Behold, I am doing a new thing

Peace, from a deeper place

Early morning

A good friend recently told me about something the famous sculptor Auguste Rodin once said. It’s simple, but I also think it is profound and expresses something important about the nature of faith.  Rodin said, “Patience is also a form of action.”

In the realm of faith, this idea that “patience is also a form of action” could mean this: God is at work in your life, right now, and always has been. And if you could only stop trying to do everything yourself, if you could just turn aside now and then to attune yourself to the presence and activity of Another, and allow this Other to work in you unencumbered by your anxiety, busyness, or distractions, you would likely be much more satisfied with the results. 

“Apart from me,” Jesus said, “you can do nothing.”  “I am the vine, you are the branches.”  It’s as if Jesus was saying, If only you could remember just how intimately connected we are, and then consciously open yourself or release yourself more fully to the flow of my life into yours. … It’s happening even now. Open yourself, release yourself.

As the prophet Isaiah said, “Behold, I am doing a new thing. Now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?”  (Isaiah 43:19) And the truth is: No, most of the time we don’t.

But it’s worth this work of patiently attuning ourselves to this deeper presence and activity. As St. Paul said, “God, working in us, can do infinitely more than we can ask or imagine.”

The idea is that we can try to live our lives as if everything is up to us, but the results are going to be a lot less satisfying than if we could have a bit more patience and allow God to have some input.  That requires work – the work of being receptive and still, attuning ourselves to a deeper reality.  The trouble for many of us is that we are often impatient to get on with things (at least I know I am), so we quickly take matters into our own hands.

The brilliant theologian, priest, and paleontologist, Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955), once put it this way:

“Above all, trust in the slow work of God.
We are quite naturally impatient in everything
to reach the end without delay.
…
Give our Lord the benefit of believing
that his hand is leading you,
and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself
in suspense and incomplete.”

In other words, God has things to do, and often, it seems that God likes to do things slowly.  The idea is that God is actively at work in our lives, which means that perhaps our most important work, as Rodin suggests, is the work of patience – intentionally setting aside regular times of silence, stillness, …times simply to wait on the Lord. Sometimes, the most productive thing we can do is to step off the treadmill (sometimes the treadmill of our own anxious thoughts or upset emotions) and then in silence and stillness, simply wait, with patient trust that, well, …something is going on.

The wise Quaker writer, Parker Palmer, tells about how he reached the point in his life when he simply had to stop asking himself, “What am I going to make of my life?” and begin asking instead, “What is my life trying to make of me?”  The idea is that something is going on in our life, if only we could attune ourselves to it, and more fully open and give ourselves to it.

Several years ago in his Easter sermon, Archbishop Rowan Williams said this:

“…there is a deeper level of reality, a world within the world, where love and reconciliation are ceaselessly at work, a world with which contact can be made so that we are able to live honestly and courageously with the challenges constantly thrown at us.” 

Now that’s worth waiting for.  Many of us have had intimations of this “world within the world, where love and reconciliation are ceaselessly at work.” We’ve touched it, so to speak, particularly when we’ve practiced silence with others – when we’ve all decided to get off the treadmill together, and practice stillness together. 

In those contemplative gatherings, after 20 minutes of silence and the meditation bell rings, indicating that it is time to return gently to the world of speaking and thinking, there is very often a palpable and welcome sense of peace and kindness among those gathered. And when the soft reverberation of the concluding meditation bell slowly fades, we might say the Lord’s Prayer. But we say it so much more slowly, so much more mindfully, peacefully, and gratefully – very different from our usual way of praying.  Again, we sense a Presence among us, a Presence we normally miss in our daily lives. …Something is going on.

Maybe this is so because at the conclusion of group contemplative silence and stillness, we have just returned from “that deeper level of reality where love and reconciliation are ceaselessly at work,” and somehow, it seems, we have brought some of that love and reconciliation into the room with us.  That’s worth savoring. That’s worth waiting for.

When Jesus said, “Come to me, all you who are carrying heavy burdens,” it was not so that he could give us new strategies for running our own lives.  No, he said he wanted to give us a special kind of rest, peace,…perhaps because he knew that this was the best way for us to bring that peace back into our daily lives and relationships with each other.

The Peace of the Lord be always with you.

Late evening