Grace in Stillness

Wakeful long after midnight, I looked out in the early hours to see frost forming in the air between the trees, over the grassy bank above the reservoir: little clouds and tendrils of mist sparkling where the last few lights still burning caught them aslant, like some gift of stillness…

I picked up my phone, and quickly noted down these few words, somehow trying to remember what I’d seen. It was quite warm in the room, and yet the still cold touched me with a kind of grace. Things are not the same in an air frost, without becoming. Silence is not the absence of noise, merely, but the place where change is, before things change, or else remain. It is only necessary, and the hardest thing, to keep very still.

Dionysius, known as the Areopagite, wrote

...the mysteries of God's Word

lie simple, absolute and unchangeable

in the brilliant darkness of a hidden silence.

Amid the deepest shadow

they pour overwhelming light

on what is most manifest.

Amid the wholly unsensed and unseen

they completely fill our sightless minds

with treasures beyond all beauty.

We don’t often think of scripture in terms like this. Our minds (mine is, at least) are so often full of critical preconceptions, scraps of imperfectly digested doctrine, the wrack and spindrift of credal formulae, that we can’t listen in stillness. It is written in Psalm 119, “Your word, Lord, is eternal; it stands firm in the heavens. Your faithfulness continues through all generations…” (Ps 119.89-90 NIV) It is only when we keep still enough that we can make any sense of passages like this, or indeed Psalm 46.10, “Be still and know that I am God…”

Only when something like this happens, and we are awake in the night and we stumble, half-sleeping, across the grace of stillness can we open our hearts to these “treasures of darkness” (Isaiah 45.3 NRSV). Or else we take up the quiet yoke of some discipline like lectio divina or Gospel contemplation. Otherwise, the rattling of our minds’ junkyards will always keep us from hearing, and we’ll miss the place from which John’s opening words make sense, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him…” (John 1.1-3 NRSV)

[Also published on Silent Assemblies]