Fine Humming Stillness

The Earth rotates at 1,037 mph. The Earth orbits the Sun at 67,000 mph. Our solar system whirls around the center of the galaxy at 490,000 mph. The speed at which our galaxy is moving through the universe is about 1.3 million miles per hour.

All that is beyond comprehension even though we know it is true. We don’t feel the speed, if we did we could not function. We exist in an infinite void, travelling at an incomprehensible speed.

There are no words capable of fully expressing our place in such a reality. We run out of words the moment we leave the pure physics which assigns terminology to explain it. We seek to grasp the meaning of each of out lives as we go through our days on this tiny blue marble. We each seek, through philosophy, religion, whatever gives us a modicum of security and structure so we can go about our lives without being existentially overwhelmed. We simply cannot go through our days contemplating the reality of it all.

We each have our mental and emotional touchstones where we have our symbols and beliefs which give us a way of securing ourselves against the shadow of unknowing.

In 1 Kings 19, Elijah flees for his life from the wrath of Jezebel. He is a day’s journey into the wilderness and collapses in the shade of a juniper tree, prepared to die but, instead of dying, he encounters the Lord. He stands on a mountain and experiences a mighty wind, an earthquake, and a fire. But the Lord is not in any of those powerful forces. After all that, there was, as the Bible says, “a still small voice.” My personal translation is, “a fine, humming stillness.”

In the space that follows the fury of wind, earthquake and fire, in between words and events is a silence too deep for words, a reality that vibrates with life and intent and gives us the courage to go on.

The answers to it all are beyond us mere mortals. Most of us are not inclined to either nihilism or absolute faith. We are destined to live in between.

We walk, perhaps, out in the mountains, out into the dark of night, and find the utter silence of sacred space. For a blessed time we cease the frenetic spinning of our minds. In that in between time we know, deep in our souls, that there is more. It is not visible. It is “just there”, just beyond sight and sound, a fine, humming stillness more real that the ground on which we stand.

If only we could, all of us, stand in that sacred place instead of summoning forth the violence buried in our DNA in a desperate attempt to make life acceptable to our particular cultural context, then war would cease. The Ultimate Reality which is bigger and far beyond our thoughts, dreams and absolutes creates a calm that makes all things well, no matter how chaotic our lives.