What It Means to Be Still

Photo by PJ Gal-Szabo on Unsplash

Photo by PJ Gal-Szabo on Unsplash

Be still and know that I am God. (Psalm 46:10)

We are in self-quarantine, day 16. 

A dark aroma meanders through my news feed, the press releases naming terrors and unsteadiness that I’ve never seen. Some days I read it. Others I turn to distractions. On the other hand, the great well of creativity that springs up every day is a joy to witness. Two sides to the same coin, so to speak.

I watch my daughter “do” school virtually. The education that previously took her away from the house for 6-7 hours a day is now completed in a tidy morning session. She smiles wryly at the end of her work. Turning then she does whatever her hands can find.

We give her projects. A new country to research every week. My wife and I dream up creative projects for her to do that she can do without the aid of technology. She needs to rest her eyes from the screens from time to time. 

Be still and know that I am God. 

Every day we take a walk, weather permitting, and ask each other the question, “How are you doing today?” We know this isn’t about aches and pains or general well-being. This is a question about the snarl of our souls against a situation over which we have little control. 

Since quarantine began, we have each responded differently. Some days I’m feeling good, taking it one step at a time. One foot in front of the other. Just do the next thing. One day at a time. 

Other days we feel the tug of the details & data – the number of cases rising, the virus moving through communities like a spark through dry kindling. 

Even the most faithful among us is called down into our depths to see what it is that truly causes us to fear. 

Which leads to something else entirely.

Through the gift of social media, I hear proclamations that often begin with “If we just…” and then a more abstract spiritual principle about “trusting” or “knowing” or “believing.” It sounds delicious - this simplicity. I would even recommend this posture to others, if asked. But I struggle to adopt it myself.

Don’t hear me wrong: trusting, knowing, believing – these are all good and beautiful streams available to anyone who wants to drink. Or, if necessary, anyone who wants to swim and immerse themselves in something bigger.

This is part of the life that Jesus invites all of us to live.

The Kingdom is not in trouble, so to speak. Those things in the outer “circle of concern” are cared for and well supplied. I trust in that.

And yet inside of the “circle of concern” there is a “circle of influence.”

The influence is where we act, live, and move. The issue is trusting, believing, and knowing are only part of the life to which Jesus invites us. Yet it is not the opposite of fear, anxiety, and concern. Those make up the other part. A part we play as we walk in skin with eyes limited and dimmed.

We miss the two parts because our Western mind wants to set up categories and classes, boundary lines and binaries. It is either “trust” or “fear” - to do the latter is to somehow break the covenant. There is no other option.

Again, I am truly happy for others that are constantly calmed and contented by trusting, knowing, and believing. It is my hope that the grace they imbibe will keep them and shelter them through the storm. 

However if that “trust don’t fear” leads us to gather in large groups and abandon the wisdom of those God has gifted to study this epidemic, I believe we have ascribed to a different kind of God and a different kind of covenant altogether.

This is simply our attempt to take over running the Kingdom..

So when my wife asks our walking question of “How are you doing?” I respond from a place of honoring my humanity and saying, “I’m irritated” or “I’m anxious.” But I also respond as one who realizes that we are all involved in something far bigger than ourselves. A “great economy,” as Wendell Berry says.

Yet the lesson for this season feels very clear: The only way through is to go in - deeper and deeper, whatever may come. God is with us - never leaves us or forsakes us. I believe that. And I am also unsteady from time to time.

For me, it isn’t either “faith or fear.” It is that God longs for us so much that to live with God is to live with faith AND fear in a delicate dance. It is believing while we’re scared, anxious, and unsettled. 

Be still and know.

What will this pandemic continue to ask of us? What will we, the incarnate image of God in process, do in the midst of great strain? 

What will our world look like on the other side? And, oh yes, while we’re at it, where IS that “other side” exactly? 

Today the sun waits in shadow below the horizon. Looking out the window above my desk I see our neighbors’ porch lights gleaming across the retention area out back. A sliding door opens and a half-conscious man steps out, shivering. The coffee cup in his hand steams up, up, up towards the new spring birdsong. 

I can’t make out the letters on the side of the cup. I supply my own sardonic wit, something like “Don’t talk to me until I’ve had my coffee” or “Virginia is for lovers.” Perhaps it is a gift from several Christmases past. 

It has been so long since Christmas. 

He lets the dog out and waits, wearing whatever was easily accessible in the pre-dawn dark. 

We all wait in earnest for the dawn. Even though the temperature won’t break 42 today, we wait for that sun that will glow on our skin. You can’t force a dog to do what a dog must do, so you wait. He sniffs around the yard making an unconscious inventory of the outer world. The roots and trunk of the tree just off the deck needs significant attention, apparently. 

The half-conscious man waits. 

The virus supposedly will reach its peak in mid-April. Just after Easter. We hear “peak” and think of a roller coaster. The anxious climb will be over and the virus will lose steam, dissipate, and retreat.  

But you cannot force this. We cannot force this. So we wait in a kind of pre-dawn moment. 

Be still. 

I’ll take a walk with my wife. Maybe today, maybe tomorrow. She’ll ask “How are you doing?” and I’ll reply with some form of better than yesterday or wondering about my job or dear God I have to get out of the house or I don’t really know what to pray for next. 

I’ll ask her the same question and she’ll respond from the hill, or the valley, or the plains of her soul. 

But we will then look at each other and know that we have hope. We’ll echo Wendell Berry’s character Nathan Coulter in the novel Hannah Coulter. When Nathan realizes that he has cancer and decides to simply let life run its course, Hannah asks what it is they will do next. 

I’ll paraphrase but he says something to the effect of: “We’ll live right on.” 

And so we will. We who live in skin, haunted by the divine, forced through the crucible of our own mortality waiting around each corner will live right on. In one form or another. 

We who ask God why and then believe God’s ways to be valid and hopeful, we’ll live right on. 

Those of us who have health care families & backgrounds who know that epidemics aren’t a joke – we’ll take precautions and invite others to do the same (sometimes with anger and frustration, sorry.) We’ll live right on. 

We will embrace the fear and anxiety of Jesus in Gethsemane, the joy of crucifixion that leads to resurrection in Hebrews, and the ascension that means things are never the same with the women at the tomb. 

This is an Easter moment if there ever was one. Filled as it is with expectations, personal perspectives, and the tumult of watching something we had taken for granted die – we are invited to see ourselves and our world in an aching pre-dawn light just about to break. 

But until then. One word keeps us. Binds us. Gives us hope. It is too simple to miss but too powerful to be reduced.

Be.