The Sacrament of the Present Moment

The word anxiety has such a central place in contemporary conversation that it sometimes seems like it is a recent phenomenon arising from the last couple of difficult years. But we know anxiety is not a new human problem.

A few Sundays ago, after the service I was having coffee with a good friend visiting from the USA. And he gave me a book he was reading by the philosopher, Christian theologian, and expert in eastern religion Alan Watts. The book is called The Wisdom of Insecurity, a message for an Age of Anxiety1.

What immediately struck me about this brilliant book is that it was first published in 1951.

Humanity has been living in periods of anxiety since the beginning of time. And one of the biggest reasons for our anxious state is that we don’t know how to live in the present or to deal with life as it meets us moment by moment. Instead, we live in a place called the future.

Most of the time we are not actually here, in real life, in the here and now. Because our minds are working their way through tonight, tomorrow, next year, the year after that either worrying about what might go wrong or else designing all kinds of strategies that will provide guaranteed security. The problem with this way of thinking and this way of living is that future time is not real. It’s an abstraction. The future does not exist. All we have is right now. There is nothing else.

In the book, Watt’s says this: “The future is a rational inference from experience which exists only in the brain. The ‘primary consciousness,’ the basic mind which knows reality rather than ideas about it, does not know the future. It lives completely in the present and perceives nothing more than the present moment. But our ingenious brain looks at the part of present experience called memory and by studying it, is able to make predictions. These predictions are relatively so accurate and reliable that the future assumes a high degree of reality. Therefore, the present loses its value.”

The stillness, the calm, and the healing offered to us in the present moment is smothered by our obsession with tomorrow. And yet, tomorrow never comes. Not really.

When Eckhart Tolle’s bestselling book ‘the power of now’ came out in the late 1990’s or when ideas about mindfulness surfaced more recently everyone thought it was such brand-new thinking. Yet the importance of being rooted deeply and holistically in the now has been a very long-standing tradition in Christianity. It has been called ‘the sacrament of the present moment’ or ‘the grace of the present moment.’

Even the mediaeval Franciscans had taught about the human struggle to live in real time. They said ‘the human mind can only do two things: it can endlessly reprocess the past and endlessly worry about the future. The mind and particularly the educated western mind cannot be present in the now.

If you take anxiety to its ultimate root, it relates to our fear of death and the fact that we live in a world, full of the unknown, where everything changes, disintegrates and dies. That’s why the concept of heaven or an afterlife has been such a reassuring idea for many religious people but fewer and fewer, even Christians, hold this as a core tenet of their belief structure.

The finite aspect of life coupled with the insatiable nature of human desires makes the chasing of our future dreams of peace and fulfilment even more frantic. We are so anxious for pleasure that we can never get enough of it. The brain is in pursuit of happiness and because the brain is much more concerned about the future than the present, it conceives happiness as the guarantee of an indefinitely long future of pleasures.

Yet the brain also knows it doesn’t have a long future, so it has to squeeze as much as possible into a few years. And then the focus becomes all about measurement rather than the real and the material. We want success, fame, or relational happiness but these are not actual things, only by-products and atmospheres of real things.

Alan Watt’s says “Money is the perfect symbol of all these kinds of desires because it is only a symbol of real wealth. To make money a goal is to confuse measurements with reality. None of us are actually materialistic, in other words people who love matter. We love the measures more than the matter, surfaces rather than solids.”

We see this in our Gospel reading this morning where Jesus tells a story about a man obsessed with measurement. His mental life is structured by the habit of possession and volume. He tells his soul to relax and enjoy the good times hoping that what his soul will now possess will give him a life of sustenance and merriment. However, in classical thought, the soul receives its life from God and gives this life into the mind, body, and world. The soul lives not by possession but by present tense flow. Jesus calls him a fool because if he had been ‘rich towards God’, in other words if he had known the present moment abundant nature of God, he would have received what his heart actually craved.

So how are we to live in the here and now not worrying about tomorrow or not obsessively mapping out our security plan? How are we to find enough peace of mind in the present when we live in a world whose very nature is insecurity, impermanence, and constant change?

The answer is less to do with problem solving and more about developing awareness It’s difficult if not impossible to ‘think’ ourselves into the present moment. We need a different set of eyes and practices for this. It is about understanding the difference between belief and faith.

Belief often involves clinging to ‘truth,’ as long as that truth squares with our preconceived ideas and wishes. Faith, on the other hand, is an unreserved opening of the mind to truth. Faith has no preconceptions; it is a plunge into the unknown. It is a moment by moment walk with the divine. It is rooted in the present tense. Many of our belief systems relate to our need to feel secure, in order to make our lives seem valuable and meaningful. So, belief becomes an attempt to hang on to life, to grasp it, to contain the uncontainable mystery of God. It clings whereas faith lets go.

Our nervous chasing of future pleasure or our attempts to escape from finitude and mortality is a very normal stage in the spiritual journey. It was always recognised in eastern traditions of Buddhism and Taoism, but it was also a principle taught by Jesus himself. His life from the beginning was an acceptance and embracing of insecurity. He said, “the foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests, but the son of man has nowhere to lay his head.”

Jesus knew that there is a massive contradiction in wanting to be perfectly secure in a universe whose nature is fluidity and change. To be protected from that is to be protected and separate from life itself. We fortify ourselves by belonging to the best nation, the best neighbourhood area, the best social class, or having a large bank balance. But it doesn’t work. To understand insecurity is not to face it or run away from it but to BE it. What do we mean by that? How can we possibly become the insecurity? Well here our New Testament passage today gives us a clue.

In Paul’s letter to the Colossians, he says, “your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ who is your life is revealed (I’ll say that again – when Christ who IS your life is revealed), then you also will be revealed with him in glory.” He goes on to say, “In that renewal there is no longer Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave and free; but Christ is all and in all.”

There is no security or respite from anxiety until we realise that we do not stand outside of life as the person called ‘I’. We are part of this divine life, and our identity is wrapped up in this. Our security comes from letting go of this concept of ourselves and instead resting each moment within the eternal love and community of God.

Watts says this “For Christ stands for the reality that there is no separate self to surrender. Christ is the realisation that there is no separate ‘I’. Jesus says “I do nothing of myself….I and the Father are one….Before Abraham was, I am.”

A life hidden in God has nothing to prove, nothing to achieve, nothing to fear. It sets its eyes on the eternal rather than the temporal. Our lives are a one-word biography: ‘Christ.’

The spiritual practice of living in the present moment is a comprehensive study well beyond the time limits of a sermon. But the starting point is simply having the awareness that there is a different way to live in the world. Training our eyes and body to be in the present gives us a more healed vision of life. It lets each encounter with another person be an utterly new and unique experience rather than spoiled by critique and judgement.

In silence and meditation, we become aware of just how repetitive, negative, or paranoid much of our thought patterns are. Eckart Tolle says this: “About 80 to 90 percent of most people’s thinking is not only repetitive and useless, but because of its dysfunctional and often negative nature, much of it is also harmful.” That’s quite a challenge for a city like Oxford to hear that up to 90% of our daily internal narratives are garbage!

When we live in the present moment our minds become open and receptive embracing what is in front of us with a greater sense of wonder. Often, we notice this when we do something that we passionately enjoy where we lose all sense of time, and our anxiety diminishes. When I draw or paint, I am tuned into the beauty of colour or composition, and I have a greater awareness of my hands and body rather than just an endless stream of distracting thoughts. It is prayer.

Most importantly, when we have a fuller awareness of the present, we will worry less about the I or the self that we think we need to present to the world. Instead, we are caught up in the bigger identity of the