Nov. 20, 2024

By Rev. Rick King

I have found Rev. Cameron Trimble’s meditations the past couple of weeks in her blog, “Piloting Faith,” to be helpful. They call me back to a place of calm in the midst of the chaos that seems to surround us right now: the aftermath of the election, several wars raging on different continents, and personal losses we have shared during Joys and Concerns on Sunday morning.

Rev. Trimble writes from her experience as a private pilot, a hobby (and for her, I think, spiritual practice) filled with metaphors for the spiritual life. In a recent post, she writes of flying into the stillness of the eye of a storm.

My father was a private pilot and we took many family trips all over the U. S. in light planes. But I was prone to airsickness, the storm raging in my stomach nearly every time we flew into turbulent air.

So Cameron’s experience brings to mind my early tendency toward inner storminess, for it was not just flight-caused nausea that I experienced for many years. I was easily buffeted by outward circumstances I found myself in: people and things to fear, the way my nervous system seemed to be wired for anxiety as my default reaction to negative energy around me.

The capacity for empathy that I find essential to being an effective pastor has another side: the tendency to merge with whatever mood, emotion, or feeling other people around me might be experiencing. I used to get drawn into that energy so easily—until I discovered that peace is an inner condition as well as an outer one.

In spiritual practices such as meditation, we can cultivate INNER peace as we create an inner spaciousness that nurtures silence and solitude of the inner variety, which is not dependent on outer circumstances. And that inner spaciousness can help each of us find our calm center in the midst of whatever storms of life we find ourselves in.

As a practice, cultivating inner spaciousness takes time. When I first started meditating, I was 12 years old and not much disposed toward patience.

Over the years, though, through many different phases and experiences of my life, good and bad, it’s something I’ve always come back to as the taproot of my spirituality.

And cultivating inner silence and solitude has become easier with repeated practice. I can find the “eye of the storm” more quickly because I know from repeated trips to that calm center that it is there for me to return to.

May it be so for you, as you practice. If you’d like to learn, let me know. I’d love to share it with you.