Finding God in Stillness

There is a connection between God and stillness. Will you allow me to make one personal reference: There is a sense in which God never seems so near to me as when everything about me is hushed and I myself am quiet and still.

I do not say he is any nearer then than when I am pressed by many duties, but it is in these moments I myself am most conscious of His presence. Now and again, when I can get away from all the stir and bustle of life and there comes perfect calm, I seem to know that God is real.

If that were only my own isolated experience it would be hardly worth while to mention it. I discover, however, that it is the experience of many men, and of men quite different from myself in temperament and outlook.

It was in lonely fellowship with nature that Wordsworth felt the presence, the sense sublime, of a being deeper than nature. It is so with men of a scientific mind. A brilliant young scientist who often questioned God’s existence told me once there was an experience in his life when his doubt was shaken, and he felt that, after all, God was real.

They were moments in which he was alone under a starry sky. This is true again and again of men of action. Captain Peary, who discovered the North Pole, once said it was impossible for a man to spend his life amid the mysterious loneliness of miles of unbroken ice without feeling that there is a God. A famous Alpine climber in one of his books tells of a mountaineer who, resting on a height half-way up a mountain, scribbled idly on the rocks, “There is no God”; but when he reached the top and saw beneath him range after range of snow-clad peaks, there crept into his soul such a mysterious sense of awe that as he descended he changed what he had previously written into: “The fool hath said in his heart there is no God.”

In the absolute stillness of that mountain summit, far away from the rush of human life that man’s soul had discovered God. We find, then, this interesting and most suggestive fact, that men of quite different types, the preacher, the poet, the strong man of action, when they get away from the turmoil of human strife and activity into the great solitudes, find that the reality of God grips them with convincing force.

There is a connection of some sort between knowledge and stillness.