Investment in Now

April 16.

I’m waking up this morning and I have had my coffee. This is one of those rare nights that I slept the entire night through.

I rediscover myself from within. 

I am alive here, right now, within this exact moment. I am never alive in any other moment except this exact one. There is an exquisite precision to it, an intimacy that rises within my sensation of Being. 

I relax and allow the whole of my existence to express itself here in this experience, in this moment.

Because of the investment in now, the mind is rather still and empty. It doesn't have anywhere else to be or anything else to go towards or run away from. It’s just here. When the mind is just here, it is also relaxed. In this relaxation, it acquires a kind of openness into which life can enter. Life is different than my associations or memories, my expectations or anticipations. It is just here as a gentle force that opens onto the moment with gratitude and love.

These two things are extraordinarily powerful forces that lie at the heart of what takes place in Being. It's a good thing that I don't feel them fully most of the time, because when they really enter me, when the full force of their truth flows into me, I’m overwhelmed. Tears come to my eyes. This happened yesterday at lunchtime, when for an instant I was filled with all of the remorse, all of the sorrow, all of the love that this life can concentrate within itself when Grace arrives. I’m both incapable and unworthy; yet the benefits, the graces, of this life and the love it’s created by and filled with continue to flow in, whether I appreciate them or not.

Well, my iniquity and my insufficiency are old stories here. It's certainly helpful to be reminded of them; yet I can't spend all day in these deep moments of receptivity which remind me of this and bring me to a real humility. My immediate task is to just be here in life; raptures, however important they may seem at the moment, should have nothing to do with my aim to be responsible right now. It's the tiny graces that live within the moment that make up the larger ones that gradually become concentrated and capable of receiving the force of the Lord within Being. 

I'm incredibly fortunate to be alive in the first place. It reminds me of the instruction of Zen master Dogen: “We have obtained these bodies difficult to obtain, and encountered this dharma difficult to encounter. Therefore let us practice as if our hair were on fire.” 

For me, of course, this instruction brings its own problems: I'm mostly bald. 

Perhaps I should practice as though some other part of me were on fire: my soul, for example. It can burn with a quiet flame that seeks the Lord; and even if the light that it casts on the darkness in me is no more than a faint one throughout the day, it can still serve.

This reminds me of another quote, part of the poem “God Knows” by Minnie Louise Haskins:

“…I said to the man who stood at the gate of the year:

“Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown.” 

And he replied: 

“Go out into the darkness and put your hand into the Hand of God.

That shall be to you better than light and safer than a known way.” 

When the mind, along with the body, is quiet and still, it acquires a freedom of response that is somehow always appropriate to the moment. When it’s not distracted by itself, it also knows how to Be. This is surprising and new, because its Being is quite different than what I generally think the mind is. It is an attention; it is what patiently waits for life and sees it as it arrives.

And here we are.

May your heart be close to God, 

and God close to your heart.

Lee

Lee van Laer is a Senior Editor at Parabola Magazine.