Be Still

By Rev. Elizabeth Rechter, Executive Director

What is pandemic life teaching me about myself, about my communities, about my world? I asked this often in the first few months of the COVID lockdown. And then I had to ask myself as months turned into a year. What is the pandemic teaching us now? And today with the Delta Variant bearing down on us, deeper still into this challenging time, what is it teaching us NOW?

One of the greatest lessons I have received has come from Stillpoint’s daily Centering Prayer community on Zoom. I know I am not alone in this. The earth is now full of online prayer chapels open anytime day or night in any time zone! A beautiful new creation.  

Our practice from 5:30-6:00 p.m. Monday thru Friday brought me to greater depths of contemplative prayer. From this daily practice, I was learning a deep version of sabbath keeping. At the root of the gift of Sabbath is resting in being, not doing. It is setting down for a time any kind of producing, accomplishing, fixing, worrying. I became aware that my thoughts were my greatest labor; the place I wander into the kingdom of me and my agenda, my fantasies, my anxieties, most readily. 

It’s very, very simple.

You sit, and allow your heart to open toward that invisible but always present Origin of all that exists. Whenever a thought comes into your mind, you simply let the thought go and return to that open, silent attending upon the depths.  Not because thinking is bad, but because it pulls you back to the surface of yourself. + Cynthia Bourgeault 

With the pandemic life coursing through my mind, body and spirit, this was a space to stop regularly. For these twenty minutes I could rest in my most primary identity, not as a doer but as a child of the Divine. Everyday this community accompanied me home to myself. During these  twenty minutes periods, fears and anxiety are released for a moment. Sometimes sabbath comes in the nano second between one thought and another.  My anxious voice is replaced with an even more ancient refrain, whether I live or I die, I am the Lord’s. 

However we observe Sabbath, it protects us. Without making the break from doing, little by little we forget who we are. We can lose the connection to our truest nature, our divine nature. We lose connection to ourselves. Our being is threatened, and we begin to be defined by something that is not the whole of who we are. We begin to be defined by our other identities: job, agendas, parenting, thoughts, anxieties, culture, ego. 

Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann thinks of sabbath keeping as a resistance movement. The Sabbath rest of God is the acknowledgment that God and God’s people in the world are not commodities to be dispatched for endless production, rather they are subjects situated in an economy of neighborliness. Indeed, such divine rest serves to delegitimate and dismantle the endless restlessness (anxiety) sanctioned by the other gods and enacted by their adherents. Sabbath as Resistance. Westminster John Knox Press. 

Be still and know that I am God. -Psalm 46

The psalmist says being still is where we will know God. I am so intrigued with the wisdom within the word still. It isn’t simply being quiet, for we know how loud our thoughts can be. Not be prayerful or attentive, which can be work, but be still. One Hebrew definition of still is: to mend (by stitching), i.e. (figuratively) to cure: (cause to) heal, repair, thoroughly, make whole. 

Stillness is hard for many of us. What a good thing to learn about ourselves. If we can’t be still for a few moments something else is running our life. 

We need not wait until our day off, or vacation, or a retreat day. There are many doors into practicing sabbath. The gift of sabbath can be received in small sips and still do its mending.

Finally, we remember that sabbath keeping was not just for the human community or for personal enlightenment. It serves the whole creative order. All creation benefits from sabbath. When we are mending at the level of sabbath keeping, the whole creation is being mended. Spiritual work is always collective.  

Don’t judge centering prayer on the basis of how many thoughts come or how much peace you enjoy. The only way to judge this prayer is by its long-range fruits: whether in daily life you enjoy greater peace, humility and charity. Having come to deep interior silence, you begin to relate to others beyond the superficial aspects of social status, race, nationality, religion, and personal characteristics. - Thomas Keating

Blessings for The Journey, 

Elizabeth+

Resources: 

Stillpoint Centering Prayer 5:30-6:00 p.m. Monday- Friday.  https://stillpointca.org/still-points (a seat is saved for you.)

Keating Meditation Chapel: Pray in silence with practitioners from all over the world. Centering Prayer groups are forming on this global video platform of online meditation groups.

MOBILE APP: You can find the FREE app in the the iTunes App Store or the Google Play Store if you have an Android; search for Centering Prayer, select the one by Contemplative Outreach. 

Cynthia Bourgeault, Centering Prayer and Inner Awakening

Peter Traben Haas, Centering Prayers: A One-Year Daily Companion for Going Deeper into the Love of God