Be still and know that I am God. ~ Psalm 46:10

I have always loved this line from Psalm 46. But I think it is often misunderstood. What does it mean “to know” The Holy One we too casually call God? Is God accessible to us by way of cognition, human intellection? Are those people deemed intelligent more capable of knowing God? Do we know God the same way we know our favorite chair or our dog or a rule in grammar or a concept in physics or dear aunt Myrtle? Can we apprehend The Ineffable One or are we apprehended?

Perhaps we can put to good use that wink-wink euphemism of to know someone “in a biblical way” by which, of course, is meant the way lovers know one another physically, emotionally, and spiritually in the union of love-making. It is an embodied, experiential knowledge. If we put our hand on a red-hot hot plate we know pain, we “learn pain” in a different way than when reading a physiological description of pain in a medical textbook.

The words “be still” should give us a hint that what is not meant by “know” is merely a process of activating mental capabilities in order to comprehend God as we would any ordinary piece of information. The psalmist passes on what God speaks. And what is implied, encouraged, and offered in and through being still is a new way of knowing, one that is as intimate as loving-making and that turns our conception of knowing inside out.

CONTEMPLATION has been referred to as knowledge born of love. By being open and prayerfully receptive in stillness before or with God, this knowledge, I submit, is not the pray-ers knowledge of God but rather the pray-er’s experience—deeper than cognition or explanation—of knowing oneself as known and loved by God. To know oneself as loved, is to know how love closes the distance between the lover and the beloved.

A father might tell his grown son “I love you” but the son still might know and feel the distance between himself and the speaker who made the sounds of those words. Or a father might look his grown son in his eyes, move toward him, and pull him into a tender and tight longed-for enveloping embrace. By just being there, by being still, by being unable to move and then not wanting to move, by giving way to the embrace, the son—in his body-being—finds himself where he has always wanted to be and he now knows his father as he knows himself as known and loved by the father.

To know God is to know love. And to know love—not just about love—is to know oneself as known, then known as loved, and finally to love in return.

Descartes famously said, “Cogito, ergo sum.” I think, therefore I am. The contemplative says, “Amor, ergo sum.” I am loved, therefore I am.

~ Dan Miller

ARTWORK: (Top): Embrace IV, George Tooker
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