"This tastes like heaven," my son Zach says, eating from a small bag of popcorn, picking out one kernel at a time. We're at the base of Diamond Head, spending part of the afternoon in a farmers market on the east side of Oahu, Hawaii. These local markets are a smorgasbord for the senses. Kiosks of exotic flowers. Crimson, vermilion and port-wine red, yellows of sunshine and sulfur, Baltimore Oriole orange, and thundercloud blue. The air is suffused with the scent of coffee. And garlic. My arm is freckled with powdered sugar, a confetti from fresh beignets, just lifted from the griddle. I take a bite of a beignet and a sip of Kona coffee.
I close my eyes.
My son is right.
This does taste like heaven.
Scott Russell Sanders observed that, "For the enlightened few, the world is always lit." Which is another way of saying that the requirement for enlightenment is pretty straightforward: let yourself live like a kid.
My beignets with Zach happened over 10 years ago, but still floats around in my memory, and settles whenever I need a reminder about embracing the moment.
I heard a lot about heaven in the church of my youth. Although, on balance, I heard a good deal more about hell. It was some calculated motivational tool to make heaven seem that much more appealing. What was clear was the objective: getting there. Heaven, that is. Trouble is, I was never much drawn to the heaven portrayed in those sermons of my youth. Because there was no movie preview about exactly what we'd be doing when we got there. And, what's really to enjoy about people (mostly old people) in white suits sitting around playing elevator musac? For a young boy, that had all of the enticement of a 24-hour Lawrence Welk special, with an all-accordion-choir.
Predictably, I was mostly frightened of hell. Heaven was used to soothe my regrets. So I could say, At least I'm going to heaven, if I was asked, which I was, daily. But one thing was clear, heaven had nothing to do with today. Or the way I lived my life today.
In his book Too Small to Ignore, Wess Stafford (President of Compassion International) tells a story from his childhood on the Ivory Coast of Africa. A village is visited by a convoy of French colonial officials for a government survey. Their questions had to do with "expectations of the future." (Including numbers and size and growth and development.) Stafford writes, "The chief and his tribal elders tried to explain to their exasperated visitors that they really didn't know the answers to those kinds of questions, because the future had not yet arrived. When the time came to pass, then the results would be apparent." This, to be sure, made the officials less than pleased. And they left, in a huff.
That day, at dusk, the village gathered in the chief's courtyard. He said, "I want to talk to the children tonight."
"We are not like them," the chief told the children. "To them time is everything... the smaller that men can measure the day, the more angry they seem to be."
The chief went on. "The present is now--the days we live today. This is God's gift to us. It is meant to be enjoyed and lived to the fullest. The present will flow by us, of course, and become the past. That is the way of a river, and that is the way of time. The Frenchmen cannot wait for the future to arrive. They crane their necks to see around the bend in the river. They cannot see it any better than we can, but they try and try. For some reason, it is very important for them to know what is coming toward them. They want to know it so badly that they have no respect for the river itself. They thrash their way into the present in order to see more around the bend.
They miss so much of the joy of today all around them. Did you notice that as they stormed into our village, they didn't notice it is the best of the mango season?
Though we offered them peanuts, they did not even taste them.
They did not hear the birds in the trees or the laughter in the marketplace.
We touched them with our hands, but they did not really see us.
They miss much of the present time, because all they care about is the unknowable, the future. The present is all we can fully know and experience, so we must.
We must love each other. We must smell the hibiscus flowers. We must hear the singing of the weaverbirds and the grunts of the lions. We must taste with joy the honey and the peanut sauce on the rice. We must laugh and cry and live."
Whether he knew it or not, the Village Chief took Jesus seriously.
Remember when Jesus said, "Behold, the kingdom of God is in the midst of you." Meaning "is--right now--in the midst of you, right here."
Meaning, this ordinary moment can be the "Sacrament of the Blessed Present," a container of grace.
Meaning, that the visible and the invisible are one. The Celts called such places,
'thin places', places when and where the sacred is almost palpable.
All of earth is crammed with heaven
And every bush a flame with God
But only those who see take off their shoes.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Yes, I get it. And I teach it. And yet my mind easily convinces me of the opposite. Like the colonial officials, I can miss what is right in front of me.
I do find beignet moments, and walk in reverence, taking off my shoes. Even so, somehow my mind tells me that the kingdom is still yet to be, somewhere in the future, something for which we are willing to give up today. In so doing, we give up who we are today, for who we think we should be.
I can tell you that I am unequivocally living in the moment now, watching my Seattle Seahawks play as an unquenchable fire in the Super Bowl. (I will not gloat--well... not much.) I would be remiss if I didn't point out that while watching the game we are peppered with advertisements--teasers--about future programming. Each program described as the event or program "we've all been waiting for." And to think that this game was what we had been waiting for. How could we have been so wrong headed?
I can give you chapter and verse about all the reasons I don't live in the moment. Or reasons I carry guilt because I should know better. I can... until an inner voice tells me to "knock it off."
I decide to pick up Eugene O'Kelly's book, Chasing Daylight. It is a book about the last three months of his life. O'Kelly reinforces what we all know to be true. This moment, I have a choice. I can receive the gift of life and embrace it, and immerse myself in it. Or, continue to live in oblivion, asleep, distracted, and waiting. And in the process, we bury the very things that might set us free. Such as stopping, stillness, listening, hearing, tasting, touching, seeing, smelling and embracing.
In an episode of The West Wing, CJ Craig (White House chief of staff) is wired, tense and distracted. Her love interest shows up, middle of the workday, at her White House office, "to take her for a walk." She consents (but not without a fight, you know, so much "to do"). On the walk, she fidgets and asks, "So, what was so important, taking this walk." He says, "Just to see."
"Well," she tells him, "this is not the day for it."
Some days I'm with CJ. Sure, I want to live this moment mindful of the sacred, but this is not the day for it.
So tell me... is there a special day for it?
To exacerbate our situation, our western mindset makes living in the present a staged event. You know, staged to be "spiritual." As if this is something we must orchestrate. Or arrange. And we sit stewing in the juices of our self-consciousness. Am I present? What am I doing right or wrong? All the while, missing the point. Lord have mercy.
A Hasidic Rabbi was interrupted by one of his followers while he was tending his garden, "What would you do, rabbi," the student asked, "if you knew the messiah was coming today?" Stroking his beard and pursing his lips, the rabbi replied, "Well, I would continue to water my garden."
It's about making the choice: to receive.
To be open.
To be available.
To be curious.
To be willing to be surprised by joy.
To fall back into outstretched arms. The name is not as important as trusting that the arms are there.
I spent another nourishing weekend in Scottsdale (at the Franciscan Retreat Center) with a group of men talking about finding or regaining peace in a world where it's easy to forget. We talked about the fault-lines we bring, the blinders and the fear, and the inevitable temptation to fix it all by Sunday's Mass. 'Tis something about the temptation to be someplace other than where we are right now. Bundled with worry, such thoughts crossed my mind last night as I looked up into the Arizona night sky. Smiling down, a sliver of a moon, a crescent smile, as if a wink and a blessing on the day. And an invitation to let go of whatever was encumbering me. I want to find my camera and take a photo. But there is nothing gained by cataloging such a moment. I just need to let it be. So I take my shoes off.
Nothing can be more useful to a man or a woman
than a determination not to be hurried.
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