Still, Still Still
November 25, 2007
Advent IV
by Rev. Dr. Donna Schaper

Yesterday, a dear friend told me that it looked like I was “slouching” toward Bethlehem, and indeed I am.  On Christmas Day Warren, Katie, Isaac, and I―no Jacob, he has to work―will worship in Bethlehem.  We fly to Israel at 6:45 today, on Aerosvit, God bless us, the Ukrainian airway (some of us will do anything for a bargain), going through Kiev tomorrow and on to Tel Aviv Christmas Eve.  So we are heading toward the real Bethlehem in the occupied territories to worship the babe.  Or at least I am on my way to the real Bethlehem to worship the real babe.  Many of you know that Isaac and his rabbi-to-be bride have been living in Israel since September.  They will return to New York in what can only be called five more long months of not watching the news from Israel. 

Please forgive the travelogue―and note that the doctor has cleared me to fly (after a car accident about which too much has already been said).  So, contrary to my friend’s bad joke, I am not actually slouching but going to Bethlehem.  I bring up this matter of the so-called real Bethlehem in the so-called occupied territories in order to make a point about peaceful stillness, which is my subject today.  At the center of the Christmas story and the Christmas season, time stands still.  Eternity and heaven touch time and earth, and we Christians say God incarnates the word in a person.  My travelogue may sound like yours: miles to go before you sleep in one way or another, dozens of packages to wrap or cards to read or e-mails to send―or worse, too little to do with too few. Either way, by the stress of excess or the stress of loneliness, stillness seems a hollow promise. Despite carols to the contrary, stillness can feel like a cruel joke.

Still, stillness stills us.  Yes, it is first an adverb.  Still and all.  Still.  Still.  When the word comes up in a meeting, you almost know what is coming: some authority is about to assert itself.  Still, we can’t not respond to the matter before us.  Still, we have to do or say something.  Still, despite all that has been said and done and not said and done and said and done too much and too little, simultaneously, still, we are proceeding.

Still is an adverb before stillness is a noun.  Stillness is relief from the self as occupied territory.  Stillness is the real Bethlehem, not the tourist trap in which I will worship on Tuesday.  Stillness happens, still in time and space, on airlines and in the insecurity lines.  Stillness happens with the desk stress still stressing and the packages unwrapped and the candles unlit.  Stillness is still happenings for those who choose to let it.

Today, a brief guide to stillness.  First of all, many of you have heard the statement that peace is not the absence of conflict but the presence of justice.  You know what that means socially and politically.  In a marriage it is not when one of the partners folds his or her tent and chooses the silence of going along to get along.  That is not peace but quiet.  Peace is the presence of justice where people learn to balance just and conflicting demands in something more like trust than like truce.  You also know what that means between nations: there is no way Africa or China or Iraq or Islam (whatever that is) cannot fight the West without a kind of justice preceding the peace.  It is just not possible for the people who order from Fresh Direct to get along with the people who deliver the high priced groceries without some justice showing up first.  There is no stillness without justice and fairness.

Stillness occurs within the context of rightness (what some would call righteousness), where we sing “all is calm, all is bright,” because we have left tyranny and tyrants behind.  Stillness occurs for the poor and the rich simultaneously, or it is not still.  Indeed, until the war in Iraq is over, our inner peace cannot be full.  We can enter a still place, but we cannot not bring our national tyranny with us.  Any other definition of stillness is spiritual hocus pocus, worse than Hallmark and just the kind of sentimentality that Caesar adores.  Indeed there is stillness, even with war raging and tourist schlock selling the real Bethlehem to itself.  It is a spiritual stillness.  It brings unrest with it.  It does not shut the door on unrest or unfairness the same way that peace does not come without justice. 

Jean Vanier, the 70-year-old founder and patriarch of Larches, an international organization for the mentally and physically ill, can help us understand.  He works with the seriously disabled by loving them in dozens of sights around the world.  He says that the whole Christmas story is about tenderness and about how tenderness and love can overcome pain.  He also argues that the reason we don’t really get the Christmas stillness is that we are afraid of pain.  We are so afraid of the fragility and mortality that comes to us all in the end that we spend a lot of time distancing ourselves from people who have no legs or do nothing but make funny noises.  Yesterday, on 23rd Street, I saw a man, fully-formed, pushing a woman in a cart.  She had no legs, no arms, just a trunk.  He had a smile on his face.  He represented Vanier’s kind of love, a love that has tenderness and even defeat at its heart.  He seemed more “still” than other people on the street.  

I have had so many good things coming out of my recent accident that I practically cannot stand it.  I am working with a physical therapist who is a downright theologian.  He saw me on Friday and gave me a double session, saying that I was literally bending my body, slouching it, in such a way as to protect it from a recurrence of the pain.  I think my friend was trying to say the same thing when she said I was slouching toward Bethlehem.  The PT took a wager.  He bet me that the pain was more gone than I thought―and then he literally pressed it, with his own hands, out of my sternum.  He was right.  I had in three short weeks developed a complete way of being that had as its major objective the avoidance of pain.  Standing, sitting, walking, I had only one goal: not to feel the crush of that car’s seat belt or the noise around it again.  The PT also said he thought I could sleep in the bed again.  Guess what?  I could.  I just didn’t know it.  What is stillness?  Stillness is the tender acceptance of pain, fragility, even mortality, even tyranny, even violent injustice―in such a way that these amount to 90 points and our acceptance amounts to 100.  It is what a brave woman in a Chicago housing project long ago said to me, in a way I cannot forget: “Knocked down ten times, get up eleven.” 

Vanier has more to say: “The Big thing for me is…the little thing.”  When we are not afraid of our own pain so much so that we need not fear the pain of others, we are able to live in the little.  We are able to understand this baby thing.  It is almost as though God knocked on our door in such a quiet way so as not to frighten us.  God could have knocked the door down.  But instead there is a quiet, small knock.  Vanier says that God at Christmas is like a father who comes home after work and gets down on his hands and knees to play with his child.  I love that picture.  It has stillness at its heart.  It has large becoming small, bending down, coming near, but coming near in a way that doesn’t frighten us.  I think that tenderness is at the very heart of the Christmas story.

For us to know the serenity of stillness, there is no need to forsake vulnerability or unfinishedness or just plain old nervousness.  Instead, there is a need to embrace these as important matters, which stand inside a much larger matter.  That matter is God’s love, bending down to earth to play with us.  That love is vulnerability because love is vulnerability.  Even God is vulnerable, says the still tenderness of Christmas.

Stillness is not the oblivion of sleep so much as it is the awakening to what is really in charge.  It is not Caesar, despite the constant obeisance we pay to Caesar in the form of anxiety, stress, worry, repression, and other refusals of peace.

All really is calm, all really is bright. Christmas, spiritually, is like a year-round snow day, when we have a good strong reminder that we are not really in charge of that much.

Yesterday, I went out to see Margaret Wright in New Jersey―she is much better but has a long way to go.  I took the DeCamp bus line, fully knowing that you had to have a ticket to go and a ticket to return, but because I was doing my Perils of Pauline, harried thing, I forgot to get the return ticket. So I got on the bus to come back, after backed up tunnels both ways, packing yet to do, stillness yet to enjoy, yada yada yada , and a woman who probably had been out in Montclair cleaning houses gave me a ticket.  I only had a 20-dollar bill (ah, the problems I face) and offered it to her.  She said, with great grace, “Don’t be silly.”

When it comes to stillness, and how we imagine it only present on Christmas Eve, when all is said and done and wrapped, I imagine God saying to us, “Don’t be silly.”

Toward the end of his life, Bill Coffin, gave this definition of peace. I keep it on my refrigerator: