Recital of Love. Keren Dibbens-Wyatt

with the fullness of compassion and tenderness only a constantly breaking heart can give.

       Selah

       Stillness

      STILLNESS IS NOT AN ENFORCED POSITION. I make no one go there solely of my volition or against theirs. Like silence, and the listening that makes it come alive, stillness is a place of discovery. It teaches who I am and you are not. It enables you to notice. There is glory and goodness all around, in every atom, every whisper of the wind, every creature’s song.

      Here in the paying attention of doing nothing is where you will find me, if you find me anywhere. Not in your heart or soul, not in a voyage of self-discovery or enlightenment, but by casting out the grandiose and sitting in stillness. Here everything worthwhile is louder, brighter, more evident.

      Giving up your masks and your illusion of control, admitting you live in a universe beyond your feeble understanding, this is the place to begin to know me. For which of you could manufacture one sparrow’s wing? Or the perfect spiral of a snail’s shell, grown over time to be trampled on gleefully by the unthinking? Could you make one stalk, one blade of grass, in all its intricacy? Can you create life and greening? Or is it I who do this?

      Sitting in the silent running of stillness this question is not difficult to answer. For here you must face the truth of your inadequacies, and the yearning in your heart for something, someone, greater than yourself. Instead of wanting to know, you will want there to be someone who knows. Instead of desiring control, you will want someone greater, someone kinder, someone magnificent to be in control. You will see how much further beyond you everything is—further than you ever imagined. Further than they ever taught you in school or in church. For it is one thing to think you can cast mountains into the sea (whoever did this, and might you lower yourself to metaphor?), but quite another to remove specks from eyes.

      In the stillness you will see how much the smallness of things matters, how much I care for each one. Life is an expression of being—my being, my wisdom, my glory—and in the stillness you will start to peek round corners at yourself and see your tiny part in it all. You will not balk at your own smallness, for such it is. You will learn only to acknowledge it before me. This is what saved Job, this insight, this perception of God and his creation. Once you begin to acknowledge, to accept what I am capable of, what I have done, what I am doing, what I might choose to do, and with what forethought, care, and precision, with what wisdom and love, with what truth, beauty, and reckless abandon, encased in beautiful order I do it, then you will trust me and begin to know me and seek me out.

      And it is here we begin, in almost totally losing sight of yourself, one tree in a plethora of forested worlds, looking beyond to the Source of Life.

       Selah

       Spirit