Category Archives: anxiety

Stillness and the Septic Tank — The Day After

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About this piece

"Leave Rage Alone" aired yesterday as a podcast recorded during a rare moment when all of us were in the same boat, waiting for the 2022 election returns. The text for the podcast is printed below."Leave Rage Alone" was written and posted four years ago before Kay and I re-located from Chaska to Brooklyn Park MN to be near grandson Elijah. We share it here in hopes it still speaks.

Searching for stillness

Stillness defines life at the cabin. It’s quiet. The only sounds are bird calls. It is this stillness that draws us here by the wetland. But my heart is not still. It’s preoccupied with evil. This morning’s assigned psalm from The Book of Common Prayer (BCP) speaks to my condition.

Do not fret yourself because of evildoers…
For they shall soon wither like the grass…
Be still before the LORD…
Do not fret yourself over the one who prospers,
the one who succeeds in evil schemes.
Refrain from anger, leave rage alone;
do not fret yourself; it leads only to evil.

Psalm 37 BCP

Leave rage alone.

Last night, after a quiet swim, I put my hearing aids back in, returned to the cabin for dinner, and listened to a podcast of The Beat with Ari Melber which Kay had downloaded on her iPhone. Back home in Chaska, we watch The Beat because it suits our outrage over what is happening to America. But listening to the podcast re-awakened the rage from which I seek relief in the quiet beauty of the disconnected cabin by the wetland. Listening to the podcast disturbed the serenity of the place. It felt like a fatal assault, a return to hell.

Midway through the podcast, I removed my hearing aids again to distance myself from the septic fret of rage. It was the tone of voice that felt like death or a foreign invasion. I was swimming in my own body waste.

The pond and the wetland are changing every day. So is the world. The Trumpeter Swans that brought such joy a month ago are gone. So are the red-wing blackbirds that had feasted on the cat-n-nine tails. And the grass? The grass is green and growing again. But the psalm reminds me that green will fade to brown in autumn until the swans return.

Meanwhile the calendar reminds me. It’s time to call the guy who empties the septic tank, before it gets full and no longer works. — July 19, 2018.

Afterword

The day after the election day, the boat of anxiously awaiting the election results is over. The shared experience of unknowing was perhaps its own kind of sacred moment, a suspension of the lethal spirituality of winners and losers. Is it too much to ask, for the sake of everyone’s health, that we come together again to empty the septic tank before it gets full?

Gordon C. Stewart, public theologian, author of Be Still! Departure from Collective Madness (2017, Wipf and Stock), 49 two-four page essays on faith and public life; Brooklyn Park, MN, November 9, 2022.

A Search for Comfort and Courage

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After an extended period of dismay and bewilderment, Psalm 39 opened a vein to write again.

Image of hermit crab crawling inside an empty shell.
Hermit Crab crawling into an abandoned shell

A Psalmic Meditation of a Hermit Crab

I said, “I will be careful how I act
    and will not sin by what I say.

I have been careful. A hermit crab at low tide, I sidle into a borrowed shell, not too big and not too small, to hide from birds of prey. I stuff myself inside. When the tide comes in, I may leave this shell. But not now. The sand is hot. The gulls are feeding.

 I will be careful what I say
    around wicked people.”

It’s not just the birds of prey that keep me here. Whatever I say outside will make it hotter for crabs like me. I’m crabby and cranky. “Keep your words to yourself! The world doesn’t need more heat. We all need to cool down.” 

So I kept very quiet.
    I didn’t even say anything good,
    but I became even more upset.

Despair is a horrible thing. “If you can’t  say something nice, don’t say it. Stay in your room until you have something nice to say. You have to be positive.” I have nothing good to say. Nothing calm. Nothing of value. Nothing to cool the beach at noon. Nothing to lower the blistering heat rising in me.

I became very angry inside,
    and as I thought about it, my anger burned.

Glass shattering, Stop the Steal, Hang Mike Pence, Execute Nancy, Make America Great Again, sounds of threats and violence, cries for help, and the silence from the White House still hurt my ears.

Then I remember how Jeremiah wept. Truth, he said, was dark and deep, and bought a worthless plot of land where hope could live. 

The prophet Jeremiah, Michelangelo fresco, Sistine Chapel

So I spoke:

“Lord, tell me when the end will come
    and how long I will live.
    Let me know how long I have.

You have given me only a short life;
    my lifetime is as nothing in your sight;
    Even those who stand erect are but a puff of wind.

It’s hard alone outside the shell. The wind is stiff. The sky is dark. Light is White and right; Black is dark and wronged again. Truth sways by a noose from the lynching tree.

When will this end? When will it stop? How will it stop? I’m an old man; my time is short, this short puff of air, soon to disappear.

People are like shadows moving about.
    All their work is for nothing;
    they collect things but don’t know who will get them.

My kind and I are like ghosts sidling along the wall of shadows we faintly see in Plato’s cave. We find no respite from the heat and clamor into which we once could crawl — or thought we could. We leave behind a scorched gift to generations yet to come.

“So, Lord, what hope do I have?
    You are my hope.”

Sea levels have rise, the tides are higher, the forests burning, the rivers drying, fields once lush and green now parched and brown, the planet spinning out of control, like a top our hands have spun. These mortal selves, this factory of gods our hearts conceive, cannot hide from Thee, O Lord, the “I AM” without end, the Breath of Life that breathes a breath through me.

Gordon C. Stewart, author of Be Still! Departure from Collective Madness (2017, Wipf and Stock), host of Views from the Edge: To see More Clearly, Brooklyn Park, MN, January 23, 2023.

I wish I were a lily pad

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Early morning reflection from the dirt road by the wetland pond

Walking the off the map dirt road where nothing much happens, it’s quiet. The only sounds are bird songs; the only things that lie here are the lily pads lying on the shrinking wetland pond bordered by the cattails and wild flowers between the pond and the unpaved road. Nothing toils or spins. Nothing is anxious here. Not this morning.

Lily pads on a wetland pond

“Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin; yet, I tell [all of] you [human beings], even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.” (Jesus of Nazareth, Sermon on the Mount, Matthew 6:28b-29.)

There are no Solomons here. No kings. No countries. No states. Nothing seduced by the will-to-power. No illusions of sovereignty. No delusions of grandeur or control. No toiling and spinning like the mind observing it all from the dirt road. Everything is what it is: Yellow Goat’s-Beard, Yarrow, and Golden Clubs; Sweetflag, White Sweet Clover, and Butterfly-Weed; Bugle-Weed, Cuckoo-Flowers that aren’t cuckoo, and Bullhead-Lilies that don’t bully; pink Storkbills, Wild Sorels, Common Milkweeds, and blue-violet Pickerelweed.

Water lily –Photo by Hiu1ebfu Hou00e0ng on Pexels.com

Only the hunting-blind on the distant hill gives evidence of other spinning heads that toil for the mastery we cannot have. The hunting-blind on stilts high about the pasture waits for trigger fingers. Soon buckshots from the tower will fire babel that breaks the silence of this place. The flowers of the field — the Butterfly-Weed, the Bugle-Weed, and the Cuckoo-Flowers, the Lilies, and the lily pads — are not anxious. They are what they are. What is is what is. What will be will be. They neither toil nor spin.

— Gordon C. Stewart, from the wetland, August 3, 2021