‘Let Nothing Disturb You’

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Monday morning the sound of a retching cat got me out of bed a few minutes after 5 a.m. I wiped up the mess and decided it wasn’t worth crawling back under the covers for the short amount of time before my alarm clock rang. Instead, I wandered out to the kitchen for breakfast and found that the bag of frozen peaches that I put in the refrigerator to thaw overnight had leaked juice all over the shelf. Once that was cleaned up, I headed for the shower, which spewed only tepid water even though the day before it had been almost scalding.

I’d like to say that I dealt with those instances like the minor annoyances they were, but instead I muttered a constant stream of words that aren’t fit to print, knowing all the while I should take Saint Paul’s advice to “not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God.”

That kind of attitude has been a goal of mine ever since, many years ago, I read about a Westerner who was talking with a Zen master in California when an earthquake struck. The Westerner began to panic, but the Zen master merely sat calmly. After the quake had passed, the Zen master returned to the conversation as though nothing had happened. The Westerner commented on their different responses to the emergency, and the Zen master replied that panicking wouldn’t have been productive, so he followed the Zen practice of focusing on the present moment.

While we Westerners may think that adopting the ancient Zen mindset is something of a New Age phenomenon, Catholic saints have been advising this attitude for hundreds of years, though their words are couched in our religious tradition. For example, here’s Saint Theresa of Ávila in 16th century Spain: “Let nothing disturb you, let nothing frighten you. Those who know God have everything. Only God is enough.”

About that same time in France, St. Francis de Sales had similar counsel: “Do not lose your inner peace for anything whatsoever, not even if your whole world seems upset. If you find that you have wandered away from the shelter of God, lead your heart back to him quietly and simply.”

The Bible, both the Old Testament and the New, might have been the source for these saints’ enlightenment. The Book of Proverbs notes that “The fool gives vent to all his anger; but by biding his time, the wise man calms it.” St. Paul also held forth on the matter, not only the quote given above but also “In your anger do not sin.”

Spending the first hour of my morning cursing like a sailor about having to clean up two messes and then enduring a cold shower because the hot water seemed to have evaporated might not have been a sin, but it certainly wasn’t blessing the Lord and having his praise in my mouth. Nor did it follow St. Francis de Sales’ advice to “Every morning prepare your soul for a tranquil day.” In fact, rather than peacefulness, I was preparing for a day of emotional turmoil, because it was entirely probable that until sundown I’d rant about the cat, the peaches and the shower to anyone I encountered.

It was in this frame of mind that I walked out of the house. The sun hadn’t yet risen, and looking up I saw a sky as black as my mood, set with gleaming stars so bright they stopped me in my tracks, so glorious that they washed away my annoyance, leaving instead fulsome praise toward the Creator and a quote from a Catholic poet whose words I can’t equal: “The world is charged with the grandeur of God.”

The beauty humbled me so that I was able to take the saints’ advice, and from that moment until I sat down to write this I didn’t give a thought to the minor annoyances of that morning.

Marie Mischel is editor of the Intermountain Catholic. Reach her at marie@icatholic.org.