world lives on constant activity, but it is also dying because of it. Our ecological crisis shows this.
What we need is an answer deeper than our activity. We need stillness.
The inability to be still in mind, body, and spirt has been a perennial problem, as shown in Scripture. People are constantly asking God to help them focus, and God is constantly telling creation to be still. If stillness means simply letting one’s attention to rest on an object of focus, then sin is not being still before God.
We lose attention all of the time. We do not attend mentally to God as we ought. We do not keep our spiritual focus on God as we ought. And we do not keep our bodies aligned with God’s will as we ought. We see more of our problems than we see of God, or we just ignore God altogether because it is more desirable to do things our way as we want. The theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher called this God-forgetfulness and God-remembrance.
But the good news is that even though we often forget God, God’s attention stays on us. This is made explicit in the Ten Commandments when God says to Israel that they should have no other gods before the God of Israel (Exodus 20). The Hebrew word for “before” literally means in front of the face, which means don’t bring any idols before the face of God. The assumption here being that God sees us, but what we bring in front of God can keep us from seeing God.
Psalm 46 and Mark 4 - God says Be Still
Psalm 46 helps us drill down on this idea of keeping our attention stayed on God amidst the temptations to lose focus. The Psalmist wants his community to be delivered from the war that the people of Israel are fighting. The first part is encouraging the community to look to God as the refuge. And then the second part turns to God’s track record. But look what happens here in verse 10 towards the end.
8Come, behold the works of the Lord;
see what desolations he has brought on the earth.
9 He makes wars cease to the end of the earth;
he breaks the bow and shatters the spear;
he burns the shields with fire.
10 “Be still, and know that I am God!
I am exalted among the nations;
I am exalted in the earth.”
At verse 10, the speaker abruptly changes from the Psalmist to God directly. God interrupts all of the human discussion to say give attention to God.
Perhaps you have heard this phrase before “Be still and know that I am God.” I’d call it a catchphrase from the Bible. People use it all of the time to lessen anxiety and worry - “just trust God to fight your battles.” While I believe that to be true, that’s only one side of this story.
When v. 10 is put in context with the rest of the psalm, the passage becomes more ambiguous about who is being addressed. When God interrupts the human war and says “be still,” is God talking to the psalmist who believes he is fighting with God? Or is God talking to the enemy of Israel, the one whose bows are broken and spears are shattered?
Ambiguity in poetry is generative here. In this case, the ambiguity of the addressee leaves the door open for everybody to hear God’s interruption. God speaks to those who follow God, who are worried about their enemies and who need to put their trust in God. To this camp, God says: “Be still. You are not ultimately at the center of your battles. God is. You are not ultimately the one exalted. God is.”
But on the other hand, God comes to those fighting against God and again says: “Be still. You will not win against God. Pay attention to who God is, the one who is exalted. Stop the ceaseless warring and receive God’s attention.”
Are you fighting with God or against God? What kind of stillness do you need to practice?
In Psalm 46 God’s stillness enters into military conflict, whereas in Mark 4:35-41 God’s stillness enters into a natural storm. The disciples (many of whom were fishermen) were worrying about their looming death. Meanwhile, Jesus was sleeping on the boat. (This is what’s pictured above.) Once they woke him up, he interrupted the storm and said “Peace be still.” But then he interrupted their worrying and told them to do the same: “O ye of little faith!”
Violence Opposes Stillness
In both the Psalm and Mark, there was violence that was opposing stillness - violence in war and violence in a storm. Violence comes from misguided activity, and can threaten our relationship with God. Stillness is about attending to God and feeling God’s tranquility. So a question we must ask ourselves is: what violence of our age threatens our stillness?
Of course there is violence that affects our bodies. We constantly combat that. But an insidious violence to combat is that which affects our minds and souls. To that end, the Catholic mystic Thomas Merton helps paint the picture.
To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything, is to succumb to the violence of our times. Violence is not completely fatal until it ceases to disturb us.
There is so much that vies for our attention and we can succumb to the violence of this age by trying to overextend. So when our attention is divided, we can practice the note of stillness by receiving God’s invitation to settle down and focus on less. Peace, be still.
Now, maybe you don’t feel like you can sit still because you’re always worried about somebody else’s safety. That is a real issue, and I don’t want to trivialize that. Once at a Notes of Rest session, somebody said they could not sleep because they felt so anxious about their relatives. I’m a new parent, so I can sympathize with this concern.
Or maybe you have competing demands at home and you can never sit still with anything for a second because of these various forms of labor. That’s a real issue as well.
But can you be still inwardly amidst those tensions, amidst the violence of our age? In Psalm 46 and in Mark 4, God interrupts our struggles and brings calm for a moment to the situation by pointing attention back to God. In the midst of the violence against the earth or the violence of political, military, and economic wars fought, we can focus our attention on God, the God who saves us from death.
What burdens are not ours to carry?
Music can help us practice this stillness. One way it does is by being a go-to soundtrack for when we need to be reminded that God is bigger than our battles. What songs remind you to be still in God’s presence?
They might be songs that are slow in tempo, or maybe they are fast. I love the monastic community Taizé because of how their contemplative stillness is so slow, and I love Judith Christie McAllister because her contemplative stillness is so energetic. But as Barbara Holmes notes in Joy Unspeakable: Contemplative Practices of the Black Church, both of these are forms of stillness.
Another angle on music and stillness is looking at what happens to our bodies when we listen to jazz. Because it is unfolding in real-time, it can encourage being still so you hear what is emerging. Keith Jarrett, a brilliant, contemplative pianist, talks about how audiences do not know where music is going to go in improvisational settings and so they have to pay attention to see what is coming next. Unlike in other forms of music where you can know the end from the beginning, in jazz you are always having to live in the momentk. This limitation encourages stillness.
I pray that in the midst of the violence of our age, with so much pulling our attention in so many directions, we can have practices that draw us back to the face of God. Lest we forget, God is always near.
Practices
Practice saying “peace be still” as a short prayer (known as arrow prayers) when you need it over your home and inner life.
Ask forgiveness for the ways you have kept other people from having their note of stillness.
Find music that promotes stillness in you. Maybe it’s fast, maybe it’s slow, maybe it’s jazz, maybe it’s folk.
Write out your own version of Psalm 46, where you describe threats all around you and then hear God’s call to “be still and know that I am God.”
Turn your phone off.
abundantly,
Julian
That icon of Jesus having a nap is weirdly funny.