Wisdom and Stillness

It seemed like every Saturday in summer, around 5 PM, for a number of years, I’d ask the same questions to different people: “richer, poorer, sickness … health? If so, say I do.” I’d often find my eyes glassing over as I read the words. The tears, however, were not engineered by Hallmark. One couple I married while taking a brief break from a four-day hospital stay where my son, at two years old, was being treated for RSV and pneumonia. I looked at this couple after watching my son breathe through a machine. I looked at them and understood that they had no idea what they were saying “I do” to.

Once, six months into marriage, my wife and I moved to the other side of the country. We were poor, living on student loans and whatever I brought in from my grocery store job. She started having panic attacks, but we didn’t know that then. All we knew was that she couldn’t breathe, and then she could breathe, and then she couldn’t again. All we knew was that we needed to take her to the hospital. All we knew was that we didn’t have insurance, and we didn’t have money. A couple getting married has no assurances, except the other. The wedding pledge is an expression of commitment without certainty. But I’m thinking about more than marriage.

My grandmother, who is 92, served as an Episcopal priest for the last 40 or so years of her professional life. She’d wear her priest’s collar in public places with a note of pride. She told me that the priestly collar was intended to symbolize a union with God and a set-apartness. She said it was binding, like a wedding ring. Her husband, my grandfather, fell down a hospital staircase in the early ’60s after huffing too much ether. He damaged his prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain responsible for controlling social functions. He became a different man, family lore goes.

“Did you ever think of divorce?” I asked once.

“We don’t leave the wounded behind,” she responded.

A year ago, in Seattle, a friend pointed to a new downtown residential building. “These are the Amazon dorms,” he joked. “People move here, take the job, refuse to put down roots, and take another opportunity in another city, making space for the next person to move in.” This has its allure. The ambitious push for “beyond.” All well-lived lives have known the tension between the dynamic and the static. I feel it, as an imperfect balance, within me every day. I want adventure and to be deeply known. I want tradition and freedom from it. I fawn, nostalgically, over my past, and I anticipate greatness in my future.

Our family began a journey of planting a church nearly seven years ago. It was the call of God that wooed us from our roots. But even as we packed up our things, we did it together. The roots of familial commitment tied us to each other as we were flung into the unknown. For some, it is the roots of religious practice that hold them as they escalate through professional opportunities. The mistake is not moving on in some area of your life; it is constantly moving on in all areas of your life. Sure, Tolkien said, “Not all those who wander are lost,” but I suspect most are.

The saintly philosopher, Simone Weil, thinks it’s “money that destroys human roots … turning desire for gain into the sole motive.” It’s a sensible but too simple claim. The answer is not money but what animates our yearning for money. “The flesh,” that old enemy that wants just to want, would — if it could — keep us constantly wandering away from connection and towards novelty. Curiosity, for medieval monasticism, was associated with restlessness and an inclination to resist one’s vows. Curiosity is a virtue for our age and has, in many respects, served us well as such. But it’s worth reflecting on why it was viewed negatively in the Medieval mind. Escape clauses, lease agreements, fear of buyer’s remorse, more money, younger limbs, the next thing around the bend — we have never known Eden, but we continue believing it is farther east, our eyes blinking at every oasis.

You know you have put down roots when you begin looking somewhere else, thinking it may be nicer. Socrates has said, “By all means, marry. If you get a good wife, you’ll be happy. If you get a bad one, you’ll become a philosopher.” If we set aside the irony and expand the principle, we are offered an expansive view. There is no wisdom without stillness. When you sit within a vocation or marriage for decades, you learn about the mechanics of time, how winter gives itself to spring, and fall to winter. For example, the return of a once-gone chronic pain produces little panic in the wise. They have noticed how every November the frost creeps in from the corners of the window towards the center, and how, slowly, more and more, darkness haunts earlier parts of the day. They know, also, that winter, in time, will give way to spring. But the agitated, restless, those bent on a better next, will go on blindsided by life’s various winters and search foolishly for spring somewhere in the snow. They have not yet learned from stillness.

Before the wedding days, I would spend time with the engaged couple. My goal would never be to get them married but to help them see what marriage is. “Covenant” is the word. It comes from the Hebrew for “cut” — as in cut out an agreement in stone. I wanted them to understand that marriage is an invitation to love, cry, chuckle, and even yell at and with each other. I wanted them to see that marriage is a redemptive disturbance to the ego, with its yearning for new and more. It is what God first offered to us and still does, not leaving us behind but binding himself to our forgetful and wandering eyes.