Find a Stillness

Rev. Peggy Clarke, Senior Minister

February 19, 2023

 It’s been such a warm winter, it’s nearly been spring with the exception of maybe 4 days- Christmas, of course, when we were all standing outside wrapped in every winter item we could find, and one brutal weekend two weeks ago – and even then, there’s been no snow or ice to speak of. This week, it hit 70. The problem is, at least for me, that winter is the time I slow down. As a working mother with big obligations in many areas of my life, I’m busy all the time. I need winter to force a slow-down, and this year, I’ve been short-changed. Instead of the natural stay-inside response to freezing weather that slows things down after the holiday season, we went from the hustle and bustle of December singing Busy Sidewalks to actual busy sidewalks, and all the growth and productivity of springtime.

In the absence of that necessary and common winter slowdown, I’m offering instead this sermon. It’s meant to be a meditation on winter and stillness with the explicit invitation to just breathe through it, letting your body relax, letting your mind go. I promise not to say anything important. I won’t talk about trauma, I won’t call you to action, I won’t give you anything deep to think or worry about. There will be no facts or figures, nothing you’ll want to remember later. Not today. Today is meant to be a gift, a kindness, a way for your brain to slow down, for your body to be still, for you to rest. So, listen to the meditative sermon. Or let your mind wander. Notice how beautiful the stained glass here is. Then come back to my words which are nothing more than an invitation to lean in to the stillness of winter.

Make yourselves comfortable. Take a deep breath.

Annie Dillard says, “I bloom indoors in the winter like a forced forsythia; I come in to come out. At night I read and write and things I have never understood become clear; I reap the harvest of the rest of the year’s planting. Outside, everything has opened up. Winter clear-cuts and re-seeds the easy way. Everywhere paths unclog…The woods are acres of sticks; I could walk to the Gulf of Mexico in a straight line. When the leaves fall, things stand mute and revealed. Everywhere skies extend, vistas deepen, walls become windows, doors open. All that summer conceals, winter reveals.”

I live in the woods, which might seem odd since I only ever see any of you here in Midtown, but I do. My house is surrounded by trees and for much of the year, we can’t see the other houses on our street through all the leaves. But in the winter, the woods empty and I can see everything. The spring is a virtual cabaret of flowers and budding trees and the summer is a carnival of life and autumn a festival of color.  But the winter is more like a memorial, a time for reflection and revelation. The trees and shrubs end the autumn in a dramatic striptease exposing a bare Earth and the humans make our way inside where we are less vulnerable, less exposed than the planet appears to be.

And then things get quiet. When there’s snow, sound seems to be absorbed and we enter the quiet time. Even when the snow melts and turns that awful gray, the chill keeps us indoors where we can think. Humans don’t talk about hibernation, but I think we do, in fact, enter a semi-hibernation state where we eat heavy food and sleep longer hours, and move more slowly. It’s natural for us to hole-up, to make our homes into little caves, to be lazy. And, to be clear, I’m not using the word lazy as a judgment, just an observance. Doing less isn’t bad. It’s counter-cultural, so it’s unusual, but it’s not bad. Sometimes, it’s even good. It’s time to recharge and it’s wholly necessary.

This is what sabbath could be for us. One day a week for rest. To be honest, I’m not a leader in this field. I have one day off each week and I still read email or do other work things. So, I preach these words for me to hear as much as anyone else. In a world that measures success by market growth, that understands the rhythm of the planet only insofar as it pertains to economic advancement, requiring everyone to do and spend more each quarter than we did the last, observing the sabbath is a wholesale rejection of a culture that cares nothing for our collective spiritual well-being. Taking one day as a break from the system that sees us all as commodities, instead focusing on healing and breathing, and being in relationship, could be a balm for ourselves and this perpetually moving culture of ours.

My aunt is dying. I spent a lot of time in her home recently with my uncle and cousins, who are some of my favorite people. Carolyn is dying at home. She’s too young, but she’s in bed surrounded by her family. There’s nothing like the stillness of a home waiting for death. I’m sure you all know what I’m talking about. We’ve spent a lot of time being still. Waiting. We make small talk. We make big talk. People move in and out- old friends, nurses, neighbors, caretakers of many kinds – and we sit. We hold her hand. We tell her stories, although she’s been asleep for a week. We eat when we’re hungry, never really clear about what time it is or what meal it’s supposed to be. Time has little meaning when everything is just what we understand to be Before. There is great sadness in our stillness, in the stillness of that house. And there’s connection. And tenderness. And love. Even as we do little more than breath together, and wait.

So many of us – the entire planet, really – had the experience of collective stillness for at least 3 months, and really more like 2 years, didn’t we? We were ordered into our homes. We were told that moving around was hurting us, was spreading a deadly virus. We need to stay still. Keep ourselves contained. And as sure as we were that we could never do that on any large scale for any period of time, it was stunning how quickly we did just that. We all stayed still. We moved indoors and waited.

Quarantine felt like a multi-national spiritual practice. Everyone inside. Everyone stay still. Everyone breathe deeply and lean into your powerlessness. Everyone. Shhh…Don’t move.

Let’s all try it. Let’s try for a moment to not move. Let your hands rest, maybe drop your eyes to a fixed place on the floor. Breathe in. Feel your breath move through you. We’re going to breathe a little together. We’ll breath in to the count of 4, then hold for 7 and breath out for 8. Doctors tell us this is good for our bodies.

Breath in 1-2-3-4. Hold 1-2-3-4-5-6-7. Out. 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8. Again.

And sit. Feel the seat. Maybe it’s uncomfortable. Feel the air on your skin. The floor beneath your feet. Your clothes on your body. Breathe.

And let your mind rest. Watch the thoughts melt away. Lean into the nothing. Let your body be still, but not so still you feel afraid to move. I was once joining a Roshi for the Zen practice of sitting and when I realized I wasn’t allowed to move I nearly had a panic attack. Don’t be that still. There are no rules. This is just about being. You and I are just being. We aren’t doing. We are still and we are breathing, and we are alive, and it is enough. It is good. It is very good.

I will keep talking, and you can tune back in or you can keep feeling your breath moving through you.

W.B. Yeats, the Irish poet wrote: “We can make our minds so like still water that beings gather about us that they may see, it may be, their own images, and so live for a moment with a clearer, perhaps even with a fiercer life because of our quiet.”

We can make our minds so like still water. Stillness is the tool that brings us back from fragmentation into wholeness. So many of us live lives of division, running from one thing to the next, waiting for moments just to sit down and when we do, it’s often in front of a screen or while waiting for whatever’s next, possibly someone who’s late who’s also living a life of  fragmentation. There’s an accepted state of constant semi-attention to the sound of voices, music, traffic, the generalized noise of what goes on all the time around us or the volcano of words that crash on our computer screens with their attachments and links to more words and tweets and updates. This keeps us immersed in a flood of racket and words, a diffuse medium in which our consciousness is half-diluted: we are not quite “thinking,” not entirely responding. We are not fully present and not entirely absent; not fully withdrawn yet not completely available, leading us all into a state of semi-consciousness as we make our way through busy days. Stillness is the healing balm that brings us back to ourselves and into right relationship with the world around us.

So, let us sit. Still. Let us sit still. Just for this moment, with Madison Avenue busy behind you, let us sit still. Let’s breath into the stillness of our bodies, long deep breaths. Let the world progress around as it does, let the day move and the buses pass, and the sirens blare, but let us sit still. There’s healing in the stillness. If we do it long enough, we’ll hear our own voices quietly telling us where to go next. We’ll see our ancestors smiling. We’ll feel ourselves rooted in Earth and nourished from our common Source.

These winter days, with or without the cold and ice, are an invitation to move inward, to rest. To be still. This is our season to appreciate the Sabbath, the sabbatical of the winter, now is our chance to reclaim our lives from the busyness, to move indoors and discover what the stillness of winter will reveal.

We’ll close with this poem by the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda called Keeping Quiet

Now we will count to twelve
and we will all keep still.

This one time upon the earth,
let’s not speak any language,
let’s stop for one second,
and not move our arms so much.

It would be a delicious moment,
without hurry, without locomotives,
all of us would be together
in a sudden uneasiness.

The fishermen in the cold sea
would do no harm to the whales
and the peasant gathering salt
would look at his torn hands.

Those who prepare green wars,
wars of gas, wars of fire,
victories without survivors,
would put on clean clothing
and would walk alongside their siblings
in the shade, without doing a thing.

What I want shouldn’t be confused
with final inactivity:
life alone is what matters,
I want nothing to do with death.

If we weren’t unanimous
about keeping our lives so much in motion,

if we could do nothing for once,
perhaps a great silence would
interrupt this sadness,
this never understanding ourselves
and threatening ourselves with death,
perhaps the earth is teaching us
when everything seems to be dead
and then everything is alive.

Now I will count to twelve
and you keep quiet and I’ll go.