Psalm 46

There is an insight about internal peace and stillness by Blaise Pascal, the French philosopher, mathematician, and scientist, written in the 17th century, that sounds as if it were written for us:

All men’s miseries derive from not being able to sit in a quiet room alone.

Although we might think our internal busy­ness and agitation is a 21st century phenomenon, a result of our busy and harried lives, back in the sixteen hundreds people were having the same problem—they found it nearly impossible to sit quietly, and alone, in a room. I would guess that none of us have ever been taught about silence. The curriculum of life in our culture does not have this as a priority. Certainly we did not learn silence in the home as children. Generally, homes with children are very noisy places. The children are told to keep quiet but they are not taught how to be silent.

We certainly did not learn about it in school. Until a generation ago, we were told to sit still for a Bible reading every day at school, but that is not the same as understanding how to be silent. I wish that every teacher would learn about silence, and that every morning before classes start the teachers would teach their students how to be quiet inside. I guarantee if that were to happen this would be a very different country, a very different world.

Even in our religious education there is little or no teaching, especially in the Western religions, about silence—except for the Quakers.

On the contrary, it seems that our society today promotes and celebrates loudness. From time to time I will go to with a friend to a restaurant patronized primarily by young people, and we are always intrigued and perplexed by the experience. When we walk inside the music is so high-decibel that it isn’t in the background at all. We see all these enthusiastic young people, fully engaged in conversation. There is laughter, animated exchanges—it all seems very meaningful to them. Yet when we sit down at our table, we can hardly hear each other. Occasionally, we will ask to have the volume of the music turned down a bit so we can talk, and the waiter will give us a strange look before doing it, as if unable to imagine why we would make that request. By the time we leave we feel wrung out, but everybody else in there is stimulated and excited. We don’t understand it.

Some years ago, on a trip to England, I learned something quite dramatic about silence. It was a beautiful August evening; I was staying at a 300-year old English country inn, a very picturesque place. That night as I went to bed I opened the window, turned off the light and crawled under the covers. Then I realized I was encountering something I had desired and dreamed about for a long, long time—to be in a place which was absolutely, completely, totally quiet for a long period of time.

I had thought how wonderful it would be. Now, here I was in that moment. There were no highway or road sounds. There were no move­ments of water, a roaring brook or stream, as so often happens near country inns. There was no wind in the trees. There were no katydids—no sound at all outside. Inside, there were no creaking floors, no refrigerator sounds, no air-conditioning sounds, no radio, no television, nothing—absolute quiet. In moments like these, one can hear the silence.

Then I realized that my body was taut, my mind was tense and preoccupied. I was in a situation I had dreamed about, and I couldn’t enjoy it. I didn’t know what to do with it.

Can you relate to this experience? How can we learn to accept and make use of the so-brief moments of pure quiet we are given? Trying to understand, I first turned to some of the great minds through the centuries to see what they say. For instance, Pythagoras, a Greek philosopher from 500 BC:

Learn to be silent. Let your quiet mind listen and absorb.

It would be wonderful if for five or ten minutes a day we could let our quiet minds listen and absorb, but if you have ever tried it, you know it is hard. We do not have the time, we say, and yet, if I have multiplied correctly, there are one thousand, four hundred and forty minutes in a day. If we were able to take five or ten minutes of that time to be in quiet, to be silent, we would be healthier physically, mentally, and spiritually. We would be angry less often, and when we were angry we would use our anger more creatively. Our decisions would be more rational and sensible. We would have a better sense of priority. We would be much happier people, because we would be grounded in quiet.

What does Scripture say about our need for silence? You might spend a little time with the 46th Psalm. The key phrase in that psalm for me is in the tenth verse: “Be still and know that I am God.” In the stillness is the experience of God. The rest of the psalm is about tumult, turmoil, conflict and confrontation—the noises of life—yet God, says the psalmist, can still be found. “Be still,” God says, “and know that I am God.”

The prophet Isaiah, in chapter thirty, verse fifteen, says, “In quietness and in trust shall be your strength.” God is in the midst of the quiet; when we are quiet God penetrates our consciousness. The natural result of God’s presence in us is that we are strengthened, we are centered and grounded, we are stronger. We have a better sense of balance. Our strength comes from being in the quietness and trusting that God is present.

Yet even understanding that our strength is in quietness, staying there is hard to do. We need to take baby steps, one minute a day, two minutes a day, three minutes a day. Then we build up to five, to seven, to ten or fifteen. As we begin to dwell in quietness even one or two minutes a day, we are going to experience the sweet hour of prayer—the sweetness of that moment—and we will begin to experience the power in that moment. We will feel the strength of the relationship with God. After a while our minds, our emotions, our bodies, our souls will demand this precious time, so that we cannot live without it.

This whole process starts most successfully using baby steps. I wish I had started with baby steps in my prayer journey, because there were many, many years when I had no discipline, no focused prayer. I was in high school the first time I really wanted to have a prayer life, but my prayers were hit or miss. I knew I needed to pray, and I had an intention to pray. But when I prayed it was usually the result of needing God’s help because I was scared about flunking an exam, or I was fighting with a girlfriend, or in trouble with my parents.

Most times I would get some kind of good answer to the prayer, but then I would forget to thank God. When the next problem came up I would feel guilty about approaching God again: “I didn’t thank You before, but I thank You this time. Please give me another chance.” The whole process was slipshod, with no focus.

When I went to college, I decided that once and for all I would learn how to pray. That was the epitome of naïveté—how many of us learn how to pray in college? I was going on to seminary and there, I was sure, I would finally learn. But in seminary, although there was a lot of teaching and talking and sharing about prayer, and I learned about prayer, I didn’t learn how to do it for myself.

After graduating from seminary I was assigned to pastor three little churches in the Catskill Mountains. Now that I had my own ministry, I felt sure I would finally accomplish my goal. It was June; the weather was warm and beautiful. I got up with the sun the first morning. I was going to emulate my heroes—Martin Luther, and the great reformer John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist Church. They had prayed for an hour a day! According to their own description, when they had had difficult problems to deal with they would pray even longer.

So I was going to pray an hour a day, starting that day, and I went into my little study with my Bible and I started to pray. I did not last five minutes. Of course, I had a lot of excuses. I tried again the next day, with the same result, and the day after that. I just kept fumbling around like this for a long time. I wish now that I had taken baby steps—just a minute at a time and then two minutes and three minutes and five minutes, as I can do now.

In your prayer journey, go into the silence, a minute at a time. Go into the quiet one step at a time until it becomes so commanding and compelling that it begins to carry you.

Scripture is such a great teacher, such an extraordinary source of understanding of the great silence where God dwells, and how we can rest ourselves there. A passage you probably know is from the twenty-third psalm:

The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. He makes me lie down in green pastures. He leads me beside the still water. He restores my soul.

Visualize yourself lying down in soft grass on a warm summer day and seeing the birds circling in the sky, feeling the breeze on your cheeks, relaxed, at ease. You are lying near water, very deep and still. You begin to feel restored and healed, just as being in the silence of God restores and heals us.

This past week has been so busy I have been in need of a restoring silence. Any preacher can tell you that often during the week of preparation for Sunday’s sermon, it appears God is testing to see if the preacher is really going to get into the subject. For instance, if I am going to preach on love, events during the week will confront me with the need to be more loving. Whatever my subject—faith, forgiveness—I will be tested.

Today’s subject is being still, so I had three days in the middle of the week which were horrendously demanding and busy, particularly with telephone calls. One of the innovations of the modern era—the conference call—is both a blessing and a curse. It’s another meeting! Some­times they go on and on and on. Decisions have to be made, and annoying and irritating details keep piling up, all needing attention. I was getting strung out and weary.

So I looked for help. Where to go for help at a time like this? I go to the One who is the Lord of my life; I go to Jesus. I thought of the words He said to His disciples: “My peace I give to you. Not as the world gives, give I to you. Let not your hearts be troubled, neither let them be afraid.” Reading this helped a bit, but I needed to look further.

Then I thought of one of our church’s new stained-glass windows, given by Valery Craane. It shows Jesus with His disciples in a boat tossed by violent waves.

You know the story. Jesus had been in the back of the boat sleeping when a sudden squall whipped up. The boat was being tossed and blown about, and the disciples were afraid they were going to die. In a panic, they woke Jesus and asked for His help. The stained-glass window shows Jesus standing in the boat with His hands out. He is saying, “Peace. Be still.”

In the story as told in Scripture, instantly the wind stopped and the waves calmed. Then Jesus turned to the disciples and asked, “Where is your faith?” I began to command myself, “Peace, be still. Peace, be still,” and the words started to penetrate just a little bit.

Then came to mind a story about Sir William Osler, the great physician and teacher at John Hopkins, and his advice to his tired and stressed-out medical students. He said, “Learn to live in day-tight compartments.” What is a day-tight compartment? You know what a water-tight compartment is. You put some water in a jar, screw on the lid, and when you tip it over the water doesn’t leak out. Osler instructed his students to circle each twenty-four-hour period and live within that period, with their full focus and energy. If a day seemed too overwhelming, he suggested circling an hour.

I have learned to do that, but I take five-minute segments: “Lord, help me to get through the next five minutes.” So I did that, and I felt the peace begin to come around me.
It may not be easy to learn to be still, to find peace, but it is possible. We can learn to become quiet if we are patient with ourselves, and take baby steps toward dwelling in the silent peace of God. Let us pray.

Lord, in the challenges of life, the confrontations, battles and noise, we ask You to help us take baby steps, so we can find peace; and in that peace we will find the ultimate relationship with You. Amen.