Faith & Spirit Quote by A. R. Ammons

Ammons turns metaphysics into a piece of clean, American syntax: start with motion, end in stillness, and notice what gets smuggled in along the way. The line reads like a conditional proof, but it’s really a devotional sleight-of-hand. If “the greatest god” isn’t a bearded manager of the universe but the total calm that emerges from everything moving - weather systems, cells dividing, planets grinding through their routes - then divinity isn’t outside the churn. It’s the sum, the limit, the hush you only perceive when you stop treating change as noise and begin hearing it as structure.

“Stillness” here isn’t stasis; it’s the strange coherence that appears when you zoom out far enough. Ammons, a poet obsessed with nature’s process (shorelines, entropy, the ceaseless ordinary), builds a god out of aggregation, not decree. That choice carries subtext: modern doubt doesn’t kill the religious impulse, it just relocates it. Awe becomes ecological and mathematical - a reverence for patterns that don’t need to be personal to be overwhelming.

Then comes the moral payload disguised as logic: “we must ineluctably be included.” Not redeemed, not chosen, not singled out - included. The word is democratic, almost anti-theological. If everything’s motion contributing to the whole, humans can’t pretend we’re exceptions: neither exalted above nature nor insulated from consequence. Ammons offers a cosmic belonging that also reads like accountability. You’re part of the system; you don’t get to opt out.