The Growth of Productivity and the Fall of Stillness
Alex Sosler
5 min read ⭑
Dietrich Bonhoeffer begins his book “Christ the Center” by saying, “Teaching about Christ begins in silence.” What do you think he meant? Why do you think that is? Take a moment to think about it. (Yes, now. Like, right now.) Pause. Breathe. Be silent.
If you’re like me, you’ll keep reading and forgo the forced exercise. But what’s it say about us when we’re so reluctant to pause?
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The Growth of Productivity and the Fall of Stillness
I have a productivity problem. No, I don’t have trouble producing. I love getting things done and checking off boxes. I have a problem with finding my worth in what I accomplish. In the truth category, I can read my Bible and check off my daily devotional time. In the goodness category, I can focus on vices and the habits that cultivate virtue. But prayer seems useless because it is so unmeasurable. Experience with the divine can’t be manufactured. I rarely leave a prayer time thinking I’ve done anything at all. It seems like I spent time in my own mind saying things to a God I believe in who may not hear me or care about what I have to say. I can’t check anything off. The prayer time doesn’t seem to accomplish anything.
In a novel by Wendell Berry called “Jayber Crow,” there’s a character named Troy. He’s pursuing a love interest and is portrayed as a bit of an antagonist. He eventually marries her, but Berry contrasts Troy with his eventual father-in-law, Athey. Here’s what Berry writes: “Athey said, ‘Wherever I look, I want to see more than I need.’ Troy said, in effect, ‘Whatever I see, I want.’” These are two fundamentally different ways of seeing the world, and the latter comes with disastrous effects. The first one cultivates care, margin and love; the second produces exploitation, efficiency and apathy.
But doesn’t Troy have the modern mindset? Sure, we may not want more land, but we want more stuff. Or in my case, I want more time, more moments to be productive in.
There may be nothing more valuable and more needed in Christian spirituality today than to slow down, to stop trying to do something, and to attend. I’m guessing that if you humored me in the above exercise of silencing yourself, you found that taking a breath, closing your eyes, and sitting still for a moment felt refreshing. It does for me. In my world, I go, go, go, do, do, do, and I need moments when I stop chasing life. As T. S. Eliot eloquently says in his poem “Burnt Norton,” I’m regularly “distracted from distraction by distraction.”
All theology starts in silence, because before we say anything about God or speculate about God, we need to be reminded that all knowledge of God comes to us by grace rather than by our own effort or our own pontificating about what we think God is like. Theology starts in silence because silence is where we meet God.
“Perhaps I can call the first step to prayer a ‘sanctified shutting up.’”
This gift of silence comes to us from the mystical or contemplative tradition. Fred Bahnson has written a memoir about food, land and spirituality. He spent time at a monastery in South Carolina where he asked his spiritual director about going deeper in prayer. Father Kevin answered, “Limit the input. . . . God pursues us. The challenge is to slow down enough to recognize it.” I can relate. In my early prayer life, I followed the ACTS plan: Adoration, Confession, Thanksgiving, Supplication. These were the parts of prayer that were necessary for connecting with God. First, I adored God. I said things that are true about him. Sometimes I’d discover a new term, like “omniscient.” “God, you are omniscient,” I would pray. But I was limited to my concepts. Then, I would confess. Often the sins were the same as last time: the generic, run-of-the-mill things. Maybe I had gotten extra mad that week, so anger would be especially confessed. Then I would thank God. I was confused with this one. It seemed a lot like adoration. So, I would thank God for the same things I adored about him. Then I would make supplications, which meant asking for things.
As I grew older, I ended up with less to say. Words failed me. I thought maybe that was a bad thing as if I was supposed to have an influx of spiritual language or insights to say to God. I needed to say true things about God. I ought to express my encounter with God, even to remind myself. To be fair, prayer needs theological insight, or it would be vacuous and meaningless. Yet when explanations and understandings and descriptions ran out, I sat in the divine presence and wanted to experience God. My words were inadequate. They always were. In silence, Thomas Merton reminds us, God ceases to be an object and becomes an experience.
The beautiful life, according to a mystic or contemplative, is not one of technique. I can’t offer you four steps to become a mystic. We live in a technological age in which growth can be condensed into steps. The temptation for me is to view the contemplative life as some sort of achievement or project. If I devote thirty minutes a day to quiet prayer, in six months I will have increased my spirituality by 25%, I think. But as Thomas Merton explains in his book on contemplation, “The worst disadvantage of contemplation is that it sounds like ‘something,’ an objective quality, a spiritual commodity that one can procure, something that is good to have; something which, when possessed, liberates one from problems and from unhappiness.” Contemplation is not a goal that one reaches. It is not a manufactured project. Christianity is an encounter with a person, not an idea.
As such, the beauty tradition requires learning to listen more than it requires knowing what to say. Perhaps I can call the first step to prayer a “sanctified shutting up.” In its essence the beauty tradition is about the practices of living more humanly. Former archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams recommends a slow life of listening as “living with less frantic acquisitiveness, living with space for stillness, living in the expectation of learning, and most of all, living with an awareness that there is a solid and durable joy to be discovered in the disciplines of self-forgetfulness that is quite different from the gratification of this or that impulse of the moment.” A beautiful life is in beholding the Beautiful One.
Alex Sosler is an associate professor of Bible and Ministry at Montreat College and an assisting priest at Redeemer Anglican Church in Asheville. He is the author of A Short Guide to Spiritual Formation and Learning to Love, as well as co-author of The Artistic Vision and editor of Theology and the Avett Brothers. He is also co-host of The Artistic Vision podcast.
Taken from “A Short Guide to Spiritual Formation” by Alex Sosler. Copyright © 2025. Used with permission of the author.
