Like bending down to pluck a small dusty stone from the ground and study its nuances, I find myself considering one tiny but fundamental aspect of what leads me to the desert: the need to escape the noise.
The clamor of a day can flow into the next on into the next and gradually, almost imperceptibly, into a mute reservoir of despondency. The rest we deeply need seems to elude, and we dream of a haven in which to abide, if even for a few unbroken moments.
[As I began the past paragraph, I mistyped the word “clamor” and wrote “calmor”. Two things immediately stood out to me about this: well, perhaps three.]
There is delightful irony that the letters in the intended word can be rearranged to evoke the antithesis of clamor: calm more. Ah, yes. More of that, please! And even as I write that, it seems a splinter of a prayer, the whole of which is a call for an increase of peace—a place of quiet where at the very least restoration can occur, if not re-creation—a place for glimpsing possibilities and seeing them through to probabilities, and prayerfully, according to divine alignment.
The next awareness was that the word could be parsed with slightly different emphasis to produce the concept: “call more.” Perhaps the anecdote to having more calm is to call more—to call upon the One who exists outside of time ever to intercede for us. How easy it is to feel swept away in the waves that seem to ceaselessly crash over us just as we get the slightest breath to cry for mercy. But these are seasons, not lifetimes to endure. And even if they are, the remedy is still the same as we own the truth that the mercies of our Creator are new every morning.
The third notion is the freeing reminder that what seems like error, and perhaps is, can often lead to breakthrough. Not just any breakthrough, but the very one we know we need, the one we will breathe into and out of to not only take our next turn around the sun with more than just a few fleeting moments of peace and grace, but the one that will take us to the place we can abide. As we increasingly source from there, we can invite others to do the same. We can spend much too much time trying to be some semblance of “perfect”—but the truth is that it is usually a rather narcissistic and therefore limited approach to living life forward. As one historian has noted: “Error can often be fertile, but perfection is always sterile.”
The mystery of the dark reservoir is somehow absolved in the silence of uttered heart-prayer. It calls us to stay in the place of remembrance that although the divine hand that keeps us is invisible, it is enough—even when it seems not to be.
In pondering the wisdom born of the hard, dry places of certain seasons in life, the unshakable One who quiets the storm within is with us, waiting for us to call his perfect name.