Meet your rebel thoughts with stillness

Your thoughts can’t give you God any more than a photograph of the sun can give you life. Ultimately, experience—direct, unmediated, and real—is what you’re after. And most of the time, you’re thoughts will only distract you from the experience you seek. They’ll manage your experience, chattering instructions at you or shaming and blaming you for this or that. Occasionally, a helpful thought may lead you to the threshold of an encounter you’ll be tempted to capture mentally—you’ll fumble for your camera and try to holler to a friend. Don’t. Your thoughts have done their job and must now retreat before the Mystery that has come to you in grace.

You must simply be still (Psalm 46.10).

Your mind will most likely be aroused and want to do what it loves to do— figure things out, record the moment, interpret it. Don’t chase the monkeys away; instead, meet them with stillness. Your stillness will help them learn to sit in peace and trust in grace.

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Moving toward what is real

Of course, as you progress in the spiritual life, many of your thoughts want to help you toward God. They’re not evil. Most of them are good, but when it comes to real encounter with God they’re not best—just as a photograph of a sunset is good but not best. Even the most spectacular photograph misses the energy and awe your soul feels as the sun bids the day farewell in a blaze of light and color an artist can imitate but never duplicate. Thoughts about God, no matter how true are not God any more than a photograph by the most renowned artist is never a sunset.

The photo’s lovely if you cannot see the real thing, and in some ways it might even be more beautiful, but it will never replace the experience of standing in the presence of the radiant Sun that gives life to all things, enrapt in wonder.

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Why Pray? A Beginner's Grace with Kate Braestrup

What stands between you and the God you seek

I don’t want to move on to other spiritual teaching until I’m sure you understand what you’re really after. So, allow me a few more posts on the matters of the mind. You can look at the beauty of a sunset, but the moment you start thinking about how beautiful it is, as soon as you fumble for your camera or holler for your friend to take a look you’re no longer beholding the splendor before you . . .

Instead, you’re beholding your thoughts about the setting sun. You’re thoughts now stand between you and the beauty that first entranced you, a glory that simply invited you to be.

So it is with God and your thoughts about God.

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What you gain by resisting mental distraction

I don’t always practice this inner spiritual discipline well. But when I do, something opens up to me I can’t fully explain in words. I can be in the midst of a busy restaurant and suddenly find myself so deeply aware that this moment and the person before me is everything.

Undistracted for at least this present moment, I’m fully here. Now. Nowhere else.

Not in my head. Not following a thought that’s carried me miles away to an obligation elsewhere.

Instead, I’ve slipped past the narrow gate guarded by my thoughts, and fallen into my heart—Eternity itself—where the fullness of God dwells. And this, at least for one timeless moment, is bliss. It’s an authentic experience of the gospel Jesus preached: “the kingdom of God is here, within you” (Luke 17.21). Now is the moment of salvation (2 Corinthians 6.1).

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