But the hope is that our stillness is not emptiness; that we sit idly letting any thoughts float by like clouds in the sky. The hope is that we are in charge of our stillness and trying deliberately to enter within when we cannot be engaged in our normal activities. They are moments when we can switch off the twitter of life and simply enjoy the stillness of being; being aware of what is happening around us, being aware of our own depths.
We find this hard. We look for someone to chat to and often it is idle chatter, or, more frequently today, we reach for the mobile phone and chat to friends or play games or whatever. We run away from stillness. It is too awkward to handle. And yet stillness is a gateway to depth and the deeper we go the nearer we come to who we really are. The first time I visited the Chinhoyi caves I was struck by their stillness and their depth.
The Church’s year progresses from the known to the unknown. The infant child grows and works. We know what that is all about. It is our experience. He is rejected and executed. He rises from the dead and “ascends” to the Father. We have no experience to tell us what this means – so we construct our own ideas about it. He sends his Spirit to be with us. At least up to now we have been dealing with a body. Now we do not even have that. Finally we celebrate a mystery: that God is three in one, that he is ‘Trinity’. Now we are really out of our depth and off the map. This we cannot even grasp in our thoughts.
St Augustine once said, if we think we understand God it is not God that we understand. But we can know God and relate to God both as the “ground of our being” and as a person like us. The more we enter into our own being, our own depths, the more we come in contact with “Being”, that is, with God. Augustine again: “Late have I loved you, O Beauty so ancient and so new; late have I loved you! For behold you were within me, and I outside; and I sought you outside and in my ugliness fell upon those lovely things that you have made. You were with me and I was not with you. I was kept from you by those things.”
Post published in: Faith