Be Still and Know that I am God
"Be still, and know I am God." —Psalm 46:10
We live anxiety-ridden lives. I look at the world and wonder, how can I live a life of peace in a world permeated with fear, hate, arrogance, divisiveness, greed, racism, famine, and licentiousness? How can I be someone who exudes God's peace? How can I "calm and quiet my soul?" (Psalm 131). The answer begins with humility, "...the acceptance of our limited lives,. When we move low, back toward the soil from which we from which we can learn the lessons of our true humility, [then] we are able to enter a kind of peace." (Sutterfield, Wendell Berry and the Given Life). There is as St. Augustine writes in The City of God, "the peace of all things is the tranquility of order" (Book XIX, Ch. 13). We are at peace when the "creature lives as a creature, the human as a human, God as God, and all are in proper relationship with one another" (Sutterfield 20-21). In other words, peace is the result of living a life according to God's order. Berry writes in his essay "Healing": "Order is the only possibility of rest." Then at the close of the essay, he writes, "Order is only the possibility of rest." To find peace, to find rest, we must accept and work within the confines of creatureliness. God is God and we are his creation. Restlessness occurs when we believe we are God, when we believe in our own sense of order.
Berry poignantly illustrates this truth in one of his most popular poems, "The Peace of Wild Things":
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's life may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and I am free.
We live anxiety-ridden lives. I look at the world and wonder, how can I live a life of peace in a world permeated with fear, hate, arrogance, divisiveness, greed, racism, famine, and licentiousness? How can I be someone who exudes God's peace? How can I "calm and quiet my soul?" (Psalm 131). The answer begins with humility, "...the acceptance of our limited lives,. When we move low, back toward the soil from which we from which we can learn the lessons of our true humility, [then] we are able to enter a kind of peace." (Sutterfield, Wendell Berry and the Given Life). There is as St. Augustine writes in The City of God, "the peace of all things is the tranquility of order" (Book XIX, Ch. 13). We are at peace when the "creature lives as a creature, the human as a human, God as God, and all are in proper relationship with one another" (Sutterfield 20-21). In other words, peace is the result of living a life according to God's order. Berry writes in his essay "Healing": "Order is the only possibility of rest." Then at the close of the essay, he writes, "Order is only the possibility of rest." To find peace, to find rest, we must accept and work within the confines of creatureliness. God is God and we are his creation. Restlessness occurs when we believe we are God, when we believe in our own sense of order.
Berry poignantly illustrates this truth in one of his most popular poems, "The Peace of Wild Things":
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's life may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and I am free.
Comments