Know, and Be Not Still
Know, and Be Not Still
March 8, 2026
Rev. Douglas Taylor
Sermon video: https://youtu.be/HrUGJuAzVP4
Friends, there is a great amount of trouble swirling around us in our lives. Wars and violence, corruption and greed. I hear from many of you that you are struggling. With all that is going on, it is healthy – physically and spiritually – to step back from it all from time to time and breath. I asked you all a few months back to find your center, to build an altar, to get grounded. One simple and profound path is simply to breath with intention. To be still for a moment and breath.
One of my favorite meditations is by a colleague from a previous generation named Jacob Trapp who offers a lyrical ode to quiet stillness:
Let this house be quiet.
Let our minds be quiet.
Let the quietness of the hills, the quietness of deep waters, be also in us.
So quiet that the noise of passing events and present anxieties, of random recollections and wandering thoughts, is stilled. …
So quiet that we are renewed, we feel at one with all others, at home in a tabernacle of stillness.
So quiet that we sense the ripples of this pool of quietness and healing pass through us and out to the farthest star.
-Jacob Trapp
Do you have times of healing stillness in your life? The advice from Psalm 46 comes to mind. It is really a song about the protection God offers.
God is our refuge and strength, [it begins]
a very present help in trouble.
The Psalm goes on to say we need not fear because even though the mountains may shake and the waters roar, and even if the very earth should change – God is our refuge and strength. If nations are in turmoil and kingdoms seem about the fall – we need not fear. And near the end of the psalm we hear the line, sung as a quote directly from God,
Be still and know that I am God.
We can almost imagine what it is like during times of great turmoil and disaster – there is panic. People are in danger from the natural disaster or political upheaval. Perhaps we feel powerless and hopeless. Be still and know that I am God. When faced with trouble – the first thing to do, according to this Psalm, is to do nothing, to slow down, to look for God. Many people take this advice when the danger is less an actual earthquake and more the metaphorical kind. It is often good when in turmoil to take a beat, to stop or at least pause, allow your prefrontal cortex to catch up to what your amygdala has already suggested for solutions to the situation.
It is sound advice. I read once that the reason a long pause like this works is because your amygdala triggers your limbic system causing the ‘fight or flight’ response. But while the amygdala turns on like a switch, it does not turn off the same way. Instead, we must wait for the neurochemicals to dissipate. So, scientifically, being still and knowing God is an effective technique for dealing with situations like this. Being still and knowing God allows us to make a choice instead of having a reaction. It allows us to choose a response instead of a thoughtless reflex.
In our Unitarian Universalist circles, I suspect more of us nod in recognition about the amygdala than we nod in agreement about God. Allow me a moment on this point.
We Unitarian Universalists function as a multi-faith community. We gather around shared values such as love, justice, and transformation instead of gathering around shared beliefs about God or the Human Condition. I encourage us to become fluent in theological translation together.
If you believe in God and use that language when talking about your beliefs and spirituality – you may need to translate most Sundays when I am preaching. I will say ‘the holy’ or ‘Love’ or talk about our communal values that call us to be in the world in particular ways. When you hear me do that, you may need to stop and say to yourself – “Oh! He’s talking about God.”
If you are a pagan and you hear me talk about the caring for the environment or the beauty of nature, you may need to stop and say to yourself – “Oh! He’s talking about the Goddess.”
If you are an atheist and you hear me talk about ‘God’s love’ or quote from the bible, you may need to stop and say to yourself – “Oh! He’s talking about the high principles and deep values that guide our living.”
If you are a Buddhist and you hear me say, ‘be still and know that I am God,’ you may need to stop and say to yourself – “Oh! He’s talking about our Buddha-nature which we uncover through meditation and dharma study.”
I encourage us to all become fluent in theological translation here. Because we each have our own knowing and understanding. We each have experiences that have led us to see the world in certain ways that help us find meaning.
What does it look like in this exact example? “Be still and know that I am God.” Well, the Buddhists as I mentioned already have a deep understanding of what can be known when we are willing to be still. For pagans it might sound less like being still and more like going through the rituals or practices to reach the place psalmist is pointing toward. For atheists, the translation may sound like ‘be still and allow inner clarity to arise,’ or ‘be still and recognize what really matters in life before reacting.’
The important part is to tap into your centering values, our spiritual ground, the loving presence of God, that aspect of life that helps displace your ego and set you firmly in alignment with Love. You do not need to have a particular theology to have access to this experience.
“Be still,” the psalmist sings, “and know that I am God.” The advice is sound. It is good to stop and refocus when things are hard. And after the stillness, after the knowing, what’s next? It is worth noting that stillness is abnormal. When we are willing to ‘be still,’ we are doing something unusual – unnatural even.
Rev. David Bumbaugh once wrote “Silence is an abnormal state.” The same point applies to stillness, but hear what he says about silence:
Silence is an abnormal state.
The world is nowhere silent: the wind calls from the tree tops and whispers in the beach grass. …
Were our ears more finely attuned, we could hear the crack of granite as boulders are reduced to pebbles, pebbles to sand, sand to dust. …
The world is nowhere silent: birds sing and chirp, squirrels chatter, insects hum and whir.
They fall quiet only briefly at our approach, a suggestion that silence is a sign of fear.
Is it not strange that even as Gaia sings to us, calls to us, shouts at us, we seek wisdom in silence?
It is not a measure of our alienation that we retreat into silence, withdraw from the chorus, in order to hear the endless eternal song?
-David Bumbaugh
We are silent, Bumbaugh suggests, as a form of withdrawal from the ordinary way of things. And so it is with stillness too. Nothing is ever really still. We seek stillness as a temporary state to find clarity – not because we want to achieve stillness for stillness’ sake.
Painter Paul Gardner once said, “A painting is never finished. It simply stops in interesting places.” And the same could be said of nearly everything. It’s never finished; it simply stops in interesting places. The whole of existence is dynamic and changing.
Mount Everest, the huge mountain standing as a perfect symbol of massive, unyielding, constant, solid reality is “growing” about 2 millimeters per year as the continental plate under India pushes under the Asian Plate to its north. Meanwhile, sea levels around New York City are rising faster than in other places because the island hasn’t finished sinking into the earth’s crust after the glacial ice melt from the last ice age.
Nothing is still. The whole universe is alive and pulsing with sound and movement. Life is always changing and it is to life that we must stay true. Everything is in motion. Be still – God says. I can’t! My heart is beating, my atoms are swirling, my planet is spinning. I cannot be still. But I will pause, briefly, Oh God, I will pause and listen for what might be next.
Author Scott Russell Sanders writes a little about this in his book of essays entitled Earth Works (2012),
Since Copernicus, we have known better than to see the earth as the center of the universe. Since Einstein, we have learned that there is no center; or alternatively, that any point is as good as any other for observing the world. I take this to be roughly what medieval theologians meant when they defined God as a circle whose circumference is nowhere and whose center is everywhere. If you stay put, your place may become a holy center, not because it gives you special access to the divine, but because in your stillness you hear what might be heard anywhere… All there is to see can be seen from anywhere in the universe, if you know how to look. (p123)
The point of being still is to better learn how to listen, how to look, how to know life. Don’t be still, thinking if you can only be still enough for long enough you will somehow win. The universe doesn’t work that way. God doesn’t work that way.
Be still and know. Yes. And after the stillness, after the knowing … be not still. All the world is in motion. There are wars and violence happening around the world and in our own streets. There is trouble clamoring for our attention. When anger or impatience arises in your heart, when your neighbor or your kin causes you to want to lash out, when the mountains shake and the waters roar, when nations are in turmoil – when you feel lost or hopeless, unmoored – be still, be still, be still.
Say a prayer. Go walk in nature. Write in your journal. Perform a ritual. Sit in meditation. Gaze upon a beloved. Light a candle. Seek God. Be still. And know … know you are loved, know you have power still to affect your days, know you are not in this alone, know we can and will rise to better days, know God. Be still and know. And then … then … rise up and move.
In a world without end
May it be so
The Substance of Things Hoped For
The Substance of Things Hoped For
Rev. Douglas Taylor
2-23-25
“I believe in the sun even when it is not shining,” our choir sings. “I believe in love even when I don’t feel it.” This phrase, repeats over and over. And “I believe in God,” they offer at the end, “even when God is silent.” This piece was composed roughly 10 years ago by Mark Miller, and was added to the Whitbourne choral work about Anne Frank life as an uplifting coda to the emotional performance. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PT-VdH2lwZk&ab_channel=maestroz25
The text which serves as the basis for the lyrics of this choral work comes from an inscription on the wall of a cellar in Cologne, Germany where a number of Jews hid themselves during World War II. Composer Mark Miller said he wrote the musical arrangement during a troubling time in his life.
“I was feeling down about a few things in my life and in the country [… the] government, being black, being gay…when I discovered the words again. […] And I decided, I’m still going to believe in love. I sat down at the piano, and five minutes later, it just came.” https://morristowngreen.com/2014/03/02/bold-choices-define-harmoniums-anne-frank-tribute-in-morristown/
My sermon title is from that well-known passage in scripture from Hebrews, “Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” (Hebrews 11:1) I believe in the sun even when it’s not shining. There is a lot going on in our world and in our hearts that is not good. And faith calls us to believe in love, even when we do not feel it.
I want to pause and step back from the poetry and dig into what this means. First, I’ll remind us that faith and belief are two different things. Poetry is important and we all understand what the line is saying. But I’m parsing it out to lift up a point about how we can understand faith in a Unitarian Universalism perspective.
Faith is a form of trusting, a confidence in life or in God or in yourself. Saying ‘I believe in God’ can translate as ‘I have faith in, trust in, a reliance upon, God.’ And saying “I believe in God’ can translate as ‘I believe God exists.’ And the second interpretation is more etymologically accurate, while the first interpretation is more common in our vernacular use – certainly in the way the song is offering.
Christian theologian and ethicist H. Richard Niebuhr put it this way: “The belief that something exists is an experience of a wholly different order from the experience of reliance on it.” This song is about the reliance upon the sun, love, and God. It is a song about faith.
In his classic book Stages of Faith, James Fowler writes about the human development of faith as something separate from beliefs and a person’s religious tradition. Fowler writes about faith as an ongoing journey of deepening and maturing. The opening pages of his book ask questions like:
What commands and receives your best time, your best energy? What power or powers do you rely on and trust? To what or whom are you committed in life?
From this perspective we can talk about faith not as a set of beliefs but as the way we live a life. We can talk about faith as what we trust, what we rely upon. And it is important to notice the context of how faith shows up. It is not when the sun is shining, but when it is not shining. Faith shows up when we have trouble and pain, when things are broken or messy or in chaos.
I remember watching my mom while I was growing up in the church. Churches are always messy, busy, slightly chaotic places when things are going well. Some people would respond with much anxiety and running around. There would be always several things up in the air and none of them were going as planned, or at least they were demanding the full attention of several people who could not give their full attention. I’m sure many of you know what that can be like because that happens here in our congregation as well.
Anyway, while I was a youth, my mother, who was the Director of Religious Education for many years and then Minister of Religious Education for a few more years, she would remain calm in midst of all this and just continue to do the next thing that needed to be done. She was a walking example of the axiom: this too shall pass. I’m not sure I would have used these words then to describe what I was seeing; but now I can tell you, I learned a great deal about faith watching my mother move through church chaos with such calm. She trusted that we would get done those things that needed to get done; and whatever we didn’t get done, well, we would figure that out when we got there.
In the face of recurring struggle and trouble, my mother’s leadership style did not rely on frantic panic or reactive posturing. She kept calm, did the next right thing, and trusted that we would get where we needed to be in good time. Even when it was hard.
Buddhist writer Sharon Salzberg says “Faith is about opening up and making room for even the most painful experiences.” She says one of the meanings of the Pali word translated as ‘faith’ is hospitality. And Lea Morris sings: You gotta keep your heart wide open. Though these wave wanna push you around.
The part where your heart stays open is faith. Finding your way back to solid ground will come, but first, be open.
If I could be willing to make room (Salzberg continues) for my aching numbness, and the river of grief it covered, allowing it, even trusting it, I would be acting in faith. Perhaps this is how suffering leads to faith. – Sharon Salzberg
Til your faith brings you back to solid ground. Faith is not the solid ground. Faith is the openness while you are out in the storm. Faith is not the solid ground, but it will travel with you back to the solid ground.
Brene Brown said it like this:
I thought faith would say, “I will take away the pain and the discomfort.” But what it ended up saying is “I will sit with you in it.”
When you turn and face the struggle with an open heart, it is an act of faith. Admittedly, this is not a guarantee. That’s part of how it is an act of faith. But remember what James Baldwin once wrote:
Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.
Keep you heart wide open. Even when the sun is not shining. Even when the evidence to date does not support your conclusion that something good can still come. Even when the God you love has been silent. Even when the struggle is all you can experience at the moment: the struggle and the suffering and the cruelty and the hate. Even when, even when you don’t feel it, you can still believe in love.
I uncovered a powerful story about the lyrics of the choir piece we had this morning; about that inscription found on the wall of a cellar in Cologne. “I believe in the sun even when it’s not shining.”
The small poem has a complicated history and has been at the center of many stories. Sometimes the story says it was scrawled on the wall of a cave outside the Warsaw ghetto, or in a prison at Auschwitz, or at a shelter where some Jews were harbored by Catholics. Sometimes the poet is unknown, sometimes the poet is part of a collection of Jews who survived in hiding, sometimes the poet is a dead girl. Each version of the story adjusts the details a little bit in the telling.
My colleague Everett Howe had a blog “The Humanist Seminarian” which he kept while studying to become a Unitarian Universalist minister. Back in 2017 he wrote a four-part series about this poem – he did a remarkable amount of research. Interestingly, it was a fifth post he made four years later in which he wrote about finally finding the original source of the poem. https://humanistseminarian.com/2021/04/04/i-believe-in-the-sun-part-v-the-source/
Rev. Howe found a 1946 Swiss newspaper which contained the story and the poem in its earliest form. In the article, the reporter talks about visiting an old underground shelter where nine Jewish fugitives had lived for several month.
When I visited the shelter, I had the opportunity to see the emergency housing, fully equipped with a kitchen, bedroom, living room, radio, a small library, and oil lamps — evidence of a stunning experience. Meals could only be prepared at night so as not to attract the Gestapo’s attention, who would have noticed the smoke during the day. Food had to be supplied by friends who willingly gave up a portion of their rations to help those unfortunate people living for weeks in utter darkness.
The following inscription is written on the wall of one of these underground rooms […] “I believe in the sun, though it be dark; I believe in God, though He be silent; I believe in neighborly love, though it be unable to reveal itself.”
This version of the story is more human, I think; more relatable. I believe in the sun even when I must hide. The fugitives had to stay underground to remain safe. The darkness was protection. The darkness was not the problem. In fact, the darkness is part of the action they had taken to be safe. Their faith is not a crying out in powerlessness. It is trusting that they are doing the next right thing to get through the struggle.
Analogously, the line about believing in God even when God is silent can be heard not as an indictment against God’s silence, but as recognition that perhaps God is with them in hiding. That is a stretch, I’m just saying it is possible.
World War II certainly produced many indictments against God from Jewish people – so that line could easily be that. But I note that the line doesn’t say God is absent, or that God has abandoned us; only that God is silent. The atrocity is ongoing around them. The injustice has not been answered yet. The war continues. And God is silent.
And finally, in the third line – the climax of the poem rather than stuck in the middle, our author writes: I believe in Love. And translating from the German, it might be charity or compassion or neighborly love, Rev. Howe points out. Much like the Greek word Agape getting translated as ‘love’ but is best understood to mean a particular form of love.
The fugitives did experience charity or neighborly love from those who helped them remain hidden. I believe in love even when it “must remain hidden,” even when it is “unable to reveal itself.” Rev. Howe suggested a few possible translations to amplify the more likely intention of the original scribe.
Perhaps faith is not asking us to believe in love when there is zero evidence for it. Perhaps faith is asking us to believe in love even when it is hidden or masked, even when the injustice has not yet been answered. And we decide to believe in love anyway.
Yes, the storms are raging, chaos is erupting around us and we struggle to maintain our balance. Yes, evil does prosper. Truth be on ‘the scaffold and upon the thrown be wrong’ But that is not the whole story.
What do you rely upon? Keep faith that you can do the next good thing; that we can keep our hearts wide open through any struggle. Trust that our faith will bring us back to solid ground. And perhaps you also will discover that even in hard times, you still believe in love.
In a world without end,
May it be so.
Spirit Ablaze
Spirit Ablaze
Rev. Douglas Taylor
12-15-24
Sermon Video: https://youtu.be/tWcWKxFP1ZQ
I recall reading somewhere years ago, but could not put my finger on the quote this week, a small story of a rabbi kissing his spouse and children goodbye earnestly each sabbath before going to lead prayers for the congregation; for who could know what might happen between the moment we invoke the name of the holy and moment immediately following when we offer suitable supplication.
I step into this topic knowing full well I preach unto a community that consists largely of atheists and agnostics; and of those remaining who do believe in God, most do not believe in a God like that. A god of arbitrary smiting and wrath. I know this. Truth be told (and I trust this is not surprising), I don’t believe in a God like that either. And yet I bring this topic before us all the same and will make suitable effort to translate in such a way as I hope will still be edifying to the full range of belief among us.
Here we are, each Sunday. And like that hapless rabbi kissing his family goodbye, I invite the holy each week to abide among us as we worship together.
In her book about prayer, Teaching a Stone to Talk, Annie Dillard frames the question this way:
“Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return.” (Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk.)
Do we? Do know what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Annie Dillard is a poet and author; her writing is a blend of naturalism, mysticism, and self-reflection. I discovered her work while in seminary and it had a profound impact on my view of the world. Her theology does not line up perfectly with mine, but there is enough overlap for me to find resonance.
When she cites our audacity to blithely invoke the holy, for example, I don’t quite resonate with the suggestion that an angry father God might strike us all down. But I do find it compelling to read her passionate plea as if to declare – this is real, you know, all this ritual and gathering we do! It’s not just a bit of pomp or fluff. It’s real. I like that part.
I am reminded of a description from Rev. Nancy McDonald Ladd’s book After the Good News that came out just before the pandemic. It is a book about the future of Unitarian Universalism. In it, she writes:
A universalist God for a tragic era is not a gauzy, hymn-singing force of personal devotion that draws us endlessly toward itself, but a fierce and compelling power that grips us by the collar amid our rebellious descent and calls us to choose the will to mutuality all over again, even when that choice is so risky that it could utterly remake us.
And that, my friends, is the risk Dillard is referring to when she suggests we wear crash helmets and issue life jackets in place of orders of service each week. The risk is that the holy we are invoking each week may remake us. We risk actually becoming compassionate toward the vulnerable; we risk acting on those ideals we mention each Sunday.
There is a joke bouncing around social media lately about how some conservative Christian pastors are warning their people against watching the new Wicked movie lest it lure them into evil ways. The tongue-in-cheek response is, “you’re worried about the influence of a 2-hour movie on your parishioner’s morals, yet weekly worship has not made your people more compassionate and Christ-like.”
The risk is we might invoke the holy together and be changed by the encounter. Or I can say – we risk invoking our deepest values and find ourselves compelled to realign our behavior to match our values. Or I can say – we risk inviting God to be with us and discover God accepted the request.
This thing we are doing every Sunday morning, there is some contradiction built into it. As Unitarian Universalists in particular, we are several steps off the beaten path in terms of religion and belief; and yet our Sunday morning practice looks a lot like the usual beaten path! We attract people who are seeking an alternative to organized religion and we jokingly say we are very disorganized – and yet, we are an organized religion. It’s just we have organized around something radically different than what most other religious communities gather around. We gather around values and a promise to be with each other across our differences.
We Unitarian Universalists live in the religious realm of individualism and freedom of conscience; and we carry an abiding distrust of authority. One result of that is the way we compensate and push ourselves to be community-focused, to lean into the concepts of covenant and accountability and liberation. Another result is an undercurrent in which we keep faith at arm’s length. We intellectualize our experiences; we talk about things and learn about things. That is in important aspect of how we create community together.
The trick here is not to stop doing that, but to balance it with more trust. We need to allow ourselves to be impacted and changed by the experiences we create together, by experiences of the holy. Our shared experiences on Sunday morning can be transformative; they can impact our living and our behaviors. We can risk growing and changing, risk being transformed, healed, or as Rev. McDonald Ladd put it – remade.
I am not suggesting we swing wildly into the over-trusting end of this conversation. Dillard offers a deep warning against that as well. She warns us not only against faking it, against being tourists in religion. And she offers a warning for when we take it seriously and we do experience the transformative power of love; that we not lose ourselves in the light we seek. Let me spend a minute in this extreme with you.
Her 1977 book, Holy the Firm, is a thin little text exploring a three-day time span of events on an island in the Puget Sound where she was writing. The crash of a small plane and a seven-year-old girl burned in the accident become a focus for Dillard to talk about beauty and cruelty, faith and suffering, and a moth caught in a candle flame.
It is that last bit that so captivated me when I read the book as part of theology class in seminary. Dillard describes how she would often read by candle light every night. Moths were constantly fluttering around her flame, many suffering the clichéd result.
“One night,” she writes early in the book, “a moth flew into the candle, was caught, burnt dry, and held. I must have been staring at the candle, or maybe I looked up when a shadow crossed my page; at any rate, I saw it all. A golden female moth, a biggish one with a two-inch wingspan, flapped into the fire, dropped her abdomen into the wet wax, stuck, flamed, frazzled, and fried in a second.” (p16)
Dillard goes on to describe the event in vivid detail for several more sentences. Quite poetic, quite horrifying.
After, she writes,
“And then this moth-essence, this spectacular skeleton, began to act as a wick. She kept burning. The wax roses in the moth’s body from her soaking abdomen to her thorax to the jagged hole where her head should be, and widened into flame, a saffron yellow flame that robed her to the ground like any immolating monk. That candle had two wicks, two flames of identical height, side by side.” (p17)
I don’t bring this story to say – don’t succumb to burn-out friends. We can have that message in the workshop immediately after the service today. Instead, the message her is a spiritual warning. When you find the light, when you find your calling, when you are alive and afire with a passion for something life-giving – be mindful of what ese is happening in your life around you as you burn with your passion.
This is a bit like the proverbial question for the dog always chasing cars. What would they do with it if they ever caught one? What would you do if you ever did set your spirit ablaze?
There is a lot going on around us these days, my friends. There are calls for us to step up and live our values out loud, to be visible allies for the vulnerable and the marginalized. And this is not just a call to do justice – it is a call to live our spiritual values together in community.
Much of it will come out as a call to do justice – Who is taking care of our trans siblings? How are the undocumented in our community? Where are unhoused people sleeping tonight? When can we feed the hungry again? A lot of this will sound like a call for justice. But deeper down it is a call to faith, a call to trust that the holy to go with you on the call.
If we gather on Sunday mornings like this, invite the holy to show up, and experience growth and change in ourselves – the spirit will call us into places where we will need our communities around us and … and we will need faith to trust that God is with us in the work. Or, to trust that our values are true.
If we invoke the holy here and feel Love grab us by the collar and utterly remake us – we do well to trust that Love and not try to be our own wick and flame. We must trust Love to travel with us where we are called. To trust God, to trust our values as true, to trust the holy. If you feel a change, a growth, a call – don’t fall for the idea that you must be the moth and burn yourself up in response.
Instead, grab you crash helmet and heed to spirit. Let love be your guide in the days to come. Dare to respond, take a risk to reach out and live your values more boldly, trusting that Love will travel with you as you go. Let love be the burning wick. Your work is show up with that love, and to trust that love will travel with you as you go.
In a world without end
May it be so.
Rev. Douglas Taylor 