What sociologist Max Weber wrote about defining “the Protestant ethic” in his famed The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905) applies in full to Be Still! as public theology: you will have grasped what the term means as you finish the book now in your hands.
To see clearly, to see clearly, to see clearly—such is the great impulse and drive you meet on each page. In the massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico years ago, how are we to see what really happened there? With noble manatees in Florida, how are we homo sapiens to grasp something of the mystery of what it is to be other creatures with us in our modern, capitalist society? As a boyish ruler in North Korea plays with weapons of mass destruction, what now has become of our “national system”? . . . system for what? As the number of oysters in Chesapeake Bay drops dramatically, what do we see or even what do we hear being said here?
Though the religious roots of this vision and struggle are sometimes hidden, the thrust is public theology through and through. By the late nineteenth century, Christianity had produced only two major social philosophies: medieval Catholicism and Calvinist Protestantism. Within this recent period, however, the modern social gospel movement originated and developed a third—namely Christian socialism.
As a great cloud of witnesses, the women and men surrounding this fine book are not difficult to bring to mind: Wendell Berry, Jane Addams, Cornel West, Walter Rauchenbusch, Reinhold Niebuhr, James Luther Adams, Dorothy Day, James Gustafson, Paul Tillich, Jim Wallis, and many others.
The movement is novel for its idea of social salvation. The leading direction has been that in order to make Christianity relevant to technological, nationalistic, and capitalist society, the church must recapture the utopian and revolutionary character of the faith . . . only in modern form. The church’s mission, the movement has argued, should be social, i.e., to transform the structures of society in the direction of social justice.
So how do you do that? With special assistance from his professor Zuurdeeg and his teacher Swenson and his prophet Stringfellow, Be Still! is the Reverend Gordon C. Stewart’s answer. Peppered with poems and allusions and metaphors, the essays in this book (Gordon calls them “photos”) all strike me as psalmic. They aim at evoking the reader’s imagination, and at putting her in touch with a source of mystery that can’t be precisely defined, much less fully comprehended.
We recall that the Psalter—or book of Psalms—is composed of 150 psalms, and that therefore Psalm 46 as a discrete expression is not only the source of the book’s title but is also deeply embedded in its larger book. The more I read and reflect on Be Still!’s “photos,” the more I am convinced that Stewart’s volume is one before it is many. Try grasping the book as a single sermon on a single text—Psalm 46, the passage known informally as “the Refuge Psalm.”
God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble. Therefore we will not fear, though the earth should change, though the mountains shake in the heart of the sea; though its waters roar and foam, though the mountains tremble with its tumult. (Ps 46: 1–3)
Introduced first in Psalm 2 and repeated frequently throughout the Psalter, this seminal idea of taking refuge in God gathers unto itself themes at once basic to Be Still! and critical to the Psalter as a whole. The commanding idea of “happiness,” for example—a notion that famously reappears in the Beatitudes (Matt 5:1–11)—is close to unintelligible apart from refuge. Happiness derives from living in complete dependence upon God rather than upon the self. “Happy are all those who take refuge in him” (Ps 2:11c).
The same is true for “righteousness” in the psalms, which is never primarily a moral category but a relational term. “The righteous” are never considered as morally superior persons whose good behavior lays some kind of obligation on God to reward them. On the contrary, the righteous are precisely the persons who take refuge, who acknowledge their fundamental dependence on God for life and for their future.
What Psalm 46 gives us, I believe, is what we find Be Still! echoing on every page, that is, the very opposite of positive thinking. Try this, the psalm says. To illustrate how powerful a help God can be in trouble, we should regularly imagine the absolute worst that can happen to us. Try the most awful hurricane, and a terrible earthquake (vv. 2–3). But truth be told: given the Near Eastern worldview, the psalmist has something even worse than this in mind! Mountains were both the foundations that anchored the dry land amidst watery chaos, and they held up the sky. So the world’s absolute worst natural disaster would be for the mountains to shake (v. 2) or tremble (v. 3).
So here is how to approach Be Still! The book is in the psalm family. Approach it as a kind of spiritual exercise to be read in small doses. It was written to be taken in small doses. And discuss it with your friends.
Tide Pools and the Ocean
Therefore, I bend to thy resounding tides, And list the echo of thy countless waves,A lone disciple, if perchance, my soul That poor shell-gatherer, on the shores of time, May by thy lore instructed, learn of God.
—L. H. Sigourney (1850)1
As a boy I would spend hours lost in the magnificence of the tide pools that dotted the coast of Rockport, Massachusetts. Wading in the tide pools is still my favorite thing to do. The tide pools are filled with fresh seawater. They are the temporary homes that give shelter to the starfish, crabs, periwinkles, and sea anemones that are left there for a few hours at low tide.
Perhaps religion is like a tide pool, a small pool of ocean water that points us to the vast mystery of the ocean on which its life depends. The tide pools hold a few drops of a vast sea. They are filled with the ocean, but they are not the whole ocean. Their health depends on the eternal rolling of the tides to refresh them.
Wading in a tide pool, it’s easy to lose track of time.
But there are other tide pools, far back from the water’s edge, created by the unusually high waves of a storm. Unreachable by the normal daily tides that would refresh them, they are cut off from the ocean that gave them life. They are without oxygen, yellow, and covered by green-yellow slime. Their original beauty has left them to the flies.
Perhaps, like religion, the soul is like a tide pool.
Watching the news these days I feel the way the great preacher Harry Emerson Fosdick did when he put the question from his pulpit at the First Presbyterian Church in New York City, “Shall the fundamentalists win?”2 Elsewhere, in “Dear Mr. Brown: Letters to a Person Perplexed About Religion,” Fosdick wrote,
Since when has the Pacific Ocean been poured into a pint cup, that the God of this vast universe should be fully comprehended in human words? When one considers the reach of the sea over the rim of the world; thinks of the depths that no eye can pierce . . . one dare not try to put these into a teacup. So God sweeps out beyond the reach of human symbols. At once so true and so inadequate are all our words.3
I can only take responsibility from within the tide pool of my Christian faith tradition. Muslim imams, like Minneapolis Imam Makram El-Amin, are doing the same in theirs. A news story in the Star Tribune quoted him as saying, “We will stand in unity against these attacks and the appalling killing of the diplomat who was there on a peaceful mission.”4 Every pastor, rabbi, and imam is called to do the same in the face of the torrent of toxins of the yellowed tide pool.
When any religious tradition mistakes its pool for the ocean itself, when it denies the existence of neighboring tide pools along the edges of Eternity,
