Wilderness Theology

”The Grace to Go Nowhere” was the theme of Charles Marsh’s seminar exploring the Christian disciplines of holy silence and stillness; disciplines which are often neglected but which bring balance and perspective to the active life.  We were refreshed and renewed in one of the most beautiful settings on earth: the Wind River Mountains of Wyoming.  Days were spent on hikes, horseback rides, fly fishing expeditions and leisurely naps.  Evenings were filled with thoughtful discussions, seminars and informal fellowship.

Ring Lake Ranch is a Christian renewal center for all ages just east of Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks. Explore the Ring Lake Ranch website and you’ll be hooked: www.ringlake.org.  If you are interested in being notified about upcoming Horizons seminars at Ring Lake Ranch, email us at info@theologicalhorizons.org.

Learning to Be Still in a Nation of Busy Believers

by Charles Marsh

A Sermon Preached at St. John’s Episcopal Church

Jackson Hole, Wyoming, July 10, 2005

I have to come Wyoming to lead a seminar at Ring Lake Ranch.  The seminar is called “The Grace to Go Nowhere,” and our focus is the importance of stillness in the Christian life, an exploration of that astonishing passage in the Psalms: “Be still and know that I am God” [46:10] 

Our concern is to ask how the gift of stillness, and along with it, the disciplines of waiting and silence enrich our active lives and inform moral action?

Stillness is not something that comes easy to most of us.  Most of us don’t live lives of serene Wyoming-wilderness stillness; rather we live lives of extreme busyness—of frenetic motion, frenzy and distress. We run shuttle services for our children; and we network; we email; we multi-task; we manage; we orchestrate.  We keep at it furiously even though we have long forgotten what “it” is beyond some vague notion of winning the prize, though we have also long forgotten what the prize is, and in fact, many of us have realized that there is no end to all our activity.

We live lives of movement and of flight. Yet when we look back across the vast and rich literature of the Christian tradition, we may be surprised to discover that stillness, and with it silence, quietness and patience, are qualities of experience that lie at the heart of Christian devotion.

Indeed they are qualities that are ingredient to the nature of God; which you see throughout the theological tradition. Theresa of Avila, in her work on mystical theology, The Interior Castle, describes the soul’s most intimate relationship with God as a place of “deepest silence”.  Yet when the soul is brought into this “Mansion of stillness”, the soul is “strengthened” and “equipped”.

In his classic text on Christian community, Life Together, Dietrich Bonhoeffer speaks of a stillness “before the Word” and a silence that “comes from the Word.” 

He affirms the spiritual discipline of a listening silence; a silence that brings “purification, clarification, and concentration upon the essential thing”.  “Real silence, real stillness, really holding one’s tongue comes only as the sober consequence of spiritual stillness.” [79]

But what about this matter of stillness?

Isn’t it an easy step from stillness to quietism, and from the withdrawal from responsible action in the world.  There has emerged in recent years a whole body of popular and new age literature devoted to being still and receptive and attuned to one’s inner life, most of which seems unaware of its narcissism or privilege. 

I grew up in the American South during the 1960’s, and most of my fellow church people were altogether still when it came to matters of racial justice and civil rights.  And in the American south, faced with the demands of justice and mercy, most of us in opted for the country club, summer cotillions and segregated churches, for serene detachment.

 Much of work as a scholar and writer is a result of the haunting memory of my evangelical childhood in MS that we acted with supreme indifference—with contemptuous stillness--towards the sufferings of African Americans under the oppressive rule of Jim Crow. 

Stillness can be a polite form of entitlement or self-indulgence.

This is not the stillness of which the Psalmist speaks; this is not the stillness that knows God, the stillness that brings concentration upon the essential thing.

Martin Luther King, Jr., in the early weeks of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, reached a place when he felt he had become a complete failure in his leadership of the protest against segregated buses.  One night in late January 1956, Dr. King returned to his parsonage after a long day of organizing meetings and from the ordeal of his first arrest and incarceration.  He was exhausted.  His wife Coretta and their two-month old daughter, Yolanda, were already asleep, and King wanted nothing more than to join them.  But then the phone rang, and when King lifted the receiver, he heard a gravely drawl release a torrent of obscene words and then a death threat. 

Threatening phone calls had become a daily routine in the weeks of the protests, but there was something about this call, mingled with his exhaustion and growing despair, that felt deeply unsettling.

So King gave up on sleep, and walked down the hall to the kitchen and made himself a pot of coffee.

In the silence of the midnight kitchen, in the deep silences of the Alabama night, King felt himself reeling within, like the Psalmist said, his soul "melted because of trouble, at wit's end".  "I couldn't take it any longer,” King wrote in his memoir.  “I was weak."

With his head buried in his hands, King bowed over the kitchen table and prayed aloud.  "Lord, I'm down here trying to do what's right.  I still think I'm right.  I am here taking a stand for what I believe is right.  But Lord, I must confess that I'm weak now, I'm faltering.  I'm losing my courage.  Now, I am afraid.  I am at the end of my powers.  I have nothing left.  I've come to the point where I can't face it alone."

As his prayer folded the silent room and house, King heard a voice saying, "Martin Luther, stand up for righteousness.  Stand up for justice.  Stand up for truth.  And lo, I will be with you.  Even until the end of the world."  King heard the voice of Jesus.

“I heard the voice of Jesus saying still to fight on.  He promised never to leave me, never to leave me alone.  No never alone.  No never alone.  He promised never to leave me, never to leave me alone."  And as the voice washed over horrible effects of the threatening caller, King reached a spiritual shore beyond fear and apprehension. 

"I experienced the presence of the Divine as I had never experienced Him before," he said.  "Almost at once my fears began to go," King said of the midnight flash of illumination and resolve.  "My uncertainty disappeared.  I was ready to face anything."

King waited on God in silence of the midnight kitchen, and he was given strength and vision for the hard work ahead.  The Movement emerged out of a deep spiritual stillness.

There is a stillness that concentrates moral energy; a stillness that clarifies vision, that teaches us to listen anew, to learn what it might mean to live with others more as a participant in the drama of creation and the work of justice than as manipulators, calculators and consumers.

Do you remember that wonderful passage in Psalm 27: 14:  ‘Wait for the Lord; be strong, and let your heart take courage; wait for the Lord!”

Here we are admonished to be strong and to take heart; but strength and power are understood in the context of waiting on the Lord.

In fact, the Psalm contains a number of images that connect the discipline of stillness with the holiness of the Lord;

                 dwelling in the house

                 gazing upon God’s beauty

                 seeking God in his temple

                 keeping safe in his dwelling

                 hiding in the shelter of his tabernacle

In all of these images, the sense is learning to partake in God’s holiness; to accept his goodness and his love as a gift that comes to us from a country far from our own. 

In his remarkable Pensees, the great French theologian Pascal said that all of our problems could be solved by learning how to sit quietly in a room.

As a father of three children, I have come to realize that so often I respond to my children’s needs by producing more activity, more busyness, more stuff.  But if I listen closely, I most often come to realize that all they really want is me.  To be with me.

We may try to orchestrate the work of the Kingdom and seek to impose our cleverness on the spirit; but God says wait; the thing I want most is your simple, grateful acceptance of my love.  Unless you place yourself within this truth, you will accomplish nothing.

Let us accept the grace to be still, and to wait on God, and for it is only out of the stillness of God that our lives find their true strength; that our souls will be equipped and strengthened for the challenging work of the present time and for the uncertain years ahead.