Security, Certainty?

Howard Thurman visits me this morning.  He says personal security is not to be found in outward things.  Security is found, he writes, when the spirit of a man or woman has found deep within himself/herself the dwelling place of God.  He says certainty, security, and assurance is a quality of being, not a matter of material or physical stability.  

“What if the sky falls,

The earth quakes,

The mountain turns upside down,

The swelling sea dries up,

And the sun comes down,

To one who has attained the (perfect) Lord?”

The unknown  seventh-century Tamil poet who wrote these words gives expression to Thurman’s theme:  the ultimate basis of certainty cannot be found in the shifting scenes of human experience, but only deep within our being—God’s dwelling place—a place from which we “can abide all of experience and look out upon life with quiet eyes.”  Always there is the sky; even though there are comets, eclipses, shooting stars, hurricanes, tornadoes, lightning and storm. The phrase “terra firma” affirms our sense of the earth as being substantial and solid in spite of drought or flood.  The earth gives us a sense of certainty until the earthquake comes.  Then that certainty is shaken and undermined as the earth, which we thought solid, begins to shift and quake. 

How many men and women have looked to the mountains for strength, reassurance and confidence?  Even the Psalmist sought that strength and confidence:  “I will lift up mine eyes until the hills.”  If the mountains turned upside down it would devastate the human spirit.   How devastating would it be to the human spirit if the sea dried up? But the mountains still stand and the sea continues its ebb and flow.

The poet says, and Thurman affirms the poet’s words, that if all these things happen, the spirit of the man or woman “who has found deep within himself [or herself] the dwelling place of God, would be secure.”