Now there is the sitting with it

November 3, 2023

(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)

Now there is the sitting with it

Mindful of the world’s dangers

and sorrows I walk.

I could go straight down to the pond

but I take the long way through the woods,

the yellow trees, apostles of the centuries,

holding their arms out over me,

the little brook sewing its way through them.

My path is narrow, made by walking it

over and over, in all kinds of weather. – Steve Garnaas-Holmes

On the one hand, there are the many fascinating, frightening and exhilarating stories about the world around us. On the other, there is the quiet breeze, the nearly silent ripple on the lake, the blue sky freckled with small white clouds, and the rainbow, all silent or nearly so. All quiet.

Here are three poems by Steve Garnaas-Holmes, posted on three successive days, written out there in the quiet places.

Woods

The quiet of the woods

is not your regular quiet,

not empty-room quiet,

 

but a full quiet, still to the brim,

quiet held in soil grown over ages,

filtered by leaves and feathers,

 

a quiet fermented by eons of rain,

the quiet of birdcall and snowfall

and snowmelt and sun,

 

a stillness shielded by trees

even whose young ones

are older and wiser than we,

 

whose roots silently ponder

what is below, and know

without saying,

 

a quiet held in the owl’s gaze,

who sees your quietness

which flourishes within you

 

hugely, agelessly,

growing in you

as silently as a mushroom.

Desert

The quiet of the desert

isn’t harsh or punishing,

not lonely or lacking, but pure,

 

the quiet of everything to be said

having been said

and now there is the sitting with it,

 

the quiet of stones and their stories,

and even the storms, who bear witness

without words, and then pass,

 

the quiet when all has been sanded away,

the removal of everything but this,

and the presence that fills the silence

 

with silence, the stillness of this,

and its being enough,

as are you.

 

Mountain

The quiet of the mountain top

is not the muteness

of having been taken from the world,

 

but the quiet of all of it, gathered:

the embrace of sky and horizon,

the murmuring of cities and rivers below,

 

the world and all its little stories,

the ages and generations,

the wars and tender moments,

 

all you look down on,

seen and unseen,

and what you have left

 

and your climbing,

all gathered together

in the quietness of this gaze,

 

the gaze of God,

who does not think or judge,

but loves without words.

Steve’s love affair with God, and with words, mirrors mine. God goes further, emptying himself wordlessly into all of nature and into us. When we look toward God, we see only an empty place where God once was, before he gave himself up for us. We might call that look the apophatic gaze, because whatever we see besides the empty is, as Augustine told us, NOT God.

How do I handle this unpredictable void? God is not here, he is risen! I think my best bet is to pray as I have learned to pray, with prayers of Adoration, Confession, Thanksgiving and Supplication (ACTS), and then be still and say nothing, remembering that all my prayers are not the point.

What matters is what God is praying for me, out of his silence, in the woods, down in the desert, up on the mountain.

Far out on the sea.

He has granted peace in your borders; with the best of wheat he fills you. He sends forth his command to the earth; swiftly runs his word!

(Romans 9, Psalm 147, John 10, Luke 14)

(posted at www.davesandel.net)

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