Be still.
A wellness app tracks my heart rate and congratulates me when I allow my body to settle – when I slip outside for a few steps and some sun, or when I pause long enough to draw five deliberate, deep breaths – almost liturgical in its reminders to rest. The psalmist in Psalm 47, though unaware of my heart rate or the algorithms that urge relaxation, repeats the refrain: Be still.
Is “be still” an open invitation or an urgent command? Psalm 47 leaves that distinction blurred, and yet I know myself well enough to recognize that I listen best when told. I was always the student who checked every box on her homework. I can see how God, ever desiring what is good for creation, would command the kind of rest that feels foreign to me, yet necessary.
But the command for stillness is not simply about the shape of rest. It is also about the possibility of God. How am I to attune my ear to love, to listen beyond the next unchecked box, when I let my life cascade restlessly from task to task? Stillness, after all, isn’t absence: it is the posture that allows me to sense the divine pulse beneath everything, if only I pause long enough to hear.
Be still and know.
And it’s not just the absence of noise that matters, but the presence of what emerges to fill the silence.
The wisdom of monks and nuns is earned through the slow sediment of hours, a lifetime’s worth, spent cultivating stillness. It is the discipline of their days — a bell that rings at intervals and calls them, not to action, but to sacred pause, to sit, to kneel, to listen for a voice that’s nearly impossible to hear in the world’s clamor. I envy them, not for the rough blankets or simple diet, but for the clarity they gain in their hours of silence. Wisdom comes not just from school and study, but from the raw confrontation with ourselves, stripped of distraction, faced with what lies within.
And it’s not just the absence of noise that matters, but the presence of what emerges to fill the silence. When undistracted, we hear truths unavailable to us while flitting from task to task.
This knowing does not accumulate like facts; it arrives unbidden, after surrendering our need to solve and strive.
There are times I crave this stillness — ready to throw off my life and join the nuns. Other times, I evade and avoid this quiet space. After all, what if the truth waiting within is not affirmation but indictment? What if the knowledge is not what I want, but what I need?
Be still and know that I am.
I confess, sometimes I neglect my prayer life because of a quiet, gnawing doubt: Is there truly anyone listening on the other end? Too often, prayer feels like holding a conch shell to my ear, hoping for the ocean. Scripture texts where doubt surfaces are a solace of shared uncertainty. Thomas needs more evidence. The desperate father who cries to Jesus,
“I believe; help my unbelief.”
What if the knowledge is not what I want, but what I need?
It helps, too, to read of a God in Scripture who refuses to be limited to a single title or metaphor. God greets us in the form we most need. “I am who I am” is the answer when Moses asks the Divine for a name. If the traditional robed, bearded patriarch leaves you wanting, the “I am” statements of Jesus are a poet’s dream. God is bread (John 6:35) – simple, sustaining; light (John 8:12) – piercing the clouds of confusion; good shepherd (John 10:11) – attentive and searching.
When I pray, I am not alone in my doubt; I’m part of a noisy lineage of those who reach, question and name God’s presence in whatever shape meets us where we truly are.
Be still and know that I am God.
God, are you there? I long for you. I hunger for your presence, to be fully known and still fully loved. Thank you for the moments, often small and always too fleeting, when I sense you near. Thank you, too, for the praying saints who carry me when I falter. Quiet my restless heart. Amen.
