Valuing the Living Moment
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by Tilden Edwards
The precocious comic strip character Calvin (in Bill Watterson's Calvin and Hobbes) once said that he doesn't like real experience because it's too hard to figure out, you never know what's going on, and you don't have any control over events. He said he preferred to have life filtered through television. "That way you know events have been packaged for your convenience! I like a narrative imposed on life, so everything logically proceeds to a tidy conclusion! And if you don't like what's happening, 'click,' you change the channel and there's something different!"Calvin's view reflects the dominant part of our psyche that T.S. Eliot was talking about when he said that human beings can stand only a little bit of truth. It is the part of us that presses for securing, clearly understood, controllable order. Much of the mass media caters to this side, because that's what most easily sells. Yet when I'm finished with an exposure to such media, something in me feels vaguely cheated and empty; it leaves my deep soul starved.
My deep soul, my spiritual heart, is not afraid of what the little boy Calvin called our "real experience." Staying with real experience is staying with what is given in the moment without rushing to take it over with our interpretive minds. Such staying-in-the-moment is an act of faith. It says that I can trust a larger Presence to be there, that it is not an empty moment needing to be filled by my preconceived ideas. It is a full-of-God moment needing my emptiness, my willingness not to bring anything but my desire for God to be God. Such an orientation frees me to dip into the moment's fullness with a sense of appreciation rather than dread, over-grasping, or restless boredom. I can feel the pregnancy in the moment, something that is lovingly alive yet hidden, positively affecting me though I don't quite know how. To me, this is the essence of prayerfulness: a willingness to be given in trust, without precondition, to the divine Far-Nearness ever-present in the living moment. (Far-Nearness is a favorite name for God of the 13th century Beguine, Marguerite Porete.)
From such givenness-in-the-moment, repeated hundreds of times a day, I know that I live into the happenings of daily life with a difference. Instead of sensing myself on my own, I sense myself as part of a larger divine reality incarnate in everything that is. In the moment of giving myself to that larger presence, something happens to my usual protectiveness and striving. These don't completely disappear, but they serve a different purpose. Instead of being heavy engines to support all I must do as I sense myself to be alone, on my own, they become what I think they were meant to be: functional facilitators for my living in the world as a divine off-spring. My protectiveness and striving become light, expedient friends, along with all my other ego functions. They then become useful in facilitating God's radiant life in and through me serving the ultimacy of boundless love rather than "bounded" self. Indeed, our whole being is an expression of that divine love. Everything that we are and do is meant to be a reverberation of the divine bounty that plays us into being.
But we don't find much support for this version of reality in daily life. We are pressed instead to treat ourselves as ultimate, the world as accident, and the moment as a vacuum to be quickly filled. This is why I find it so vital to intentionally lean back into God, trusting the divine Spirit to be flowing through everything, veiled in every thought, feeling, image, and sound. So many times I have found that such leaning draws me into daily living with new freedom for compassion, joy, and whatever may be authentically called for. What is most given is subtle, a sense of greater confidence in God's involvement in whatever is happening, a feeling of freedom to appreciate God's Heart/Mind mysteriously at work and play in me and around me. I also often taste something of the radiance of the moment just as it is, full of God.
Since we find so little cultural support for such leaning into God in the moment, it can be helpful to give ourselves some protected times for intensive practice. That can be one of the values of a retreat or regular spiritual group. We also can give ourselves a little time each day for a longer "sitting" in the immediate, open presence. Where it's possible, we might also practice at times a modern kind of fast, a media fast: fasting from the sensory overload and contrivance of what comes to us from the pervasive presence of mass media. We can put away reading materials and turn off our television, computer, tape deck, and all other processing media. Then we can let ourselves be given to God amidst the unpackaged, uncontrolled "real experience" of the living moment.
When Calvin grows up, I hope he will come to love the beauty of the immediate moment in God's hands. Everything of value flows from the moment that is given to God.
© 2008 The Shalem Institute.