Touched by Stillness

When the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke visited Russia in the summers of 1889 and 1890, the trips transformed him. Finding deep devotion in its vastness, he found that words of poetry came to him spontaneously from what felt like a sacred space. In the guise of a Russian monk, he set down these words, which were published as The Book of Hours, named after books of prayers that are recited in monasteries seven times a day.

In one poem¹, God directly addresses the monk, who is the devotee in all of us, speaking to the anxieties that keep us from him. As Rilke interprets it, God tells us simply:

I am, you anxious one.

We are kept captive in our anxieties. We frantically wrack our minds for ways to unlock the dank prison cells of our fears and worries, but only end up tightening our bonds ever more strongly.

Yet, whenever we manage to stop for a bit, we can hear a voice, the voice of our God. It tells us simply, “I am.” This is all we need to hear, all we need to know. There is an immense and powerful beingness, an ‘I am’ that is beyond anything our puny frightened minds can conjure up. When God called out to Moses and Moses asked who he was, God replied simply, “I am who I am.”²

This ‘I am’ is wonder and awe and majesty. Any worries or anxieties dissolve in its immensity. Although prayer after prayer in every religion extols the might and glory of God, the prayers we repeat can’t come close to the numinous reality. God can’t be conceived through thought.

We can’t think our way to God. That’s why I’m willing to abandon everything I know, to love the one thing I cannot think. He can be loved, but not thought. By love, God can be embraced and held, but not by thinking.
_{The Cloud of Unknowing}³

We can embrace God. We can hold him in love. This love is how we reach up and into him. However, we do not really ‘reach’ up to him, as he is not reached by action. We simply turn our gaze to him and wait.

He is our Father. There is nothing real in us which does not come from him. We belong to him.… We cannot take a single step toward him. We do not walk vertically. We can only turn our eyes toward him. We do not have to search for him, we only have to change the direction in which we are looking. It is for him to search for us.
_{Simone Weil}⁴

This idea that we cannot take steps to reach him can feel disheartening. If we cannot, then how do we foster love for him? Rilke gives us some hints as he continues the poem, having God ask us three important questions. The first is:

Don’t you sense me, ready to break
into being at your touch?
My murmurings surround you like shadowy wings.

The wondrous ‘I am’ can be sensed, it can be touched. In fact, it only ‘breaks into being’ at our touch. We bring God to life in ourselves when we dare to feel him inside of us. He is always in us. When we still our thinking, when we empty our mind of every concept, our inner sense of touch becomes purified, vivified, and sensitized enough to touch God, to feel him, to experience him. And this sensing, this touching, is love. Just as in the physical world we often express and experience love through touch, so it is in the spiritual realm. Our consciousness touching God, caressing him, embracing him, is sheer love.

The wonderful thing is that we don’t have to feel the love in order to embrace him. In fact, since he doesn’t “break into being” until we touch him, we need to touch him in order to feel love for him. It is our wanting to love him that leads to him becoming present for us, and as soon as we sense him, we cannot help but feel love.

When we touch God, when we feel the great ‘I am’ that permeates all, we begin to sense what Rilke calls God’s “murmurings,” his presence brushing against us like “shadowy wings.” God’s presence is subtle, but it can be experienced. If we keep still enough, we can hear his murmurings and feel his soft touch brushing against us.

In the next question, God lets us know that the wondrous ‘I am’ is right here with us, even though it is hidden:

Can’t you see me standing before you
cloaked in stillness?

God, the supreme Stillness, robes himself in stillness – it is how he disguises himself when he wants to manifest in this world. It is when we contact the stillness, when we touch it, that we can see and feel God. The whole Being of God is enveloped in stillness, and this Being is all that truly exists in our world and in our heart. We can’t see him because we aren’t quiet enough to sense the stillness. When the individual ‘I’ stops its struggles, when it becomes silent, it can encounter the ‘I who am’ cloaked in stillness.

In a Gospel story, a woman who comes to Jesus to be healed says in complete faith and trust: “If I only touch the hem of his cloak, I will be made well.”⁵ The author of the Cloud of Unknowing comments on the woman’s expression of faith:

By touching the hem of God’s cloak, she was healed physically, but you’ll be healed infinitely more because your soul will be made whole in the uplifting work of contemplation as you spiritually touch God’s own being, his own loving self. Step up and be bold. Taste that medicine. Lift up your frail self, as you are, and give everything to God and his compassion, as he is. Stop analyzing yourself or God. You can do without wasting so much of your energy deciding if something is good or bad, grace given or temperament driven, divine or human. The only important thing is your simple awareness of your naked being and joyfully offering that to God with a willingness to love. It will connect you to God in spirit and unite you with him in grace. You’ll find yourself bonding with the amazing being of God, simply as he is, nothing more.⁶

Thomas Merton says that not only do we touch God in our contemplation, but God touches us; our silent waiting for God triggers his touch:

Contemplation reaches out to the knowledge and even to the experience of the transcendent and inexpressible God. It knows God by seeming to touch him. Or rather it knows him as if it had been invisibly touched by him…. Touched by him who has no hands, but who is pure Reality and the source of all that is real!
_{Thomas Merton}⁷

Rilke continues his poem with God’s third question. He speaks about the love that discovers this Reality, this infinite Being, the great “I am.” He says:

Hasn’t my longing ripened in you
from the beginning
as fruit ripens on a branch?

This love, the longing that we experience, is not our longing. It is God’s longing, his great gift to us, which has been with us always, slowly ripening, whether we know it or not. The seed of longing has been planted in each soul “from the beginning,” so that throughout our many lives it can grow and develop to the extent that we become aware of it and start to consciously foster it. When we do so, we worship him or, as Hazur says, “He worships himself through us.”⁸

Thus, according to God’s mysterious plan, the whole world is worshipping him all the time. In this world of duality, the seed of longing is ripening not just when we are doing well, but also when we are “trespassing” against him, as the Lord’s prayer says, when we are failing, and when others are harming us and our world. This seems counterintuitive, but longing is of the highest importance on the path to God. Going through dark times and feeling how awful it is to turn away from love and positivity help to nurture longing for that which is beyond good and bad, justice and injustice. It is part of his plan, and we should remember that in this life and previous lives we have been on the dark side and thus cannot judge others who are working in darkness. It is all grist for the mill of longing.

At the bottom of the heart of every human being, from earliest infancy until the tomb, there is something that goes on indomitably expecting, in the teeth of all experience of crimes committed, suffered, and witnessed, that good and not evil will be done.
_{Simone Weil}⁹

God’s creation is nothing but goodness. In the Bible it is said that when God made the creation, on the sixth day he described it like this: “Indeed it was very good.”¹⁰ He didn’t exclaim, “What horrors have I created!” He didn’t take account of how humankind would infiltrate the creation with crime and wrongdoing. Even we mortals, who often have trouble seeing God’s creation as good, know on some deep level that all is well. There is something, as Simone Weil says, that knows that amidst the evil, “good … will be done.”

Thus everything in this world has its purpose, and all is planned so that the seed of longing can ripen in us and lead us back to consciousness of the divine. He has placed that longing in us so that we may worship him. And what worship does he want? He wants us to help his longing to ripen by watering it and fertilizing it with our silent contemplation, with our waiting and patience, with our total embrace of whatever he has willed for us. When our worldly wants are stilled, when our longing for anything but God is purged, then we can sense God’s stillness – we can touch God and God can touch us.

In this ripening of our longing we encounter ever deeper and deeper layers of stillness. The Tibetan Buddhists speak of three levels of motionlessness. The first motionlessness, of the body, leads to the second motionlessness, in which the senses are emptied. The mind stops fabricating thoughts and we become pure awareness, quiet and clear. Relaxing into this stillness we become transparent. And with this still state, we invite the third motionlessness, which is the stillness that touches pure presence.

The ‘third motionlessness’ comes now, unbidden. It is the stillness of presence itself – the stillness of the pure clarity that is always here, behind and within everything. It is what allows everything to show up. It is empty too, not made out of anything, yet it is awesome and radiant in its presence. It is the first moment. It is, without being an it.¹¹

When the fruit fully ripens, it becomes pure existence, an “is, without being an it.” It becomes just like God, the “I am who I am.”

Rilke then explains more about what is happening as our longing ripens and we experience the ‘I am’:

I am the dream you are dreaming.
When you want to awaken, I am that wanting:
I grow strong in the beauty you behold.

This world is a dream, an illusion. But God is there in the illusion; in fact, he is the illusion. It is all his play. When he wants us to awaken, he becomes our wanting: he infuses it with his presence. When we start to awaken, we start seeing the beauty in the illusion, and we start to see God, the supreme Beauty, in everything. With awe and love we “behold” that Beauty within beauty. Our vision of God becomes clear and God grows “strong” in us. The Greek philosophers often spoke of God as ‘Beauty.’ Plato says that as we purify the eye of our soul, we become able to see the “vast ocean of Beauty itself,”¹² and our love “takes delight in the contemplation of true Being and Reality.”¹³

Rilke ends his poem with this line:

And with the silence of stars I enfold
your cities made by time.

Our cities made by time: what have we human beings wrought! In our never-satiated search for beauty and belonging in places it doesn’t exist – in pleasure and comfort and stimulation – we create more and more complicated contraptions and build more and more artificial environments, and in doing so we destroy God’s creation. In our ever-increasing anxiety and insecurity, we try to control and manipulate our environment, and the results are tragic. Cities are built up and destroyed and fought over. We see bombed-out buildings on the news and weep, yet so much of the suffering humans cause other humans in their attempts at control and power doesn’t even make the news.

We dig ourselves deeper and deeper into the negative energy of time, kal as opposed to dayal (mercy), by our actions, which inevitably lead to reactions and endless cycles of rebirths. We avenge the past and try to manipulate the future, losing the only thing that truly belongs to us and brings us peace: the present moment.

In the Tao Te Ching the sage says that in an empire with many attempts at control – many prohibitions, many laws, many weapons, many new inventions – the state stays in poverty and darkness. The sage then says that when people stand aside, stay still, flow with what is natural, and don’t try to turn their desires into new creations, the Tao flourishes:

Therefore the sage says: I do not act,
Hence the people transform by themselves;
I love tranquillity,
Hence the people are normal by themselves;
I have no business,
Hence the people grow rich by themselves;
I have no desire,
Hence the people are like the uncarved wood by themselves. _{Tao Te Ching}¹⁴

The Tao Te Ching often contrasts uncarved with carved wood. The uncarved wood is the natural Tao, unmanipulated, before desire has incited attempts to change it, to take action to make what is natural ‘better’. When we carve wood, we create useful objects and beautiful art, but in doing so, we also create conflict and enmity. We inflame our desires and then seek to protect them. A commentator on the Tao Te Ching says:

Ching (quietude) is the peace of earth, free from disturbances caused by human desire and action. When humans outgrow the desire to dominate and to conquer leading to wanton aggression and destruction, peace on earth will prevail.¹⁵

In the last line of the poem, God is telling us that no matter what horrors we have wrought in our cities made by time, he is enfolding them with “the silence of stars.” These days we hardly get a chance to experience the wondrous and glorious firmament of the skies. But no matter how we have obscured the constellations with our artificial light and pollution, they are there, enfolding our troubled earth with their silent majesty and beauty.

We can choose to put our energy into the transient things that time will destroy, or we can choose to turn our attention to the silence of the stars that always shine, no matter how often and long we have turned away from them. We can keep still so that we can touch God and be touched by him. We can stop our activity and judgment and simply contemplate and appreciate the beauty of God’s creation and the divine presence that enfolds us and protects us. We can remember the one simple “I am” that transcends our endless anxiety.

I, God, am in your midst.
Whoever knows me can never fall,
Not in the heights,
Not in the depths,
Nor in the breadths,
For I am love,
Which the vast expanses of evil
Can never still.
_{Hildegard of Bingen}¹⁶