Freedom and the present moment
One of the essential conditions of interior freedom is the ability to live in the present moment. For one thing, it is only then that we can exercise freedom. We have no hold on the past-we can’t change the smallest bit of it. People sometimes try to relive past events considered failures (“I should have done this… I should have said that…”) but those imaginary scenarios are merely dreams: it is not possible to backtrack. The only free act we can make in regard to the past is to accept it just as it was and leave it trustingly in God’s hands.
We have very little hold on the future either. Despite all our foresight, plans, and promises, it takes very little to change everything completely. We can’t program life in advance, but can only receive it moment by moment.
All we have is the present moment. Here is the only place where we can make free acts. Only in the present moment are we truly in contact with reality. Someone might think it tragic that the present is so fleeting and neither the past nor the future really belongs to us. But approached from the standpoint of Christian faith and hope, the present moment is rich in grace and holds immense reassurance.
This is where God is present. “I am with you always, to the close of the age” God’s is the eternal present. Every moment, whatever it brings, is filled with God’s presence, rich with the possibility of communion with God. We do not commune with God in the past or the future, but by welcoming each instant as the place where he gives himself to us. We should learn to live in each moment as sufficient to itself for God is there; and if God is there, we lack nothing. We feel we are missing this or that, simply because we are living in the past or in the future instead of dwelling in each second. Psalm 145 says, “The eyes of all look to you, and give them their food in due season. You open your hand, you satisfy the desire of every living thing.”
There is something very liberating in this understanding of the grace of the present moment. Even if the whole of our past has been a disaster, even if our future seems like a dead end, now we can establish communion with God through an act of faith, trust, and abandonment. God is eternally present, eternally young, eternally new, and our past and future are his. He can forgive everything, renew everything. “He will renew you in his love.” In the present moment, because of his new infinitely merciful love, we always have the possibility of starting again, not impeded by the past, or tormented by the future. The past is in the hands of the Merciful God, who can draw benefit from everything: the future is in the hands of the Providence of God who will never forget us. Faith keeps us from living as many people do, oppressed by a burdensome past and worrisome future. Living in the present permits our hearts to expand.
2. “To love” has a present tense only
Treatises on spirituality speak of the stages of the spiritual life. They list three, seven, twelve, or whatever number the particular author prefers. There is much to be learned from these accounts, whether it is the seven mansions of the soul depicted by St. Teresa of Avila or the twelve degrees of humility of the Rule of St. Benedict.
But experience has taught me a different approach. I often say jokingly that the ladder of perfection has only one step: the step we take today. Without concerning ourselves about the past or the future, we can decide to believe today, place all our trust in God today, love God and neighbour today. Whether our good resolutions produce success or failure, next day we can begin again, not relying on our strength but only on God’s faithfulness.
This attitude is fundamental in the spiritual life. St. Paul describes it: “Forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus… Only let us hold true to what we have attained.” It is a basic note of monastic spirituality. St. Anthony of Egypt (the father of Monasticism, who died at the age of 105 and who, when he was 100, used to say, “I haven’t yet begun to be converted!”) would repeat St. Paul’s words unceasingly. His biographer, St. Athanasius, adds: “He also remembered the words of Elijah: ‘The Lord liveth before whom I stand today.’ St. Anthony pointed out that when Elijah said ‘today’ he took no account of the past. And so, as though he were still at the beginning, every day he strove to live as he wished to appear before God: pure of heart and ready to obey God’s will and no other.” The same attitude has been practiced by all the saints, St. Therese of Lisieux being a shining example. She wrote: “To love thee, O Jesus, I have but today.”
3 We can suffer for only one moment
This effort to live in the reality of each moment is of the greatest importance in times of suffering. St. Therese of Lisieux said during her illness: “I only suffer for one moment. It is because people think about the past and the future that they become discouraged and despair.” Nobody has the capacity to suffer for ten or twenty years; but we have the grace to bear today the suffering that is ours now. Projecting things into the future crushes us-not experiencing suffering but anticipating it.
…Reality is something one shoulders together with all the suffering that goes with it…But the idea of suffering (which is not the reality, for real suffering is always fruitful and can turn your life into a precious thing) must be destroyed. And if you destroy the ideas behind which life lies imprisoned as behind bars, then you liberate your true life, its real mainsprings, and you will also have the strength to bear real suffering, your own and the world’s.
4. “Let the day’s own trouble be sufficient for the day”
One of the wisest sayings in the Gospel is “Let the day’s own trouble be sufficient for the day.” Let us absorb this lesson Jesus teaches. We often complain about how much we are suffering, without realizing that it’s our fault. As if today’s suffering weren’t enough, we add regrets for the past and worries for the future! It’s no surprise we feel overwhelmed. For life to be bearable, we must practice bearing today’s problems only.
The past casts its shadow over the present whenever we brood about old failures and yesterday’s choices. Of course we should ask God’s forgiveness for our faults and should learn from them where appropriate. But once we’ve said we’re sorry and meant it, that is enough. While seeking to make amends where possible for the harm we’ve caused, most of the time we should simply leave things in God’s hands, trusting him to put everything right. We must put a stop to attitudes or thoughts that keep us from living trustingly in the present moment.
Sometimes we feel we’ve wasted much time and missed all too many opportunities to love and grow. If the feeling leads to real repentance and to starting again courageously and trustingly, then it is something positive. But if the sense of time wasted gets us down and makes us feel we have ruined our lives, we must reject it. To lock ourselves in the past would only add another sin to those already committed. It would be a serious lack of trust in the infinite mercy and power of God, who loves us and wants always to offer us a new chance to become holy, despite the past. When the thought of how little progress we’ve made threatens to overwhelm us, we must make an act of faith and hope, such as: “Thank you, my God, for all my past. I firmly believe that you can draw good out of everything I have lived through. I want to have no regrets, and I resolve today to begin from zero, with exactly the same trust as if all my past history were made up of nothing but faithfulness and holiness.” Nothing could please God more than that!
5 Tomorrow can take care of itself
If it’s a mistake to add burden of the past to the weight of the present, it’s a still worse mistake to burden the present with the future. The remedy for that tendency is to meditate on the lesson contained in the Gospel about abandonment to God’s Providence and ask God’s grace to practice it. “Do not be anxious about your life, what you shall eat or what you shall drink, nor about your body, what you shall put on. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? And which of you by being anxious can add one cubit to his span of life? … Therefore do not be anxious, saying ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink’ or ‘What shall we wear?’”
Again, this does not mean being improvident and irresponsible. We are obliged to plan for the future and take thought for tomorrow. But we should do it without worrying, without the care that gnaws at the heart but doesn’t solve anything-and often prevents us from putting our hearts into what we have to do here and now. Hearts anxious about tomorrow can’t be open to the grace of the present moment.
Like the manna that fed the Hebrew people in the desert, grace can’t be stockpiled. We can’t build up reserves of grace but only receive it moment by moment, as part of the “daily bread” we pray for in the Our Father. To be free of the burden of the future as well as the past, we need “re-education”. Here are some commonsense points that can help.
Things seldom happen as we expect. Most of our fears and apprehensions turn out to be completely imaginary. Difficulties we anticipated become very simple in reality; and the real difficulties are things that didn’t occur to us. It’s better to accept things as they come, one after another, trusting that we will have the grace to deal with them at the right time, than to invent a host of scenarios about what may happen-scenarios that normally turn out to be wrong. The best way to prepare for the future is to put our hearts into the present. In the Gospel, Jesus tells his disciples they will be hauled before tribunals, and then he adds: “Settle it therefore in your minds, not to meditate beforehand how to answer; for I will give you a mouth of wisdom, which none of your adversaries will be able to withstand or contradict.”
Projecting our fears into the future cuts us off from reality and prevents us from dealing with the present situation as we should. It saps our best energies. In another passage of her journal, Etty Hillesum says: “If one burdens the future with one’s worries, it cannot grow organically. I am filled with confidence, not that I shall succeed in worldly things, but even when things go badly for me I shall still find life good and worth living.” Fear of suffering, as we’ve seen, causes more pain than suffering. We need to live accordingly.
We have to fight them daily, like fleas, those many small worries about the morrow, for they sap our energies. We make mental provision for the days to come, and everything turns out differently. Sufficient unto the day. The things that have to be done must be done, and for the rest we must not allow ourselves to become infested with thousands of petty fears and worries, so many motions of no confidence in God. Everything will turn out right… Ultimately, we have just one moral duty: to reclaim large areas of peace in ourselves, more and more peace, and to reflect it towards others. And the more peace there is in us, the more peace there will also be in our troubled world.
6 Live, instead of waiting to live
Our present life is always something good, for the Creator has endowed it with a blessing he will never cancel, even though sin has complicated things. “God saw that is was good,” the Book of Genesis tells us. For God, “seeing means not merely taking note but actually conferring reality. This fundamental goodness of life is also expressed by Jesus: “Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing?”
Sometimes, though, it isn’t worry that causes us to focus on the future, but the hope of something better or happier. It may be a very specific event, like a reunion with someone we love or coming home after a long, tiring journey. Or it may be less well-defined; the time when things will go better, circumstances will change, life will be more interesting. At present, we tell ourselves, we don’t really have a life, but later we will “live life to the full.” There is nothing wrong with that, but is does contain a certain danger. We may spend our whole lives waiting to live. Thus we risk not fully accepting the reality of our present lives. Yet, what guarantee is there that we won’t be disappointed when the long-awaited time arrives? Meanwhile we don’t put our hearts sufficiently into today, and so miss graces we should be receiving. Let us live each moment to the full, not worrying about whether time is going quickly or slowly but welcoming everything given us moment by moment.
To live today well we also should remember that God only asks for one thing at a time, never two. It doesn’t matter whether the job we have in hand is sweeping the kitchen floor or giving a speech to forty thousand people. We must put our hearts into it, simply and calmly, and try not to solve more than one problem at a time. Even when what we’re doing is genuinely trifling, it’s a mistake to rush through it as though we felt we were wasting our time. If something, no matter how ordinary, needs to be done and is part of our lives, it’s worth doing for its own sake, and worth putting our hearts into.
7. Availability to other people
Availability is fundamental in our relations with others. In every encounter with someone else, however long or short, we should make him feel we’re one hundred percent there for him and do whatever needs doing for him. Good manners, yes, but also real, heartfelt availability. This is very difficult, since we have a strong sense of propriety rights to our time and easily tend to get upset if we can’t organize it as we choose. But this is the price of genuine love. If Jesus asks us not to have any worries, that is mainly to safeguard the quality of our relations with other people. A heart preoccupied by concerns and worried isn’t available to other people. Parents should remember this: children can get along happily without constantly demanding their parents’ attention, provided there are regular times when Dad or Mom have no concern except being with them. If we are riddled with anxieties instead of leaving them in God’s hands, we can’t offer our children that kind of time, and they will never feel secure in our love, no matter how many expensive gifts we lavish on them.
8. Psychological time and interior time
If we try to live like that and deepen our relationship with God and our prayer life, so that we can perceive his presence within us and live as much as possible in communion with his indwelling, we shall discover something wonderful: the interior rhythm of grace that our life follows at its deepest level.
It might be said that there are two modes of time: time of the head and time of the heart. The first is psychological time, the time in our minds, which we make calculations about, and divide into hours and days to be managed and planned. This kind of time always goes either too fast or too slowly.
But there is another sort of time, experienced at certain moments of happiness or grace, though it always exists. This is God’s time, the time of the deep rhythms of grace in our lives. It is composed of a succession of moments harmoniously linked. Each of those moments is complete in itself, full, because in it we do what we have to do, in communion with God’s will. That time is communion with eternity. It is time we receive as a gift.
If we always lived in that time, we would have much less opportunity for harm and wrongdoing. The devil slips into time we live badly because we are refusing something or grasping too eagerly at something else.
The saints habitually lived in that interior time. To do that required great inner freedom, total detachment from our own plans and programs and inclinations. We must be ready to do in an instant just what we hadn’t expected, to live in total self- abandonment, with no other concern than doing God’s will and being fully available to people and events. We also need to experience in prayer God’s presence within us and listen inwardly to the Holy Spirit so as to follow his suggestions.
Then nothing is left to chance. Often we may journey in darkness, but we sense that our lives are unfolding in a rhythm we do not control but to which we are happy to abandon ourselves and by which all events are arranged with infinite wisdom.
By Jacques Philippe, Interior Freedom, Part II (Scepter Publishers)