Tuesday, September 3, 2019 – Canton, Ohio
“Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, but today is a gift. That is why it is called the present”
Master Oogway, Kung Fu Panda
This is really embarrassing to admit, but yesterday I finished catching up on processing (i.e., clarifying their meaning to me and deciding the next action—see David Allen, Getting Things Done) something over 10,000 emails that had accumulated in my inboxes over the past months. Most of it was either old news or junk, but some of it held information and requests that are important for me to attend to. I could waste your time and mine explaining the why’s and wherefore’s of how this came about, but I won’t, at least not today. Mainly, though, I should have known better than to have let this happen in the first place, regardless of circumstances.
The reason I find this spiritually significant is that whenever stuff accumulates in your life—whether correspondence, things to do, bills to pay, or whatever—this forces you to live in the past, at least to a certain extent. Worse, it forces you to fear the future: “What if something that I haven’t seen yet, buried in that backlog, is a disaster about to happen?”
If you are living in the past or in the future, you are living an illusion, and the worst thing about living in an illusion is that you cannot really love, because love is real. Reality is only in the here and now, and so love, like God, exists only in the present. After all, God is love (1 John 4:16), no?
Though the saying is attributed to many people, most recently it was Master Oogway in Kung Fu Panda who said, “Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, but today is a gift. That is why it is called the present.” My spiritual father had another way of expressing this truth, common to all of the world’s major religions. He used to say, “All that is, is now.” Accepting the gift of the present moment and choosing it over the phantasms of past or future is the core of the spiritual life. And heaven and hell—eternity—is not something we encounter at the end of our time in time and space. Heaven and hell are the choices we make each and every moment.
Time is something God created for us to live in, although we are destined for eternity. Trying to imagine an eternal and infinite Now is pretty tough, because our consciousness is bound to the succession of nows we call time. The truth is, though, that the present moment is not only all we have; in very significant ways, it is all there is.
And that is why choice, the capacity to do X rather than Y, is the kernel of the gift of freedom that is the image of God in us. A succession of moments in which I chose to do something else rather than attend to the messages flooding into my inboxes created in the future the necessity of dealing with the past (i.e., old emails), but the main effect of those choices was to cause me great and ongoing anxiety in the present. And that had a powerful effect on the choices I made each moment.
In the end, there is only ever one choice: in the matter facing me, whatever it is, will I deal with it with love or without love? I just finished reading Johann Christoph Arnold’s Escape Routes, a very wise book I mentioned before. He puts this business very well:
“In The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoyevsky speaks through a character who, as he lies dying, comforts his mother by reminding her, ‘One day is enough for a man to know all happiness.’ If that is really so—that what we do today has power to justify our whole life—then the essential thing is to stop wasting our time, and to make a choice today, between hell and heaven…Will we choose to love, or not? Everything else pales beside this crucial question,” (pp. 142-143).
Now = always = forever and ever. Now is the moment to choose heaven over hell, to choose to love. There is no other time.
I really needed that today. Thanks Bishop Mike!