Sister Doreen’s Reflections
When I began to think about this, I found myself looking at one of Terry Pratchett’s quotes (he is Sir Terry Pratchett, an English author, humorist, and satirist who died in 2015) he mentions the following about the life of Wen the Eternally Surprised, and notes that the first question he was asked was why was he eternally surprised?’ The answer they are told: ‘Wen considered the nature of time and understood that the universe is, instant by instant, recreated anew. Therefore, he understood, there is in truth no past, only a memory of the past. Blink your eyes, and the world you see next did not exist when you closed them. Therefore, he said, the only appropriate state of the mind is surprise. The only appropriate state of the heart is joy. The sky you see now, you have never seen before. The perfect moment is now. Be glad of it.’
I began to think that there is no perfect moment really, even though sometimes you are in a situation where you feel that it just might be now; but always you discover that you must take the moment that is now and make it perfect. This was part of my meditation following another Splenda message stirred into my coffee “the perfect moment is now”. Now is what we have, now is ours.
Being where I am, fully immersed in it and alert to the present moment, it seems to me is one of the great spiritual quests for living fully. But doing just that is hard. It is a lesson to be learned, one that seems to travel up hills and down valleys in a never-ending journey. It is a difficult quest, being present to the now, living in a culture that seems to be in perpetual motion. Life often seems to be more like being on our way to somewhere else, a meeting, an appointment, watching our watch to make sure we arrive where we are supposed to be. Sometimes it feels like we are in two places at once, not able to really enjoy either fully.
Joan Chittister in one of her blogs wrote: “We live with one foot in tomorrow at all times. We plan for tomorrow and prepare for tomorrow and wait for tomorrow with distracting fitfulness. Here is never good enough, what is, is not important to a people on the go. What is coming is always what really counts. What is yet to be had, yet to be seen, yet to be done, yet to be accomplished becomes the essence of life. But life is every grain of sand in the hourglass. And it is running. And once run it is gone forever. Too often, while we wait for life, it passes us by, leaves us up to our hearts in dissatisfaction and over our heads in wanting. We live overcome by losses and dissolved in spiritual ruin or wasted by a death of spirit, by a diminishment of enthusiasm, by the dissipation of hope. Yet all the while the present moment lies truly dormant within us.”
To take the moment that is now and make it perfect we need to stop, to wait, to enter that still place where we get in touch with our contemplative consciousness. It is this that teaches us to dwell fully where we are. It is this that allows us to live in the present moment. It is this that will make the perfect moment now. It is this that allows us to live in a fully sacramental world where everything is an epiphany! Living positively present right now is the only way that anything new is going to happen, and this is the challenge before us. Not to build into our spiritual life moments to cultivate that waiting stillness and awareness, will mean that we only experience what we already agree with and what does not threaten us and our preferred mode of being. We will never experience the unexpected depth and contentment that is always being offered to us.
In his book “Living Buddha, Living Christ” Thick Nhat Hanh tells a story: “When the Buddha was asked, ‘Sir what do you and your monks practice?’ he replied, “We sit, we walk, and we eat.” The questioner continued, “But Sir, everyone sits, walks, and eats” and the Buddha told him, “when we sit we KNOW we are sitting, when we walk we KNOW we are walking, when we eat we KNOW we are eating.” It is a call to be here now.
Living in the now will invite us to let go of worry, allow us to say it is enough, to be faithful in small things, and to live fully inside our own skins! The perfect moment is now – now: where we are gratefully aware of the immense richness of our ordinary human experiences. We know from experience how difficult it is to be inside the present moment because the past and the future seems not to leave us alone: memories, wounds, feelings of regret, desires to cling to something that once was, anxieties about what will be. We know that our hearts are restless until they rest in you O God.
It was St Augustine who wrote those immortal words: “Late have I loved you, O Beauty ever ancient, ever new, late have I loved you! You were within me, but I was outside, and it was there that I searched for you. In my unloveliness, I plunged into the lovely things that you created. You were with me, but I was not with you.” God and love had been inside of him all along, but he hadn’t been inside of himself.
To be able to take the present moment and make it the perfect moment now – to be present to the richness of our own lives, to be sufficiently present to what is there with a sensitive insight – present to the moment. The secret to prayer is not to try to make God present, but to make ourselves present to God. This is true also of our finding beauty and love in life. God and the moment don’t have to be searched out and found they are already here and we need to be here also.
To be able to take the present moment and make it the perfect moment, to be really present is also a tremendous gift that can be given to others. We all know just how affirmed and loved we feel when someone is truly present to us – we become part of the unconditional, tenacious love that is God for each other.
