God in the Deep

“Be still, and know that I am God.”
—Psalm 46:10

We spend a lot of energy trying to stay near the surface of life. We manage schedules, curate impressions, and distract ourselves from what feels too heavy or frightening. Beneath the surface are the things we fear most: anxiety, grief, anger, uncertainty, and the awareness that the world can be violent and fragile.

In her beautiful book of essays, Teaching a Stone to Talk, Annie Dillard gets at this. She writes that “in the deep are the violence and terror of which psychology has warned us.” The deep, she says, is real—and it is dangerous. And yet, she refuses to stop there. She dares us not to flee. If we “ride these monsters down,” she suggests, we discover something beneath them—something science cannot measure or name. Beneath the chaos is a kind of sustaining reality.

The 13th-century mystic Meister Eckhart gets at this from another direction. He writes of a “spark within us that knows God,” a light beyond thinking or feeling. When we become attentive to this spark, Eckhart says, we enter a “still desert where all is one.” This desert is not empty or lonely. It is a place where false divisions fall away, where fear loosens its grip, and where we discover that God is closer than our own breath.

Put together, Dillard and Eckhart are pointing us toward the same truth: when we stop running from the depths—whether the depths of the world or the depths of our own hearts—we discover that God has been there all along. Beneath our fear is faithfulness. Beneath our chaos is communion. Beneath all our effort is grace.

This does not mean the monsters disappear. The waters may still roar. But we are no longer alone in them. The stillness God offers is not the absence of trouble; it is the presence of trust. It is the deep knowing that our lives, and our life together, are being held by something stronger than fear.

What if stillness is not withdrawal, but courage? What if the deepest truth of our lives is not what we fear, but what carries us?

Psalm 46 promises, “God is in the midst of the city; it shall not be moved.”

When we find time in stillness, we find neither, finally, shall we.

Let us pray: Holy God, you meet us not only in calm and clarity, but in the depths where fear and uncertainty dwell. When the waters roar and the ground beneath us shakes, help us to be still—not in escape, but in trust. We ask in Jesus’ name. Amen.

‍