Don’t Hold Your Breath
“It might be true that the sun rises regularly because he never gets tired of rising. His routine might be due, not to a lifelessness, but to a rush of life. . . . But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, “Do it again” to the sun, and every evening, “Do it again” to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. The repetition in Nature may not be a mere recurrence; it may be a theatrical encore.” — GK Chesterton, Orthodoxy
“Baby, all we need is just to be.” — Faith Hill (🤣)
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Holly Graham’s illustration (see below), Full Lungs, overlooks our dining room table — a table often riddled with stacks of mail, car keys, library books, and school backpacks. Guests often marvel at the illustration because of its invitation. To slow down. To breathe. It’s effect is almost priestly, confronting our hurried souls and comforting us with the simple posture of breathing. And, yet, I miss, or worse, ignore its place in our home. I glance at it with a disgust that presumes that something as simple as breathing can make any kind of difference to a soul weary from seemingly endless survival.
I don’t have time to pay attention to my breath!
I must keeping moving.
I must feed the machine.
I must hold my breath hoping that things far less valuable will ensure a rest that anxiety cannot bring.
The woman in the Graham’s illustration isn’t threatened. She sits. She waits. Her movements steady. Her invitation never rescinded.
Take a breath. Take another. Again. And Again, if needed.
My lungs fill with rest,
with laughter,
with sorrow,
with collapse,
with panic,
with mercy,
with grace,
with beauty.
Brandon Vaidyanathan’s striking essay, “My Mother’s Hidden Radiance,” wrestles with two kinds of beauty: scripted and revealed. Scripted beauty “is the beauty for which we have cultural scripts – the kind we recognize and reward. We see it in physical attractiveness, beautiful objects, in picture-perfect homes with doting couples and smiling family photos.” It is not merely superficial but can be full of meaning and longing.
But it is in revealed beauty that we find something richer, something we might miss if we don’t do the work of slowing down, the hard work of pressing our fingers deep within the soil where the gold resides. Revealed beauty “usually remains obscured yet sometimes discloses itself unbidden in moments of radiance and recognition where something surprising breaks through.”
Again, scripted beauty can bear some of the weight of our yearning, but our disenchantment is not quenched by familiar scripts, cheap imitations, or flattery. We need something else. Something more. Something counter-intuitive, something cruciform, something full of quiet resurrection. A death full of life. A sorrow full of joy. A weakness full of imagination.
Even something ordinary.
When we slow down, when we pay attention, we find a strange contentment with unresolve. Pierre de Teilhard de Chardin, a French Jesuit and philosopher, ends his poem, “Trust In the Slow Work of God,” with these lines:
Only God could say what this new spirit gradually forming within you will be. Give Our Lord the benefit of believing that his hand is leading you, and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself in suspense and incomplete.
This is not a posture I tend toward. Anxiety is the enemy! I don’t have time for suspense! But such resistance is exhausting because it favors self-reliance over the (oftentimes frustrating) work of the Spirit, a work understood and experienced in something as simple as breathing. But it’s more than just breathing. It’s challenging the well-worn narratives of productivity, of wealth, of security, of accomplishment. It’s giving spaces (as small as they may be) to the simple acts of surrender.
To remember that you can’t do it alone.
To celebrate your limitations.
To wait on something revealed, something better.
