Serenity of mind easy to understand, hard to achieve

Be still,” Mama said as she wrapped my ponytail in a rubber band so tight I couldn’t blink.

“And know that I am God,” I responded in a deep voice like Brother Scott’s, our preacher in Saint Luke’s Methodist Church.

It was the shortest verse I could find – and commit to memory – for the conclusion of Bible school that summer. Others quoted the familiar John 3:16, or the definition of love as expressed in I Corinthians: 13.

Those were strictly for showoffs; I just intended to recite a verse, get through with Bible school and onto summer. The last thing I wanted was to “be still.”

But I do remember doing just that, one summer moment when lying in the honeysuckle that covered the steep hill behind our house, the hill that led to the abandoned railroad tracks where we played and frequently found arrowheads.

As I lay there, clutching the arrowheads and smelling the honeysuckle, I found myself motionless for a change, just watching the clouds, silently saying the verse I’d memorized: “Be still and know that I am God.” As a child, I wasn’t sure what it meant.

As an adult, I’m still learning.

It’s not a bad mantra, if you think about it. But that’s the rub: thinking about it. If we’re truly “being still,” our minds, as well as our bodies, must be quiet, as one theologian says: “stilling the mind before God.”

“The mind is busy, noisy, distracting,” writes author Marcus J. Borg, professor of religion and culture at Oregon State University. “Nonverbal prayer involves learning how to become silent inside.”

Silent inside? Unimaginable. Most of us find it difficult enough to be silent outside. That’s why occasionally we sit on the shore for an hour at sunset, swatting mosquitoes and observing cormorants and seagulls eating their supper. We watch out the window of a friend’s house as apple blossoms fall onto the deck like snowflakes.

We idle the boat so we can view the fat, bobbing heads of harbor seals or loons diving near an old swimming hole. We remember the poet’s urgings to stop and smell the roses, and we do; and we smell the lilacs, the irises, the flats at low tide, the cedar out back.

We are “still” as we listen to The SeaWinds Ensemble performing works of Roussell, Mozart, Ibert and Thuille -the flute, oboe, clarinet, horn, bassoon and piano miraculously in harmony. We are still as we read … or watch out the sunroom window … or drink morning coffee in the bedroom.

But “silent inside” as the theologian suggests?

“To use an image I owe to Alan Jones,” Professor Borg writes, “nonverbal prayer involves the attentiveness of a bird-watcher: as one watches silently and motionlessly, the forest can become alive.” Those words suggest even we can do this; perhaps it isn’t unimaginable.

“Be still and know that I am God.” A simple verse a child can recite but a complex one for an adult to embrace.