Rev. Tom Disrud

First Unitarian Church
Portland, Oregon

April 19, 1998

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When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
Wendell Berry

Do you notice on a hot summer day how much more aware you become of your movement? A walk would normally not be too taxing. But on a day when the sun is beating down, it can be a different story. You want to move toward the shade. Without much effort, you feel the sweet beads building up on your face.

At first it feels good to be out. The air is ripe with warmth. There’s a stillness, it hardly moves. But after a while, it may not be like that. You either want to wear fewer clothes, or none at all. The thought of some cool water suddenly splashes around in your mind.

You sit down, you see the glass of iced tea on the table before you. In the heat the beads of sweat roll down the glass. It, too, feels the impact of the heat. Before too long the outside of the glass seems to be as wet as the inside. The sight of it is refreshing.

On hot days, when it takes more effort to do things, it may be we simply want to be still. We don’t want to move if it will make it seem even warmer. We want to simply stay put. A qualifier may be necessary here. I know we’ve had some hot days in the Northwest, but I also know that they pale in comparison to other parts of the country right now.

But all this is some of what summer is about, wherever you are. It is a time when the days slow down. To be quiet. To enjoy the sunshine. To read a book. In summer we get out of our usual schedules. The office may close early. The kids are out of school. We take vacations. We try to relax.

In most of our lives, we are bombarded with sights and sounds. It can happen if we live alone and don’t have contact with many people or live lives that are heavily scheduled. The sights and sounds may come from the television, the radio, from the street outside our home, or from the e- mail we tune into after work in the evenings or from the regular pile of mail that comes our way day by day.

In this barrage of images, stillness seems to be a rare commodity. When is it we just stay put, content with what we have around us, not wanting to move on to something else?

Even when we choose the images coming at us, they are not often all that satisfying. They are simply there, and we get used to them. We start to tune out of the nuances of life, because we have so many things coming our way.

Finding that quality of stillness, where we are able to be receptive to the subtleties of life around us is not easy.

A couple weeks ago I was in Midwest, in the area I grew up. Driving around the farm country of southwestern Wisconsin, I was struck by the beauty of the rolling hills and the small farms that dot those hills. The red barns and the patchwork of green crops create a wonderful spectrum of colors against the blue sky.

Time here seems to move a little slower. When you get behind a slow-moving tractor on a narrow country road, you can choose to go slowly and enjoy the scenery or get upset. In my life I’ve tended to do the latter. On this trip, I found the surroundings seemed to encourage the former.

Driving these roads, I was taken back to some of the times I spent as a child. I remember playing by the creek that ran by my family’s cheese factory. I remember seeing the changes in life as the seasons went by. I remember playing in the grass with my dogs. I remember the sense of time as something that was endless.

It was time where noise was kept to a minimum. It was time to imagine and think about things and to wonder about the world.

All to often these days, it seems life is full of things. Full of calls, full of traffic. Full of things to do. It is easy to get caught up in this business. To rush from one thing to another and not really stop and be present. Our lives can come have too much commotion, and we lose something in this.

The commotion may not be all the satisfying. It may be we are running from thing to thing but not really doing much. Our imaginations are not what they could be.

The writer Kathleen Norris tells a story in her book entitled Amazing Grace. Over the years she worked as an artist in elementary schools in North Dakota. She devised an exercise for the children about noise and silence. She would make a deal with them—first they get to make noise and then they would make silence.

The rules for the noise were simple. When she would raise her hand, they could make all the noise they wanted while sitting at their desks using their mouths, hands and feet. Norris tells about how their eyes would grow wide with these instructions, so she would add: “the important thing is that when I lower my hand, you have to stop.”

The rules for silence were just as simple. Kids couldn’t hold their breaths or make funny faces. After a couple tries, Norris found, the children were able to become still and the silence became a presence in the classroom.

Some of the children loved it, asking to do it again. Others were not so sure. One fifth grader said it was scary for him. When asked why, he said: “It’s like we’re waiting for something—it’s scary!”

Norris said what was so interesting is how the silence liberated the imagination of the children. When making noise, most of the images they came up with were clichés. They were not that creative. But in the silence, there was a different quality to their writing. The silence seemed to make them go deeper and to be more creative.

Said one third grader: “Silence is like spiders spinning their webs, it’s like a silkworm making its silk. Lord, help me to know when to be silent.”

And another girl offered this wisdom: “Silence reminds me to take my soul with me wherever I go.”

From the silence comes a deeper sense of soul. Of our being and awareness.

Henry David Thoreau wrote:

There were times when I could not afford
to sacrifice the bloom of the present moment
to any work, whether of head or hands.
Sometimes, on a summer morning,
having taken my accustomed bath,
I sat in my sunny doorway
from sunrise till noon, rapt in a reverie,
amidst the pines and hickories and sumachs,
in undisturbed solitude and stillness,
while the birds sang around.
I grew in those seasons
like corn in the night,
and they were far better
than any work of the hands would have been.
They were not time subtracted from my life,
but so much over and above my usual allowance.

Thoreau, of course, was able to go live in the woods for a time. For most of us, that may not be an option, even if we want it to be. But he does touch on that quality in life that stillness can bring to us.

His words call forth the question of how is it we choose to order our lives? What is it we do with our time? What are the things that are the most important to us?

A story.

A couple weeks ago when I was in Wisconsin, I visited my favorite aunt, my aunt Helen and my uncle George. She lives in the town I grew up in, a small farming town that doesn’t change too much.

Her life is a simple one. She and my uncle George don’t go out much, except trips a few miles from home. She has arthritis, and this keeps her from a very active life.

During the summer, the Chicago Cubs are very important to aunt Helen. If there’s a game on TV when I arrive, that will be part of the visit. In fact the TV is usually on. It is something that over time I come to expect. When I was little, for some reason I have memories of the Merv Griffin show being on.

Well, this year I came for my visit. It had been a couple years and it was really good to see aunt Helen and uncle George. The had aged some, but looked good and their spirits were good, too.

When I arrived, as usual, the Cubs game was on TV. The sound was pretty loud. But I was happy to see them and didn’t pay much attention.

But during this visit something different happened. Aunt Helen actually took the remote control and turned off the TV. I was instantly aware of this. This was not what I was used to. It certainly made me feel like an honored guest and I wondered if my status in the world had somehow moved up. I think what it was really about was that she was glad to see me.

And as I look back on it I’m aware of the quality of our time together. It was precious. I sat on the floor playing with their two dogs. We talked about what was happening in our lives and the rest of the family. Aunt Margaret joined us a little while later. These were not monumental conversations about the state of the world, but simply time to be together. The time was good.

Turning off the TV was a little thing, but as I look back on the visit, it was also very meaningful. Living in another part of the country, I realize how important some relationships are in my life and how precious that time together is.

It helps me to see how easy it is to fill my time with stuff that isn’t all that lasting. It will probably be a couple years before another visit, and I want to make the most of the time we have.

How is it we choose to spend our time, whether it be alone or be with others?

When I look at my life, I wonder if sometimes it is easier to let the distractions keep me from relating on a deeper level. It may be we keep ourselves at arm’s length from nature. It may be from other people. And maybe that is easier.

In the old comic strip Calvin and Hobbes, Calvin is the ever wise 6-year-old and Hobbes is his toy tiger, very much alive in the mind of Calvin. In one strip, Hobbes says, looking philosophical, “When you’re confronted with the stillness of nature, you can even hear yourself think.”

Calvin responds, “This is making me nervous. Let’s go in.”

Sometimes it may just be more comfortable to be at a distance. Staying with the stillness might make us a little nervous. But the stillness and attention can bring great gifts. We can see things in new ways.

I once had the experience of being with a group that ate in silence. It was a group in seminary and we were experimenting with cooking and ritual. On this particular evening, we cooked a meal together and then ate the first part of the meal in silence. It seemed a little awkward at first. We had to get used to the sounds of the silverware hitting the plate and the sounds of chewing. We had to get used to a strange feeling of facing others around a table and deliberately not talking. This was a new way of relating. But something happened when we didn’t have the distraction of talk. We were together in a new way. I was aware of the texture of the food, how some things were crunchy and others were soft. The colors of the food seemed more vibrant as I looked at them in a different way. I thought of where the food came from, the hands that had prepared it. I was aware of all the flavors. I was aware how I instinctively slowed down my eating, and how good the food tasted.

I was suddenly doing this everyday activity with a lot more attention. I was opening myself to seeing something in a new and wonderful way. As I did this, I found that a door to the imagination seemed to open up.

The writer Stephen Graham says “as you sit on the hillside, or lie prone under the trees of the forest, or sprawl wet-legged on the beach of a mountain steam, the great door, that does not look like a door, opens.”

Life reveals itself in new ways, if we are open to seeing it.

The writer Doris Grumbach writes:

“Not long ago I was brought up short in church by the reading of the forty-sixth Psalm: “Be still, and know that I am God.” After that sentence, or better admonition, I heard little else. I thought about it for days afterward. It served as confirmation of what I have begun to sense, that it is not in activity, even charitable activity, or during communal recitations of prayers, or in the face of a beloved, or even in the omnipresence of the beauty of the world outside one’s windows, that one knows God, but in stillness. Staying put intrudes upon this reverie—to stay put is very hard, since we tend to equate movement with being alive. And yet staying where one has been put, in stillness, is perhaps the most alive one can become.”

This is echoed in the Hebrew scriptures, from the First Book of Kings:

But the Lord was not in the wind: and after the wind an earthquake; but the Lord was not in the earthquake: And after the earthquake a fire; but the Lord was not in the fire: and after the fire, a still, small voice.

In our culture of images and sensations, putting ourselves in a place to stay put can almost seem like an act of resistance. It can be a saying no to the dominant cultural message to keep busy, not matter what that business may look like.

But is essential to make choices about how we order our lives. The business can keep us from experiencing a deeper relationship with the beloved.

The buddhist Thich Nhat Hanh says:

Our true home is in the present moment.
To live in the present moment is a miracle.
The miracle is not to walk on water.
The miracle is to walk on the green earth,
to appreciate the peace and beauty that are available now.
Peace is all around us—
in the world and in nature—
and within us—
in our bodies and our spirits.
Once we learn to touch this peace,
we will be healed and transformed.
It is not a matter of faith;
it is a matter of practice.

How is it we order our lives? What do we want them to look like?

We have a challenge and an invitation. During these warm days of summer, may our practice be to find the stillness that can lead us to a deeper sense of life. May it be a stillness that we feel in our bodies and in our souls. And may it carry us to places we didn’t expect to go.

Amen.

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Copyright © 2000, Reverend Thomas Disrud. All rights reserved.