When my son Patrick was three, I was invited to his pre-school for a performance. The children sang songs for the parents and I remember so clearly a sliver of stillness between songs. As one song ended and before another began, Patrick sought me out in the crowd, locked eyes with me, and in a gaze filled with a mixture of love and pride told me that I was the only audience member that mattered to him. It was a connection born from familiarity that traversed noise and activity, could be intensely felt across a room, and was received in a moment of profound stillness. The deep experience of that sliver of stillness remains with me across all the years that have passed since then.
Art is often about capturing slivers of stillness. When a ballet dancer has enough control of her movements, she is able to leap through the air and at the apex of that leap, pause in a pose of profound beauty, toes pointed, head tilted, arms still and in perfect position. A photograph taken at that moment shows the perfection of her beauty, every line, every angle perfect. The stillness of course is elusive. It is only a moment amid great activity. The dancer’s sliver of stillness comes only after years of training, years of conditioning, years of learning to know her body and learning to trust herself in the air. Disciplined training and preparation are needed for slivers of stillness to occur.
Stillness is commanded of us in the bible. Through the Psalmist, God says,
Be still and know that I am God!
Psalm 46: 11
Psalm 46 speaks of dangers that still plague us today, earthquakes, tumultuous, surging seas, unstable nations, and wars. Though these dangers felt overwhelming to the psalmist and feel overwhelming to us today, the psalm tells us that the dangers we see around us should not shake us because amid these dangers God is our shelter and our strength. The faith required to be still amid life’s turmoil is faith rooted in deep knowledge and profound trust in God, a knowledge and trust that comes to us as gift if we are willing to spend time with God in stillness.
The spiritual practice of stillness was called hesychia by the ancient monks of the Egyptian desert. The Greek word hesychia can be translated stillness, quiet, tranquility, and deep peace. In monastic literature, hesychia is associated with deep prayer, resting in God, surrendering to quiet, stilling the heart. The stillness discussed is not merely quieting outer activity but even more importantly finding an interior space of stillness, a stillness below our thoughts, free from unruly emotions, a place within that is centered and calm. Finding this stillness was the work of a lifetime for a monk and involved retreating from the world to the desert. Old and wise monks gave advice to younger monks and one of the sayings of these wise desert fathers was,
Go, sit in your cell, and your cell will teach you everything.
Abba Moses of Scete
To sit in your cell meant to remain by yourself, with yourself, in the midst of your vulnerability, even when you wanted to flee, to distract yourself, to escape yourself in any way that you could.
Most of us are not monks and finding God in stillness might feel impossible. But perhaps we are too idealistic about the stillness we are seeking. Stillness does not have to come in the form of prolonged silence and inactivity. We all have cells, not small monastic dwellings, but places life calls us to be. Our cell might be a bedroom where an infant demands late night feedings, or the kitchen where preparing food for the family is a daily task, or the home of an elderly parent for whom we are caring, or in front of our computers where we have many work tasks to fulfill, some challenging and some quite boring.
We may experience many emotions in these places and spaces, have good days and bad days, but inevitably in meeting the demands of the daily, we will encounter our vulnerability there and sometimes wish to escape. The idea is that if we are disciplined enough to keep showing up in these places and spaces with hope of catching a glimpse of purpose, meaning, or the presence of God, over a lifetime we might learn to see what transcends all the work. We might learn to find right in the midst of life’s activities, a stillness of heart and mind that can receive God’s gift of God’s presence.
Though our attempts to find stillness in the world might seem like an uphill battle, I believe nurturing awareness of mere slivers of stillness yields a rich harvest. These moments of stillness are not isolated to times when we are completely alone. Instead, when we become familiar with stillness, we carry that stillness with us, and it informs all our interactions with others. Like many spiritual gifts there is an abundance to the gift of stillness. Once we taste it, it breaks in upon us more and more often and we awaken to wonderful moments of connection with God and the people we love. We may even find that we can touch stillness in moments of turmoil and stress.
