The festival of the chariot had come to the city, and the streets were
packed. A huge wooden temple-chariot, taller than the houses, rolled slowly
along on wheels each as wide as a doorway. Hundreds of hands pulled the
ropes; drums boomed; flowers rained down from the rooftops.
A girl named Ira sat on her uncle's shoulders to see. Her uncle was a quiet
man, a carpenter who had helped build the great wheels themselves.
"Uncle," she shouted over the drums, "the wheels are doing all the work!
Look how fast the rims spin!"
Her uncle smiled. "Watch the very middle of the wheel," he called back.
"Right at the centre. What do you see there?"
Ira looked hard. The outer rim was a blur, the spokes flashed by — but at
the heart of the wheel, where it turned upon its axle, there was a small
still point that did not seem to move at all.
"It's quiet in the middle," she said, surprised. "The edge is racing, but
the centre is calm."
"And yet," said her uncle, "without that calm centre, the whole spinning
wheel would fall to pieces. The still hub holds everything. It does not run
around with the rim. It simply *is* there, steady, and because of it the
whole great wheel can turn."
That evening, when the festival quieted, Ira's grandmother told her the rest
of it.
"The whole world is like that chariot wheel, little one. Nature is the
spinning rim — busy, busy, always turning. It gives birth to everything: the
birds that fly and the rocks that lie still, the fish that swim and the
mountains that never stir. All of it is born from nature's turning.
"But nature only turns because the Lord is the still centre, watching over
all of it. He does not run about and push. He does not spin with the rim. He
is the calm hub at the heart of the world, and just because He is there,
quietly seeing, the whole great wheel of creation keeps rolling round and
round."
Ira closed her eyes and pictured it: the racing, busy world spinning on the
outside, and at its very centre a calm, watching stillness that held it all
together.
She slept, and the wheel of the world turned on around her, as it always
has.
