Stillness is not the absence of activity. It is its own discipline — one of the hardest the contemplative life asks of us. To stop. To wait. To let God be God without our help. This sonnet honors that slow, stubborn apprenticeship in being quiet.
The Sonnet
I had not known how hard it is to sit, To let the hands lie idle in my lap, To let the world go on without my wit, To rest without the steady, fevered tap. The body wants to move, the mind to plan, The day's demands rehearse their urgent call, And stillness feels like failure to a man Who learned to measure life by length of haul. But slowly, in the discipline of pause, A different kind of strength begins to grow, One that does not depend on outward cause, One that has learned a deeper way to know. So teach me, Lord, to keep this quiet art — The unmoved, listening posture of the heart.
Reflection
“Be still, and know that I am God,” the Psalmist writes. Be still — not as a suggestion, but as a command, and one that turns out to be far harder than the active commands. We can be busy for God all day. Stillness, we resist. It feels too much like doing nothing, too much like wasting time, too much like trusting that the world will keep turning without our anxious participation.
And yet stillness is what the soul most needs. It is in stillness that we hear what hurry drowns out. It is in stillness that we are reminded we are not the ones holding the world together. It is in stillness that God does His quietest, deepest work in us — work that no amount of effort on our part could accomplish.
Practice a little stillness today. Five minutes, ten if you can. Resist the urge to fill it. The God who built the Sabbath into creation knows what He is doing. Trust the quiet.
