Week 2: Stillness
I sat down to pray last week and lasted about forty-five seconds before I started creating to-do's in my head.
That’s usually how it goes. The moment we try to be still, we discover how loud it is in there. Thoughts, worries, lists, regrets, plans. The mind doesn’t want to stop.
This is not failure. This is exposure. We're noticing what's been humming underneath all along.
But there's something else beneath the noise. Silence is how we get there.
Many of us have inherited a story about distance. God is far away. Heaven is above, and we are below. The spiritual life is about climbing, reaching up, and bridging the gap between our unworthiness and God's perfection.
Yet the Christmas story tells a different story. God came down.
I've been holding a question that changed the shape of my faith: what if the incarnation (God becoming human in Jesus) isn't God's emergency response to human failure? Some of the earliest and most influential voices in the tradition taught that Christ would have come even without things going wrong. The incarnation is the goal, the fulfillment of creation itself. God didn't create at a distance and then reluctantly bridge the gap. God created toward union. The whole arc bends in this direction.
This matters because it shifts the emotional register of everything. If God came to fix a problem, we are fundamentally broken. If God was always coming, we are fundamentally beloved. The first framing produces anxiety. The second produces rest.
The Franciscan teacher Richard Rohr writes, "Most of us understandably start the journey assuming that God is 'up there' and our job is to transcend this world to find 'him.' We spend so much time trying to get 'up there' that we miss that God's big leap in Jesus was to come 'down here.'"
The direction is down. Into matter. Into flesh. Into the ordinary. Into here.
Immanuel means “God is with us.” Not above us, issuing instructions. Not behind us, cleaning up our messes. Not ahead of us, waiting at the finish line to see whether we make it. With us. In the middle of it.
Something shifts when silence stops being about reaching up toward a distant God and becomes settling down into a presence that's already here. Noise has been covering it. Silence lets us find it.
What’s beneath the chatter?
See you at the gathering
Session Recording
Lectio Divina: Psalm 46:10
Be still, and know that I am God.
Be still, and know that I am
Be still, and know
Be still
Be
