Seasons

I read an article recently on how, knowing what we currently do about our solar system, gravity, and the motion of celestial bodies, it’s well within reason to base physics on an earth-centric system rather than a sol-centered one. The author argued that convenience and long-standing tradition prevent altering modern physics into that arrangement, but that it’s no less valid an axiom of physical phenomena. Whatever the truth behind these arguments, for I’ve not the authority to challenge or back anything within this realm of reason, it spurred my thinking into the contemplation of motion.

I easily imagine the earth revolving around a stationary sun, anchored in spot like a tiny marble in those children’s games where you attempt to fit each ball into place by wiggling a tiny-maze platform.  But nothing (to my knowledge) within our solar system lies motionless. In truth, it’s too easy for me to imagine our solar system as a 2-dimensional platform on which the planets path in slow elliptical ranges around the sun. Rarely is anything so simple.

One of the passages I’m contemplating this week is : “Be still and know that I am God” from Psalms 46. My NASB version says “Cease striving and know that I am God”. Nothing sits still. The sun moves above the greater galaxy and every living body on earth moves with the revolving, rotating, spinning, dreidel of an earth on which we ride. Motionlessness is impossible you might say, as forces of gravity, life, and being exhibit pressures on us every which way, dragging us about like the current, the moon, the wind, the somnambulist beckonings of our subliminal souls. Ceasing to strive isn’t simple stopping, sometimes, but an anti-motion, a counter-motion.

I often contemplate what it takes for meditation, for prayer, for focusing on divinity and the spiritual, whatever it is. There are two interpretations of what meditation as a discipline is: either an emptying, a voidance of emotion, feeling, and thought, or a pregnant patience of being without preconceived patterns of belief that seek to alter the course of the waters carrying us along. Acts of meditation, of fasting, of prayer seem to be definitive attempts at halting and ceasing to strive. But they are not always, and I think we’ve Americanized the concept of each of these into a business proposal, a busyness that inhibits the calm and care behind the practice. We’ve industrialized prayer, we’ve transformed Christianity into capitalism, and Church is a business community sometimes that tries to embody a perpetual motion machine that eventually falters, sputters and dies.

But if you look around, reading Mary Oliver and opening your eyes unto the apparent divinity of surroundings, the creative hand of the God whose calligraphic brush painted the beaches and careful mosaics formed the mountains, I think a motionless can be embodied, though everything spins about, above, around, and here, sometimes, peace is found. In the flowering, fruitful, fullness of uncluttered patience.