(l) Quiet Contemplation -
Charles Kuralt's Sunday morning program on CBS would often end with several minutes of wordless nature shots. The camera and the microphone would pick up the sounds of birds singing, breezes blowing through the trees or the water rippling across the rocks ---sometimes even a tractor plowing new ground. These moments of meditation gave the viewer an opportunity for the quiet contemplation of nature. How I long for this quiet.
Yet to want quiet is almost unpatriotic. You get on a busy street and see the kids carrying those noise boxes on their shoulders, blaring wide open. Or stop at a traffic light and somebody drives up beside you in a pickup truck that's literally vibrating with sound. Even the church-growth people say that only the churches with noisy services are fast-growing. They call it "celebration worship." But I still have to think of it as a bit noisy.
Americans are not much for quiet.
Occasionally you see an exception like my friend Bob Turner who slipped the bandleader at his Palm Beach Club a few bills. Immediately afterwards the band left the stage. Bob came back smiling because he had bribed the orchestra to quit playing so he could have some quiet.
Americans don't appreciate contemplation.
We're accustomed to the TV age where all solutions are given to us in twenty second sound bites.. We can solve national politics, international strife, or mental illness in 30 minute intervals.
Recently, speaking with a small group including several foreign visitors, I was impressed by one man's very bright face. Afterwards he introduced himself as a businessman from Nepal who was a Hindu. He asked to have lunch because he had never before heard an American Christian talk about contemplation, a thing which is so much a part of his own religion. Even in our homes, as a parent you may have even wanted to holler at your noisy kid, "Sit down and shut up up." Of course, we usually fight that temptation, but sometimes we feel that way about ourselves. A career woman in Miami was telling me that she got so tired of the internal conversation she carries on with herself that she will scream while driving down the road, "Shut up! Shut up!" I know how she feels, particularly when the pressure is heating up and we keep going over and over the same thing in our minds.
Contemplation is like olives - you have to develop a taste for it. I know of no one who comes here with a natural taste for olives. Did you ever try to give a baby one? Yet as we get more sophisticated we become almost addicted to them. The thirst for contemplation and meditation is an acquired taste that makes the words "Taste and see that the Lord is good" come alive.
The scripture says "be still and know that I am God." This is personal worship, removing the ritual of communal worship and arriving at the reality of a one-on-one relationship with the almighty God. After speaking in the convention center of Anaheim I was walking down the corridor and saw my old friend the German scientist Gerhardt Dirks. He is an old man should be, fat and red-faced. As we approached we held out our arms and hugged, and I said to him, "Gerhardt, what are you excited about?" His eyes misted and he replied, "the awe of God, the awe of God!" "Fred, can you imagine a mind that can conceive of the DNA?" For 45 minutes we just discussed the awe of God as expressed in creation.
Contemplation is not a passive thing.
It is not a sleep aid. No, it is intense concentration, producing some of the high emotional moments for those who are practiced in it. We all remember moments of high emotion that we never want to forget. I remember standing beside Mary Alice in the hospital room after she had delivered Brenda as the nurse brought her in for the first time and laid her in Mary Alice's arms. That was high emotion for us. I ask myself and you, too, do we find those same high moments of emotion in our contemplation of God? I have enjoyed some of the highest moments of my life contemplating God. I think of those nights in the mountains of Colorado away from all artificial light on a clear night standing and just looking at the sky while considering that all this is the handiwork of His fingers. An unforgettable experience was as a young executive, early one Sunday morning I was standing at the corner of 57th and Sixth Avenue when I realized that my Tennessee concept of God was too small to include New York.
In contemplation we establish our relativity with God - not our relationship but our relativity. He is eternal, we are temporal. He is infinite, we are finite. He is creator, we are created. The effect of contemplation is to know that when I am divinely small, I am utterly secure; but when I am humanly big, I am insecure. The bigness of God gives me ultimate security. No one is waiting to knock me down to size. Contemplating the infinite stretches me beyond measure; meditating on an immeasurable God stretches me beyond all human thought….. this is the joy of contemplation.
