Until I Understand It Better

The list has eleven things on it and she made it in January.

Four books, two of which she owns and one of which she has read. Three long articles. A set of talks from a retreat house in Wales that she has downloaded and not opened. A course with a waiting list that she is on.

All of it is about silence.

She is not a dilettante about this. Something happened in her in the autumn, in an ordinary week with nothing wrong, where she found herself standing at the sink for a long time not thinking, and it was the first time in about four years that her head had stopped, and it frightened her a little and she wanted it back.

So she made a list.

There is a chair in the small room at the back. There is nothing wrong with it and nobody uses it. Twenty minutes would fit in most days between about half past four and five.

And she has done it twice since January.

Because there is a thing she says to herself, and it is very reasonable and it works every single time: I want to understand what I am doing before I start. She does not want to sit there doing something wrong, or turn it into a technique, or get it muddled with the wrong tradition, or start something and stop it, and all of that is sensible and none of it is untrue.

In August she added the eleventh item to the list.

And on the way to the kitchen afterwards she passed the small room and looked at the chair and thought, quite clearly: I am afraid of that chair.

Two words, given to people in a crisis

Let me honor the list before I say anything else about it.

Wanting to do a thing properly is not a character flaw. There are traditions here that go a long way and they are not all saying the same thing, and a person who wandered in and started borrowing techniques without any care would be doing something worse than what you have done. Your carefulness is real.

Now hear this, and take it as settled rather than as encouragement: you do not have to qualify for the chair. There is no threshold and there never was. That is not my gentle handling of eight months of postponement, it is what stands written in the forty-sixth Psalm, where the instruction is two words long and is given to people in the middle of a catastrophe, and the same Holy Spirit who inspired it is the one who stopped your head at the sink in the autumn.

Read the verse in its actual setting, because it is almost always quoted as though it were about a nice afternoon.

Be still, and know that I am God; I will be exalted among the nations, I will be exalted in the earth.Psalm 46:10

The psalm around it has the earth giving way, mountains falling into the sea, waters roaring and nations in uproar.

That is who be still is said to. Not to people in a settled season with a clear evening. To people in a crisis, as an instruction they were expected to be able to carry out immediately, in the state they were in.

So this is yours right now rather than pending the reading: you are qualified for that chair as you are, because the written word hands the instruction to people with the mountains going into the sea and does not attach one condition to it, and the Spirit of God is the one who has been holding the room at the back open since January.

Now let me name what happened in the hallway in August, because you named it yourself and then walked into the kitchen.

I am afraid of that chair.

That is the truest sentence in this whole story and it did not come from the list. Sit with it a moment: what is frightening about twenty minutes in a room with nothing happening?

Not doing it wrong. You know perfectly well that nobody is marking it.

It is that the sink in the autumn was uninvited, and lasted about ninety seconds, and could not be extended or repeated. Sitting down on purpose means finding out what is in you when nothing is being managed, for twenty minutes, at your own invitation, and it might not be the sink and it might be the four years before it.

That is a real fear and it deserves a real answer, and the answer is that you will not be in there on your own. What is written says be still and know that I am God, and the second half is a promise about company rather than a demand for stillness, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is in that room already, at half past four, whether or not you ever open the talks from Wales.