Stillness.. Quiet..... Peace.....Lots of it. Lots and lots of it. It has been a couple of quiet weeks. I started getting anxious. "Father, is there something more I should be doing?" I asked God. Busy is good. According to my recent hospital volunteer training in culturally competent care, I learned that Americans consider busy-ness to signify importance. (As in "Love to talk with you now, but gotta run. I am very important.") It follows that busy-ness is second to the I-gotta-fix-it drive. Although I thought the I-gotta-fix-it approach was a guy thing, I started seeing how these two elements were part of my operating system and they were jamming it up. I am not busy - I could make myself so, but that is not the point. I have little to fix. I have fixed most everything and little is coming my way to fix. Hmmmm. I thought. Not busy. Little to fix. SO then who am I? I started thinking about patience. It didn't start off well. I reasoned that if I can tolerate patience for a while, then later, I get to be busy and do stuff. I moved on to thinking that if I get the right thinking thing down, double that with the patience, then I get to go somewhere. OK, I needed another angle.
I think the point may be to get beyond a busy life to a meaningful life. When I kayaked, we had a name for those who stayed in the calm waters of the eddy, waiting to figure out how to do a rapid -- sometimes waiting for long periods of time. We called them "eddy flowers." Being an eddy flower was an anxious thing to be. You could get swamped by indecision, doubt and grow increasingly intimidated by the rapid ahead of you. Far better it was to determine your course and just do it. In fact, that is how I have handled most of my life. See. Pray. Do. Quickly, efficiently, full throttle. The "aha" thought came today that now, in this quiet time, there is actually lots of life going on. Perhaps I am not in the eddy at all, but am flowing along with the current of life. Perhaps it is a new river, and instead of being a roaring class IV, it is a calm class I-II, teeming with life and gorgeous every splash of the way. As I am typing now, my family is going about their usual Saturday routine, and I am looking out over a stand of birch, maple and pine trees with big, fat snowflakes falling. This is the epitome of pleasantness. In the quiet of the last few mornings, I had a distinct thought about someone I love very much. Although I would never suspect that this person would ask for healing through prayer - through Christian Science treatment, I thought through how I would pray for this person if called on. I opened my favorite book on prayer and healing, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy, randomly fell on some ideas and started praying. The next day, I was told this person was in the emergency room. I went to visit him and he commented that he was going to call me to ask for treatment the night before. We talked and what he shared made me realize that in the quiet of those few days, I had been mentally preparing to be of help to him. There was never a moment lost. Here are some wonderful bits about presentness, moments and stillness. "The present moment holds infinite riches beyond your wildest dreams but you will only enjoy them to the extent of your faith and love. The more a soul loves, the more it longs, the more it hopes, the more it finds. The will of God is manifest in each moment, an immense ocean which only the heart fathoms insofar as it overflows with faith, trust and love." Jean-Pierre De Caussade in The Sacrament of the Present Moment "Yet more and more I find that dwelling in the present moment, in the face of everything that would call us out of it, is our highest spiritual discipline. More boldly, I would say that our very presentness is our salvation; the present moment, entered into fully, is our gateway to eternal life." Philip Simmons in Learning to Fall "Rushing around smartly is no proof of accomplishing much."
--Mary Baker Eddy in Miscellaneous Writings I am in my right place. God has graciously given this to me. Abundance. Potential. Gratitude. Grace. Stillness. This is what fills my days. |
