Dear Members and friends of Redeemer,
How good it is to center down! To sit quietly and see one’s self pass by!
Things in motion stay in motion. That is Newton’s first law, and most days it is also a fair description of our lives. One thing leads to the next. A meeting ends and another begins. We move from task to task without asking how we got there, or where we are actually headed. Our minds race, turning over things beyond our control. Motion, once started, does not require our attention. It simply continues, until something disturbs it.
The streets of our minds seethe with endless traffic; our spirits resound with clashing, noisy silences.
Howard Thurman, in his prayer “How Good to Center Down!,” found in his book Meditations of the Heart, understood this at a cellular level. That single line has outlived the page it was written on. It has lived in my head for years now, uninvited and unpaid, the way certain lines of scripture and certain hymns do. It surfaces at odd hours. I think it keeps coming back because it names a hunger most of us carry and rarely name ourselves. It resonates even more now, after a couple of weeks away, wondering how to carry that same quiet back into the ordinary run of days.
Something deep within hungers and thirsts for the still moment and the resting lull.
We are entering a new season. The literal kind, as summer thins out and the program or school year gathers itself for another run. And the other kind too, the metaphorical turning that a change of season always invites, whether we ask for it or not. New seasons are, if we let them be, an outside force. They can be the thing that disturbs our motion long enough for us to notice we were moving at all.
We look at ourselves in this waiting moment–the kinds of people we are. The questions persist. What are we doing with our lives?–what are the motives that order our days?
To center down is not a technique. It is not a five-minute exercise to fit between appointments, though it might begin there. It is something closer to attention. Awareness. A willingness to stop long enough to ask what is happening in us, underneath the motion, in the interior life that the pace of a new season has little patience for.
Where is my treasure, and what do I love most in life?
I do not have a program to offer here, no three steps toward stillness. Thurman did not offer one either. He simply named the good of the thing and let that be enough. But I do encourage you to carry this prayer as a spiritual practice in its own right.
Our spirits refreshed, and we move back into the traffic of our daily round with the peace of the Eternal in our step. How good it is to center down!
So here is the question I keep returning to as this new season opens. What would it take, this week, to be disturbed enough to stop?
Blessings,
Quotations are from Howard Thurman, “How Good to Center Down!,” Meditations of the Heart (Boston: Beacon Press, 1953, 1981, 2022)