PRESENT PRESENT PRESENT!!! Live there

Last week’s entry dealing with the truth about ownership, our schedules, and the illusion of "MY time" made me want to stick on this whole issue of living in the present moment. What does that mean? I've been on a journey the last 10 months trying to figure that out and slowly but surely things are changing. I've come to this realization that this is one of the most important things we must grasp in life in order for true life giving transformation to take place.

If we are not living in the Present we are MISSING life. I am sick of missing out on life, aren't you?

The demon Screwtape focuses in on their strategy to get us to focus on the Future. He continues his series of letters to his nephew Wormwood (oh and if you only have about 5 minutes skip down to the green quote, it is a juicy nugget):

“The humans live in time, but our Enemy [God] destines them to eternity. He therefore, I believe, wants them to attend chiefly to two things, to eternity itself and to that point of time which they call the Present. For the Present is the point at which time touches eternity. Of the present moment, and of it only, humans have an experience analogous to the experience which our Enemy has of reality as a whole, in it alone freedom and actuality are offered them. He would therefore have them continually concerned either with eternity (which means being concerned with Him) or with the Present—either meditating on their eternal union with, or separation from, Himself, or else obeying the present voice of conscience, bearing the present cross, receiving the present grace, giving thanks for the present pleasure.” (I added underlines).

Present, Present, Present!!! This is where we are called to live but we are so often being ruled by anxiety which focuses us on the very near Future. Worry leads us: “What will I eat for lunch? What will I wear tomorrow? If I don’t get this paper done now I’ll never get it done. I’ll fail. Then I’ll have to quit school. Then I won’t get a good job. Then I’ll have to live with my parents forever. Then eventually I’ll be homeless!”

Screwtape goes on to say how demons strategy is to get us to focus more on the Future and the Past then on the Present.

“Our [the demons] business is to get them [humans] away from the eternal and from the Present. With this in view, we sometimes tempt a human (say a widow or a scholar) to live in the Past. But this is of limited value, for they have some real knowledge of the Past and it has a determinate nature and, to that extent, resembles eternity. It is far better to make them live in the Future. Biological necessity makes all their passions point in that direction already, so that thought about the Future inflames hope and fear. Also, it is unknown to them, so that in making them think about it we make them think of unrealities. In a word, the Future is, of all things, the thing least like eternity. It is the most completely temporal part of time—for the Past is frozen and no longer flows, and the Present is all lit up with eternal rays. Hence the encouragement we have given to all those schemes of thought such as Creative Evolution, Scientific Humanism, or Communism, which fix men’s affections on the Future, on the very core of temporality. Hence nearly all vices are rooted in the Future. Gratitude looks to the Past and love to the Present; fear, avarice [Greed], lust, and ambition look ahead.”

Last week a good friend of mine reminded me of a quote from a book by Phil Strout called God’s Relentless Pursuit. It is this following quote and the conversation I had with my friend that made me want to continue to chew on this whole issue of living in the present:

“Gerald Sittser, the author of The Will of God as a Way of Life, explains his discovery of God’s will:

As I struggled with the issue of discovering God’s will in light of my own personal uncertainty, intense suffering, and in-depth biblical study, I came to a startling conclusion. The will of God concerns the present more than the future. It deals with our motives as well as our actions. It focuses on the little decisions we make every day even more than the big decisions we make about the future. The only time we really have to know and do God’s will is the present moment. We are to love God with heart, soul, mind, and strength, and we are to love our neighbors as we love ourselves.

Sometimes, we can make God’s will so difficult to grasp that we forget that there are simple commands God gives, us, enabling us to do His will each day. God is not trying to trick us—He wants us to get it.” (Page 139).

I think Phil’s commentary explains Sittser’s thought best. But what about planning for the Future? Isn’t there some wisdom in that? Screwtape continues:

“To be sure, the Enemy [God] wants men to think of the Future too—just so much as is necessary for now planning the acts of justice or charity which will probably be their duty tomorrow. The duty of planning the morrow’s work is today’s duty; though its material is borrowed from the future, the duty, like all duties, is in the Present…He does not want men to give the Future their hearts, to place their treasure in it. We do.” Pages 67-69.

And there is the crux of the whole matter as it always is: “where your treasure is there your heart will be also” (from Jesus of Nazareth). We’ll pick up on that next time.