Biography
The Rev. Dr. John Killinger is a is pastor, teacher and writer. His recent books include God, the Devil and Harry Potter and Ten Things I Learned Wrong from a Conservative Church. John was the minister of the historic Little Stone Church on Mackinac Island in Michigan for seven years and lives in Virginia with his wife, Anne. [Biographical information is correct as of the broadcast date noted above.]

"God and Our Haiku Moments"
"Be still," says the Lord in that magnificent psalm, number 46. "Be still, and know that I am God." It's a beautiful thought—and it skewers me. I mean, how often am I still? Truly still. Quiet in body and serene in soul. That isn't the modern way, is it?

We live in the most frenetic culture that ever was. Radios and TVs blaring. Cell phones interrupting our meals. Blackberries in everybody's pockets. Traffic up to our kazoos. Construction sites all around us. Bells and whistles on all our appliances. And, as if that weren't enough: pagers, alarm clocks, talking calendars, even timers on our pill boxes.

I saw a cartoon that showed a family setting up camp in the woods. They had brought their TV set, camera phones, video games, and a box full of other electronic devices. "It's a good thing we've got this stuff," one of the kids is saying, "or we couldn't shut out the noise of that stream and the waterfall!"

"Be still, and know that I am God." That's a tough order in a world like this.

We almost forget that there is another world, don't we? A world of silence and serenity. A world of deep peace and soulfulness. A world of quiet healing, where our wounds are repaired and life grows over the broken places. A world of holiness and order, of mystery and transcendence. A world with God at its center.

A couple of years ago, I did a wedding service for one of my former parishioners, who is now an assistant to a U.S. Senator in Washington. The groom had lived in New York, and several friends had come to D.C. for the wedding. I sat by one of them at the rehearsal dinner. His name was Mike. Mike had been an accountant in Brooklyn, but he was now retired. Now, he said, he was making up for lost time. He was having his haiku moments. You know what haiku are—those little 17-syllable Japanese poems about things the eye sees and the soul feels.

Mike couldn't help telling me some of his haiku moments. One had been in Yellowstone Park. He had gotten up before dawn and strolled over to Old Faithful, the big geyser. He watched the sky redden behind the steam coming up from the geyser hole, and then saw the great geyser spout into the air just as a flock of birds flew over. He said he thought his heart would stop it was so beautiful.

Another of his haiku moments had occurred just that morning in his own back yard. He had been sitting on the back stoop, drinking a second cup of coffee, when a sparrow lit on the end of a tall sprig of grass. It held on as the grass rocked back and forth and back and forth. "It thought it was on a seesaw," exclaimed Mike, who treasured the picture as much as if it had been painted by Rembrandt himself.

"I live more in a single day now," he said, "than I used to live in a year. It's wonderful!' I agreed. It is.

I thought about my own working life as a minister, and how sometimes I got so busy that I couldn't see the world around me and didn't have any haiku moments. Once, I even talked to a psychologist about it. "Here I am, trying to point people to the abundant life," I said, "and I can't feel any simple joys the way I used to."

She suggested that I start noticing the joys I did feel and making a list of them at the end of the day. I did. I ran across some of those lists recently and noted some of the joys. They were mostly little things: the taste of honey and raisins in my yogurt; the sight of three hummingbirds at once on our back-porch feeder; the sweet smell of dough rising; the coppery hue of the sky as the sun was setting; the sound of a fly buzzing in the window; the sound of a zipper being closed. But there were also conversations with various people; dining out with my wife; going up in an airplane; hiking in the mountains.

What happened was that, by a simple technique, I was recovering my sense of wonder. I was seeing the world again, standing in awe before it, admiring what God had made.

I remember a lovely text in Annie Dillard's book, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, that has always been exceptionally meaningful to me. Annie was taking a sabbatical leave from her job at Harper's Magazine, and she and her husband went to live on an old farm outside Salem, Virginia, near the college where she went to school. It was a very restorative time in her life, when she learned to see the world all over again and sense its remarkable wonder. Sometimes she would bring a quart of creek water into the house and pour it into a vitreous china bowl. Then she would go back an hour later and examine the minute trails made by invisible creatures on the bottom of the bowl.

One day, as she was turning the corner of an old barn, Annie said she looked up and saw a mockingbird suddenly fold its wings and dive, thirty-two feet per second per second, toward the earth. It looked as if it were intent on committing suicide. Then, at the very last moment, it raised its wings, so that she could see that characteristic fluting of white that mockingbirds have on their wings and tails, and merely stepped off onto the grass, as if it were getting off an escalator. She was entranced, and kept contemplating the sight.

Later, she wrote in her journal that she had been thinking about that old conundrum about the tree that falls in the forest. You know, if there's no one there to hear it, does it make a sound? "I wondered," she said, "if I hadn't come around that building at precisely that moment and seen it, would there have been grace and beauty there?"

"I could only conclude," she said, "that there would. There would have been grace and beauty there whether I had been there to see them or not."

"But the very least we can do," she added, "is to try to be there."

Isn't that a beautiful thought? Grace and beauty are in the world whether we see them or not. They're all over the place. But the very least we can do is to try to be there. That's what Mike was doing with his haiku moments. He was trying to be there. It's what I was hoping to do by writing down my little joys. I was trying to be there.

And the reason for being there? "Be still," said the Lord, "and know that I am God."

When our hearts are quiet—when we are waiting and listening and watching—when we see the world around us—really see it—we know that God is God.

It’s as simple as that. God isn't necessarily in the sunrise over Yellowstone or in a dinner with one's spouse or in a mockingbird diving to earth. But these things are reminders that God isn't far away, that life in all its wonder is only an outer garment of God, that God is as close as the breath we take, or the breath we expel, that God is always waiting to reveal himself to the eye that can see and the ear that can hear.

“Be still and know that I am God.”

It isn’t easy in our razzle-dazzle world, with all its bells and whistles, its bangs and booms, its blares and distractions. Some voices are even warning that we shall lose the ability to discern God in this age because our consciousness is always under bombardment by something else. I wouldn’t go that far, but I do worry that I shall miss him a lot of times when he was there and I was simply too busy or preoccupied to notice.

Noticing. That’s the name of the game, isn’t it? Being conscious. Being aware. Being present. “The least we can do is to be there.”

Interview with John Killinger

Lydia Talbot: John, the magnificent poetry of the psalms is how you began your compelling message: “Be still and know that I am God.” If you were to take one of those holy moments you described—you just transport us there, John—what would be on your list of joys like the list that you came across from an earlier time?

John Killinger: Oh, the taste of a good cup of tea, sitting with my wife by a candle lit dinner, being out by a creek. I’ve always loved a babbling creek! And the rocks, seeing the rocks that have been formed over the years by that. There are so many little things, you know. It isn’t the big, bombastic moments that remind us so much of God, I think, as it is the little things. My wife and I have been having some massage therapy. We have this lovely lady named Ronnie who does it. The other day I had had a massage and I was complimenting her on what a sanctified feeling it gave me. It was almost a sacred feeling because she is so reverent about the body and the way she handles it. Her response was, “I have a mantra.” And I said, “What’s your mantra?” She said, “Be still and know that I am.”

Daniel Pawlus: That’s wonderful. I wanted to ask you, too, John, we think of awareness associated with the quiet a lot of times, but it’s not always found in the quietness is it? Are there other times we can discover it?

John Killinger: We can be disturbed or we can find God and feel God even if somebody is right outside the window with a concrete digger or something like that. I think, though, probably it’s in the cessation of the noise, in perhaps in that switch over that we discover God. I think about Elijah in the cave when God wasn’t in the strong wind and the storms and all of that, but he was in the still, small voice that followed all of that. I think it’s difficult in the business of life, in the bluster of everything, to feel things. As I said, our senses are being bombarded by so many sensations that we may not feel God in quite the same depth and reverie when there is quiet. And it may be that the switching from the noise to the quiet is important, too. I don’t know.

Lydia Talbot: I’m reminded of the film, Babette’s Feast, based on the short story by Isak Dinesen, On a Danish Peninsula. And, Babette, through her sacrificial gift—the film, of course, is more about relationships than food—gives all that she has to prepare this meal for a group of pious little believers who’ve been bickering among themselves. And it’s her gift and the awareness...you remember the film.

John Killinger: Oh, yes. Very vividly. When I lived in Lynchburg we had a lady in our church who prepared the communion bread and she had an old fashioned machine that made these little pellets that stamped a cross on the top of them. And they were delicious. You know, so much communion bread tastes like plastic or something and you have to kind of imagine that God is in that. But you knew God was in her bread and it was a gift that she always gave to the church. I hated it when she moved out of town and took her machine with her!

Lydia Talbot: But it brings people together.

John Killinger: It does.

Lydia Talbot: And in the film, Babette’s Feast, it was the general who was the only one who recognized the taste of that food and knew that Babette had to have been the head chef at the Café Anglais in Paris. But, John, you say that the wonders of life are like a garment of God. I love that you speak metaphorically. And your imagery, it just transports us to these moments. Where does that come from?

John Killinger: Oh, thank you. I suppose I’m guilty of being able to think only that way. I don’t have an analytical mind. I worked among analysts all my life in schools and places, but my own mind pictures things. I wanted to be an artist when I was a boy and so I see things in pictures and images, more poetry than anything else. And in defense of that, I think maybe the world is better known in poetry that it is in prose. But, who knows?

Daniel Pawlus: You talk about your experience and you’ve just written a new book, Winter Soulstice, which I’ve read. And it’s really inspiring and insightful.

John Killinger: Thank you.

Lydia Talbot: In relation to our topic, do you think awareness gets any easier the older you get, the more experience you have?

John Killinger: Yes. That’s one of the points I make in the book and that’s why it’s called “Soulstice,” S-o-u-l-s-t-i-c-e, because I think as we approach that time in our lives that is a little akin to the real winter solstice, when getting older there is a time…there’s time then to retire from the activity of life and to appreciate our own sensibilities and how they put things together and how God has been active in all the strands of our lives leading up till now. And I confess that until I sat down to write that book, I wasn’t aware of a lot of them and how they were coming together in my own existence.

Lydia Talbot: You describe the strands in your life: the relationships, the experience, the memories, the people, the family. All these things coming together like streams of a tributary. I love that image. Do you have to be part of the “wisdom years” in order to gather all this in?

John Killinger: I’m sure you don’t, Lydia, but it certainly helps to be able to review a lot, not just to have a little evidence but to have a lot of evidence; and be at a point in your life where you are relaxed enough to look back. I wish I’d had it when I was forty or fifty, but I was so busy then that I didn’t see it as much. Now I see it more. And I think for all of the people all over this country and all over the world who are older, one of the blessings of life is being able to feel wise about all these things. That subtitle wasn’t mine, incidentally. My editor chose that. He called them the “wisdom years” and I like that because that’s better than senior years!

Lydia Talbot: But this book is really your memoir isn’t it?

John Killinger: It is. I didn’t start out to write a memoir but it turned out that way because as I tried to illustrate the different chapters, who did I know better than myself?

Lydia Talbot: In the book, the “Don Quixote factor.” What was that?

John Killinger: Well, the Don Quixote factor for me was a habit I’ve had throughout my adult life—in particular in my ministry—of tilting at windmills that often got me wounded and left me disheveled on the ground. But I’ve always insisted that religion in the public forum ought to be honest and I have tilted at a lot of things that I thought were dishonest. As I’ve said, I’ve often ended up on the ground from it, but I can’t stop doing it. I’m still doing it.

Daniel Pawlus: That’s what we like about you, John. One of the many things.

Lydia Talbot: It’s part of being prophetic.

Daniel Pawlus: Absolutely.

John Killinger: I appreciate that. Thank you.

Daniel Pawlus: We’re delighted that you’re here to share these insights with us in your message.