A still image
A few months ago, someone I know was diagnosed with cancer. She described to me the moment she heard the devastating news. At that time, she did not know what the long-term prognosis would be, but one always assumes the worst. It took her several weeks to get beyond the debilitating fear of dying and contemplating everything that she would be leaving behind. But then she described how, quick as a flash, things began to become reprioritised in her mind. So many needless distractions were banished and she suddenly found herself in a place of complete peace with it all, and a sense of stillness she had never before experienced. She described how, in this stillness, she felt a profound closeness to the divine. In a strange kind of way, it had taken the diagnosis of a life-threatening illness to enable her to stop and, standing on the edge of eternity, gaze on grace.
We all need to take time away from the ordinary routines of
life sometimes. To still ourselves and look back over what has happened, take
stock of where we are and to contemplate the future. But more than this, we need
time to just be. To be properly present with ourselves and with God.
‘Be still and know that I am God’ are the infamous words of
the Psalmist.[1] In
this prose, the Psalmist first invites us to be still. To still our overactive
minds and bodies. Clear the diary. Make space for stillness. Only in the
stillness can we become acquainted with the person we are called to be. There
we shall meet God and he will inspire in us that peace that so often seems
beyond our grasp. It is his ‘still, small voice’[2]
that speaks those comforting, reassuring words deep into our hearts using a language
so pure and primeval that it speaks into the most primitive parts of our being;
those parts that only God knew even before the creation of the world.
Our notion of God, the Divine, or however we might wish to
refer to it, is greatly diminished when we interpret him as only being outside
of the created order. One of the great mysteries of God, as the Christian tradition
has properly interpreted it, is that God is within creation as well as beyond
it. He is through all and in all. He is everywhere present and in all things. God
is active within the created world, whilst ordering it from beyond. This means
that he speaks to us from within ourselves and from within everything around
us. His divine presence runs through everything. As Rowan Williams recently
commented ‘in Christianity properly understood, there is no such thing as dead
matter. There is no such thing as just ‘stuff’ lying around. It is all of it
carrying the energy of God in some way’.[3]
There is a profundity to realising that whenever I cease the
incessant mental chatter and see things the way they actually are, then the
whole world becomes a far more beautiful place. Not only do I meet God at the depths
of my inner being, but also in everything around me. I become more aware of the
colours of the flowers, the scent in the air, the exquisite beauty of the
other. Once we cut through all the chaos and the noise, then we rediscover how
we are placed in a world of radical allure. A world made of and for love in its
widest and most transformative sense. And it is from this place that we
discover who we are meant to be.
