Five Ways to Accelerate Your Spiritual and Emotional Growth in 2022: Quieting

Today’s blog post is the fourth in our series on five ways to accelerate your spiritual and emotional growth in 2022.

In April, we talked about ruthlessly eradicating hurry from our lives. In March, I wrote about learning to recognize when we are triggered. In February, I suggested that we add a spiritual practice to our daily routines.

Today we are going to talk about quieting—the practice of purposefully lowering our energy levels so we can calm and be still. This can take many forms. It can be as simple as relaxing our bodies and being still before the Lord—waiting on him in peace. It can be a pause after a high energy activity or conversation. Our pause can be less than a minute or several days as we move into the practice of solitude. It is a huge subject that I will only touch on here. The best way to learn the value of quieting is to experience it.

I was in my fifties before I realized that life would be enriched by learning to quiet. I learned this from my Life Model friends, who taught that we are made to live in rhythms of high energy joy and low energy quiet, or shalom. This is because our brains need times of quiet. And so did my spiritual life.

Just recently, in reading Dallas Willard’s A Divine Conspiracy, I learned that solitude and silence help us “escape the patterns of epidermal responses". By this he means, our automatic responses, the way we react to the world around us. What we are talking about, at its core, is letting go of “our habit of constantly managing things, and being in control, or thinking we are". It is letting go of our cultural tendency to rush through life, for this tendency “is a huge hindrance to the life that God has for us.”

This is because God “will not compete for our attention”. He wants to be wanted. Most of us are so caught up in being productive every single moment that we don’t know what it is like to simply stop. Where do we begin? Willard writes that our, “automatic, epidural responses [can be] broken by solitude and silence—[because they] break the pell-mell rush through life and create a kind of inner space that permits people to become aware of what they are doing and what they are about to do”. This opens the door to change, so that fight, flight, and freeze do not kick-in immediately every time we are rubbed the wrong way.

As we’ve talked about before, it does not work to simply say, “I’m going to try harder to slow down.” What does work is to become the kind of person that knows how to quiet and is aware when a moment of quiet is needed. A person like my friend Linda, who in the middle of a conversation will notice that she needs a break before she even starts to become overwhelmed.

How do we become the kind of person who notices and values quiet? We practice on ordinary days, when, quite frankly, it does not seem important. Instead of filling up our unscheduled moments, we steal away and do nothing. That is right. Nothing. Willard writes that it is vital to develop “the capacity to do nothing,” and describes this capacity as “one of the greatest spiritual achievements”.

When Willard was asked, “What do you do? he replied, “Nothing at all. “

We can enjoy things in solitude and silence, he says, but “don’t try to. Just be there. “

One of the most significant encounters I have had with God happened during a silent retreat on October 20, 2021. I sensed God nudging me to come away with him, and I told Sam that I was planning to do it the next day, a Sunday. I asked him if it was OK if I left him alone. He was willing, so I dress warmly and took my journal, my Bible, and a pen and went to Meadowlark Park where I found a quiet bench in the middle of a grassy hill that sloped down to the lake. There were no paths or benches near me. I was reading scripture and began to see a courtroom. The Trinity sat on regal thrones. There was a small galley. I recognized my parents, my mom in the third row, my dad further back. They waved, but I had no thought of going to them. To my surprise, the people who were being judged were people who had harmed me. One by one the Lord brought them forward and said, “This person betrayed you. Or this person harassed you.” Then the Lord asked, “Do you remember?” In each case, I remembered. I sometimes offered a few words, but it was a holy place, not a place where one said much. Then I was asked, “Do you forgive them?” I’ve always found it hard to forgive but, in that holy place, I felt so thoroughly seen and heard and understood. I know that the Trinity had seen it all, even the parts that I did not see. Knowing that it mattered to them, that they had taken account, made it easy to forgive. And so, I did. Each person one at a time.

At one point I expressed surprise that the Trinity was judging people who were still alive, but they quickly responded, “If we did not judge the world, it would devolve into chaos and darkness.” In an instant I realized that it is the conviction of the Holy Spirit that keeps us from destroying each other, that draws us into their light, and that empowers us to do good when temptation is nigh.

Why do I write about this? To help you recognize the great value of silence and solitude and to encourage you to set aside time to experience what God has for you in the stillness.

Willard writes, in our evil world “God intrudes, gently and in many ways, but especially in the person of Jesus Christ. It is he who stands for love, as no one else has ever done, and pays the price for it. His crucifixion is the all-time high watermark of love on earth. While we were still helpless, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly.” (Romans 5:6)

May you be blessed to know the reality of these words in your own life today.

Dallas Willard quotes are from his book, The Divine Conspiracy.

Dallas Willard, The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life in God, (New York, HarperCollins Publishers, 1997), 392-394