A perfect stillness

Do you have a favorite word? One that comes first to mind when you are on your own or with a close friend with whom you can relax completely and work together on life’s challenges.

Mine is the word stillness, which also brings delight to anyone who shares my joy in its gentle, healing qualities.

I think of an early morning this past summer when I looked out of the window toward an inlet of the Mystic River. There wasn’t a ripple across water that reflected a thousand trees and just as many shafts of ever-changing light. A perfect stillness.

Also admiring that scene was a Great Blue Heron, its slim legs and yellow beak adding their own reflections to the myriad colors blending harmoniously at the water’s edge.

The only movement (if you can call it that) lay in the silent progress of the rising sun. The heron stood tall and still, as if daring anyone—or any thing, not even a fish—to break the silence.

A different kind of stillness—yet almost as tangible—filled the Forum in Montreal in 1976 during the women’s (and girls’) gymnastics competition, when the 14-year-old Romanian Nadia Comaneci stood tall on the balance beam as she sprinkled the first Olympic “perfect tens” among her gold medals.

I’ve never seen and felt stillness better exemplified than in those moments on the beam when thousands of spectators held their breath as Nadia’s finger tips reached for the roof, and her tiny feet dared not move even a fraction of an inch.

That was a perfect stillness—indelible for me even after almost fifty years.

I relate this to the spiritual serenity Christ Jesus called for when he quieted his disciples’ fear of a squall on a lake by rebuking the wind and calling “Peace, be still!” And, as Mark’s account puts it, “the wind ceased and there was a great calm” (4:39).

This prompted Jesus to question his disciples’ faith. But when he was alone with them, the text confirms, “he explained everything.”

         How relevant a great calmness is in the unsettling and destabilizing times we’re going through at the moment!

If only there were someone who could take us aside and in stillness explain everything—or, at least suggest how we might bridge the gap between the world we seem to have inherited and the world we’d like to inhabit.

  How desperately we need to feel steadied and comforted—truly understand that “in all things God works together with those who love him to bring about what is good.” Or to put it even more simply: “Be still, and know that I am God” (Romans 8:8, Psalms 46:10, NIV).

A person who really knew how to be still in this way was a friend of mine, Bettie Gray House, who on Friday afternoons joined me in a tiny coffee shop near our office to offer prayer-based solutions to the turmoils of the past week.

For me, one of her observations, which soon found its way into print, says it all:

Whether the stillness is easy/

or is wrestled for and won,/

the place/for stillness/

is no bleak or silent emptiness,/

for stillness/is a listening prayer/

      where Love’s voice speaks,/and Love speaks/

volumes/to Her child, whose love/

for stillness/Love imparts.

(The Christian Science Journal, March, 2001).