Be still: A Morning Prayers Homily by Greg Johnston

This homily was given by Greg Johnston '13 at the Morning Prayers service in Appleton Chapel (Memorial Church) on Harvard Yard. Greg is a faithful member of ECH and will be confirmed this year into the Anglican Communion.

A Reading from Psalm 46 (verses 1-4, and 9-12):

God is our refuge and strength, *
      a very present help in trouble.

Therefore we will not fear, though the earth be moved, *
      and though the mountains be toppled into the
        depths of the sea;

Though its waters rage and foam, *
      and though the mountains tremble at its tumult.

The LORD of hosts is with us; *
      the God of Jacob is our stronghold.

Come now and look upon the works of the LORD, *
      what awesome things he has done on earth.

It is he who makes war to cease in all the world; *
      he breaks the bow, and shatters the spear,
      and burns the shields with fire.

“Be still, then, and know that I am God; *
      I will be exalted among the nations;
      I will be exalted in the earth.”

The LORD of hosts is with us; *
      the God of Jacob is our stronghold. 

            It wasn't until I was sitting in the waiting room at the psychiatric ER that I realized I had left my book behind. So now I'm sitting there while a social worker talks with my best friend, without my book. It hadn't been a problem while she had been curled up unresponsively in my bed, or while I had been calling the HUPD officer, or while he had been calling the paramedics, or while they had been wheeling her down the stairs in their special chair, or while we had been riding in the ambulance to the hospital, her in the back and me in the front seat with the driver And it wasn't that I'm a particularly forgetful person: I had remembered her shoes and her ID and her bag and my wallet. This was in one of my late-semester research-paper-writing hazes, when I spent every Friday reading something or other, and I had somehow left whatever I was reading behind. I'll tell you a secret: I don't know what that book was, or what paper it was for, or even—unless you gave me a few minutes—the classes I was taking that semester. But at the moment it seemed important.

            And it was something like that the day there was no food in the refrigerator, which was also—coincidentally—the day that my dad moved out of the house. He and I had driven back from a week-long vacation together, with my mom and my sister in a separate car. “Should we stop at the store for groceries?” I asked on the way home. “No,” he said, “I'm sure Mom will want to do her big back-in-town shop on Monday.” And so on Sunday morning when he sat us all down in the kitchen, and told us he had to go, and took his suitcase and left, all I could think of as my mom and my sister sat there crying was that there were no groceries, and that I needed to go get some. And I'll tell you another secret: I have no idea—absolutely no idea—what we ate for dinner.

            “God is our refuge and our strength, a very present help in trouble. ...Be still, then, and know that I am God.” And yet when we are in trouble, God seems far off, and stillness even further. For me, there's a little voice, instead: a voice that tries to distract me with thoughts of being helpful in a time and a place when there is nothing to be done to help; a voice that tries to control something, some little thing—a book, or groceries—in an uncontrollable situation.

            Thomas Merton, a Trappist monk and mystic, offered this prayer: “Lord, I have not lived like a contemplative....My actions prove that the one I trust is myself — and that I am still afraid of You. Take my life into Your hands, at last, and do what ever You want with it. I give myself to Your love and mean to keep on giving myself to Your love — rejecting neither the hard things nor the pleasant things You have arranged for me.” That little worried voice, I suspect, comes from something like this: trust in myself, and fear of what the psalmist calls “the works of the Lord.” Now, this distraction has its very real benefits: it keeps us from feeling our feelings, from giving in to emotion entirely, until we are in a place we feel safe. And it has its very real drawbacks: it keeps us from feeling our feelings, from giving in to emotion, until we are in a place we feel entirely safe. So often, we misjudge that safety. If there's a safer place to feel emotions than the psychiatric emergency room, I haven't found it. If there's a more loving place to be upset than at the kitchen table, only God knows.

            So how can we feel safe? How can we feel those emotions in a healthy way? How, in other words, can we quiet that anxious little voice and be still in the presence of God? The answer, for many people, is prayer. Not prayer the way we usually think of it, full of words and impressive-sounding phrases and pleas and praises, but contemplative, meditative prayer. After all, as the now-retired Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams writes, prayer is primarily a matter of “putting aside our defences and disguises, coming into silence and stillness so that what stands before God is not the performer, the mask, the habits of self-promotion and self-protection but the naked me.”

            Now meditation is primarily about one thing: stillness. It's about quieting those worried thoughts, calming that voice that tries to distract us from our pain. It's about being silent in the presence of God. And most importantly, it's about loving yourself even more when you realize that—for the thirtieth or fortieth time in the last five minutes—you've failed at the seemingly-simple task of stillness and quiet.

            God, somehow, is “our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble.” “Therefore we will not fear, though the earth be moved, and though the mountains be toppled into the depths of the sea; Though its waters rage and foam, and though the mountains tremble at its tumult.” Though our friends are in pain and our families are falling apart. Though our wars have not ceased, our bows are not broken, our spears are not shattered. “The Lord of hosts is with us; the God of Israel is our stronghold.”

            “Be still, then, and know that I am God.” If only it were so easy as saying the words. But the beautiful thing about us as human beings is that we are not hopeless, we are not helpless. We are in a process of re-building ourselves, every day, into something new, with God's help. Be still, then, and know that I am God.

Let us pray.

O God of peace, you have taught us that in returning and in rest
we shall be saved, in quietness and confidence shall be our strength:
By the might of your Spirit life us, we pray, to Your presence,
where we may be still and know that you are God;
through Jesus Christ our Lord, who taught us to pray, saying,

Our Father . . .