The Still Point of the Turning World
"The inner freedom from the practical desire, / The release from action and suffering, / release from the inner / And the outer compulsion, yet surrounded / By a grace of sense, a white light still and moving... / At the still point of the turning world." T.S. Eliot
One recent afternoon when students and I gathered for class, we began by reading a passage from T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets that reminded us of a place familiar to all of us enmeshed in life’s complexities; that place between knowing and not knowing, between reality and imagination, between doubt and faith; that place we enter in the process of discerning the paths and meanings of our lives’ experiences. The scriptures are filled with depictions of just such circumstances: Hannah longing for a child; Moses hiding in the desert as he faced the call back to Egypt; Jacob wrestling with the angel for God’s blessing; David pleading with God for mercy as he realizes his depravity; Mary assenting to the annunciation of the angel Gabriel; Jesus agonizing in the garden of Gethsemane. All faced the existential dilemma of knowing that God was summoning them to the future, none of them knowing how they would face it.
In a time when modern science, with its phenomenal achievements, offers us the possibilities of certainty, we seem to have become less adept at living with ambiguity and manifold possibilities; to have forgotten that we don’t set the terms of our own existence. In that place between vision and actuality, knowledge and action, fallenness and redemption, or helplessness and empowerment, we are compelled to contemplate the paradox of recognizing that existence itself is ultimately beyond human comprehension. The apostle Paul describes it in his beautiful and telling metaphor, that “now we see through a glass darkly” (1 Cor 13:12).
Jesus reminds us that we do not know the hour when he will return, “like a thief in the night” (1 Thes 5:2). This reminder gives us pause when we realize that historical time as we know it can and will end, without our consent. We are more urgently made aware of our finiteness when we face this unalterable news, tragic to our own immediate circumstances. Our need for assurance in this life is indicated in the many therapies that we take up to assuage the infinite varieties of our fears and anxieties. Indeed, the self-help industry is propagated by our need to avoid uncertainty and its accompanying anxieties.
"The spark that is struck within us by this touch of the finger of God kindles a sheet of flame that goes forth to proclaim His presence in every fiber of our being and to praise Him from the marrow of our bones." Thomas Merton
Thomas Merton, one of the twentieth century’s most significant American Christian writers, elaborates the paradoxical, vexed place of unknowing as a pilgrimage rather than as a problem. Conceding that he could not comprehend, by reason or intuition, the ways of God in our human world, Merton sought faith as his path of perception in the light and darkness that life brings; in joy and in sorrow; in health and in death; in pleasure and in pain; in success and in failure. As such, faith is not the contradiction of doubt. It is its ally. The constant in life, he wrote, “was that still point within us” where the presence of Christ resides, where the Holy Spirit comforts and guides, where the imago dei dwells. Their transformative power produces in us the fruit of Christ’s passion and redemption—love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control (Gal 5:22–3)—the very empowerment that is strength in weakness, humility in suffering, joy in servanthood and peace in terror.
This presence makes itself known to us as does God—in the mystery of His power, which often seems to dwell in utter silence. But such silence is not a test of faith; rather, it beckons us into the darkness where all but God is—that place between knowing and unknowing where faith becomes authentic, revealed only as it is needed so as to guard its authenticity. To venture there is to find the believer’s most precious secrets: that in death is Resurrection; that in darkness is Light; that in reality is God. The cost is fidelity to Christ. The reward is life abundant, now and forever. In Thomas Merton’s words, “The spark that is struck within us by this touch of the finger of God kindles a sheet of flame that goes forth to proclaim His presence in every fiber of our being and to praise Him from the marrow of our bones.”
Lynn R. Szabo is Associate Professor of American Literature and Creative Writing and Chair of the English Department.
by Lynn Szabo
illustration by Andrea Smith
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