Stillness In The Evening
Van Gogh, Starry Night, 1889
Can you remember a time when you were arrested by silence? Where all the frenetic movement of life suddenly paused? Where even the chattering of your busy mind grew utterly quiet, if just for a moment? Perhaps it was a mere sunrise after an unquiet night. Or maybe it was morning light streaming in the window after a long rain. You noticed the flowers from your open window. The birds were up early too. Nothing too spectacular here, I suppose, and yet you are simply swept up in the holy hush all around you.
Or maybe it’s one of those evenings when everything is quiet as the sun descends on the push and pull of the day. It’s almost as if for the first time you notice the splashing of ever-radiating orange and blue across the distant sky. And everything is quiet. The noisy city in the distance recedes from its raucous intrusion. Even the freeway grows quiet. You want to bow down. You feel something inside being called out. Whatever it may be is golden.
You might imagine Van Gogh, looking out from his asylum window, into the night sky, finding calm for his raging mind. Stars swirl through the darkness. The church seems to ring its bells for vespers. There is quiet all around. There is a new calm within.
I long for this quiet. Our world seems so noisily out of control: three little children gunned down in their school after prayer; unending wars raging across innocent lands; large, unquiet superpowers flexing their mighty muscles; the genie of uncontrollable algorithms out of its bottle. And then there are our ceaselessly chattering minds and our restless hearts trying to make sense of it all, trying once again to get a handle on death and illness and hatred and sadness and sorrow and chaos, trying to locate a place where we are welcomed home into quiet.
I’ve decided I want to write most of all out of this silence and stillness, that when I try to bring words to address the chaos around, I fear I only contribute further to the ills that plague us. Stillness, I’ve decided, is the answer, the starting point, for such a time as ours. In stillness we come closer to God, our center point, an anchor, our home. It is in stillness we sense God’s promise of rest we so desperately need right now. I know Jesus calls me into the fray where suffering and pain persist, but I am trying to discover more fully how Jesus also invites me into his promise of complete joy. If I can only stop for a small moment to see the soft colors of the evening, simply to pause, stand still, maybe I can look out on the loud, raucous world more calmly. Maybe I can even bring something small and quiet into the turbulence.
I’ve been reading, again, the remarkable Welsh poet R. S. Thomas, this morning from his short poem “Evening”:
The archer with time
as his arrow – has he broken
his strings that the rainbow
is so quiet over our village?
Let us stand, then, in the interval
of our wounding, till the silence
turn golden and love is
a moment eternally overflowing.
There seems no escape from the “interval / of our wounding,” and yet if we can just stop to witness the rainbow over our village, maybe then the rush of time can be broken by quietness. And notice this exquisite quiet is not just for me, but for our village. All the frantic pace and the threat of terror remain, but here, in this moment, silence and love overflow. The moment is golden.
When our friends are dying; when our beloved institutions crumble; when people who love God huddle in fear; when our machines threaten our very existence—maybe the only place right now to begin again is in the heart of silence, where God resides, where there is love eternally overflowing, where the evening turns golden in the quiet.