Grace and Stillness

When I posted on grace and motion, I was thinking about loss and the open road. Now that I am off the road and starting to settle into a new place and a new life, I am thinking about grace and stillness. In a comment to that post, my favorite Harvard seminarian noted that grace sometimes came from stillness, from not departing but staying put, and he is right. There is less risk in stillness. I have deleted that line several times now, but I think I am going to let it stand. I deleted it because I don’t want to imply that there is no risk in staying home; clearly, to not take the open road and stay at home can be risky in its own ways. But certainly to venture forth from the everyday and the safety that it affords (which is one reason we call it home) is to expose yourself to greater risk. Mircea Eliade notes that we cannot live in the sacred permanently; else it would become the everyday. I am reminded of that wonderful description of war as “long stretches of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror.” (I tried to find the origin of this quotation without luck but found it used in relation to everything from war to skydiving to commercial flying.) We experience the sacred in much the same way: it is rare and it involves terror, or at least the old sense of the term “awe.” It is something so much larger or different than us that it causes us to rethink our categories and reorient ourselves in the world. Obviously, we can’t be doing that every day, and some of us never do it at all.

What I am getting at is that motion eventually has to stop, we have to “settle down,” even if it’s temporary, and we have have to be still. What form does grace take in stillness?

Grace is the stillness, the quiet, the solitude, the centripetal force that moves you to the center and keeps you there. Grace, that free and unexpected gift of life and love, is present when you no longer have to worry about your route, your lodging, or your meals. That’s another definition of home, so grace without motion is simply being home. Rather than letting things go, you begin to accumulate them, and while our religion of capitalism has made this another thing completely, there is grace in having things around you from your journey. The hero or heroine does steal something from the gods on her journey, and she brings it home where it rests with her. These elixirs and symbols remind the sojourner of the journey and what was lost, but also what was gained. To surround yourself with these things is to continue the journey in another way, but from the comfort of home. And of course we continue to take journeys–emotional, spiritual, romantic–even from the comfort of home. In fact St. Dorothy of Oz comes to realize that “there’s no place like home,” even though she’s just taken one of the most amazing journeys in American literature and film without ever leaving her bed.

As usual, all of this is best articulated in a poem. Serendipitously, I found this poem when I bought the print version of Michael Cunningham’s A Home at the End of the World. It was not read in the audio version. I have read a lot of Wallace Stevens, but I had never come across this poem before. It is a simple but profound rendering of grace and stillness, especially the kind that comes after a long journey.

Wallace Stevens – The Poem That Took The Place Of A Mountain

There it was, word for word,
The poem that took the place of a mountain.

He breathed its oxygen,
Even when the book lay turned in the dust of his table.

It reminded him how he had needed
A place to go to in his own direction,

How he had recomposed the pines,
Shifted the rocks and picked his way among clouds,

For the outlook that would be right,
Where he would be complete in an unexplained completion:

The exact rock where his inexactness
Would discover, at last, the view toward which they had edged,

Where he could lie and, gazing down at the sea,
Recognize his unique and solitary home.

“To be complete in an unexplained completion”–there it is. That’s home–unique and solitary. That’s the grace that is the stillness.