The Counterculturalism of Stillness

‘Be still and know that I am God.’ Psalm 46:10, NIV

Nearly three years ago, I started practising stillness on a regular basis. Inspired by Julia Baird’s luminescent book, Phosphorescence*, and the constant noise inside my own head, I set myself a goal of becoming still at least once a day. It didn’t matter if it was only fleetingly or just before falling asleep; I needed to be more still, more often. It wasn’t just an attempt to be countercultural, but to be counter-Steffie.

As I come up on my stillness anniversary, as it were, I find myself reflecting on how challenging the process has been. Initially I thought it would be easy. ‘How hard can it be to do nothing?’ I thought naïvely. Ha. Hahaha.

Stillness, it turns out, has a way of shedding one’s layers. The past three years for me has seen a stripping away of my masks, defense mechanisms, shame, attachment issues, and any shred of spirituality that was performative in any way. Yikes.

When you are being still, there is no talking. No praying. No singing, even in your head. No explaining yourself. No unpacking any issues. When you are being still with God, you don’t have to do anything. It is a time when all expectations—including time—are put on hold.

At first, I felt lazy. Shouldn’t I be doing something? But in stillness, I have found emancipation from performing, something I’ve been doing my whole life. As a recovering perfectionist, this permission to not perform has been a big deal. It still is. I find it enormously confronting, every single day, to stop trying to be something or do something with God. But I do stop. Then I simply am. I am his child, a child with nothing to prove, a child who is not in trouble nor at school, a child with no homework to do.

(My inner perfectionist continues to struggle with the concept of ‘nothing to do’.)

There’s another layer of stillness that is yet more difficult, and it is the reality that underneath all the busyness and productivity and self-esteem I employ, there is nothing. I am nothing. I have nothing to offer. In the future, if my illness gets worse, I may have even less to offer. If I become housebound or bed bound, I will have nothing to offer. Sitting with that reality is beyond confronting. It makes me squirm. Even as I write this, I am tempted to delete it.

But that’s the power, and the cost, of stillness. I confront the reality of who I am and who I’m not. I gain perspective. And I am learning that it is OK. I still belong to God. There are acres of grace waiting right here for me. The Holy Spirit is with me in every attempt at stillness, in every mental wrestle and every moment of true rest. He is not upset with me because I struggle to ‘do stillness’, get distracted, start jabbering, or fall asleep. He is with me in the utter silence and absence of everything. He is in the nothingness.

The deeper I go into stillness, the more I realise how radical it is. This world is full of distractions, fronts and fakery, me included. How countercultural it is then to ‘Step out of the traffic’ (Psalm 46:10 MSG) and just be. God grant me the grace to continue in stillness and silence before him.

Have you ever felt drawn away from the hustle and bustle of daily life into a space of stillness? What would life look like if you were still more often? What difference, if any, would that stillness make? Share your story. Let’s have a countercultural conversation.

*Baird, Julia (2023) Phosphorescence, HarperCollins, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia.