Believe it or not, the greatest moment of your life is the one you're now living

Whether you’re one who’s had to start over completely, or you’re a person who vacations or retreats periodically to keep your wits about you and keep yourself whole, at some point your respite must end and you’ll have to plunge yourself back into the routine of living here and now. To live well, and to live in attunement with God who is with you here and now, you’ll need to get over your wistful longing to be elsewhere else. If you don’t, you’ll stay stuck in the past, you’ll get lured into the future, and you’ll never live in the only place life can be lived—here, now.

The greatest moment of your life is the one you’re now living, but you’ll never taste it so long as you’re wistfully looking elsewhere for it to appear.

Would it be easier if we just started over?

I heartily recommend periodic retreats—as long as we don’t idealize these escapes and delude ourselves into believing that praying would better or easier if we bailed on life and started over again somewhere else, someplace more sacred. There are, of course, a few of us who must start over completely—so twisted have our lives become, so entangled with dysfunction. Some of us may have to escape permanently from what has become of our lives up to this point. But one day we who’ve ducked out for a while will have to return to the ordinary dailyness of the new life that’s emerging within us.

Break from the noise and clutter, but not as an escape

It’s strange really, given the way of prayer I've been talking about here and here, that there’s still a nearly universal temptation for those of us who seek God to try to ascend a spiritual path, climb a mountain, find a remote monastery or retreat center, and escape the insanity of our lives for awhile. Look, I know as well as anyone that such an escape can be helpful—Jesus himself withdrew from the press and pull of city life to enjoy some spiritual respite away from it all. And he invited his disciples to join him.

So we too must occasionally break from the noise and clutter, the responsibilities and commitments—all that holds us captive and renders us numb and deaf to the presence of God. We too must periodically flee from what can keep us cold to the Beloved’s subtle courtship of our affections. We too must break from what can blind us to the pain within us and harden us against the suffering outside us. Our pain and suffering, given the space to face it bravely and attentively, can awaken love in our hearts and compassion in our hands. Without an occasional break we can too easily become captives to ways of living that not only aren’t helpful, they’re not holy.

Continued . . .

Second hand experience of God is not the real thing

The fact is, it’s in the midst of daily life that you’ll meet God or you’re not likely to meet God at all—not really. Sure, you can think nice thoughts about God, and there’s a part of you that’ll congratulate itself on how religious or spiritual these ideas about God might make you feel, but thinking God is very different from loving God. Loving God is a genuine experience that cannot be thought. It’s the difference between reading about love and being in love.

Once you’ve tasted love yourself, no amount of second hand experience through reading can substitute for the real thing.

The kind of prayer that keeps us from God

Prayer, as I offering it here, is living with a nearly continuous sense of the Sacred no matter what you’re doing or where you are. Prayer is life. But so much of the time, what passes for prayer is actually an abstraction of life, and it’s not the kind of prayer God wants for you. The kind of prayer that’s religious and therefore somewhat separate from ordinary life. That kind of prayer is what people do before a meal, but not while they’re eating. It’s what they do when they’re doing something particularly pious, but not while they’re doing the dishes or writing an email, shuttling kids to school or sitting in a doctor's office, talking with a friend or making love. Too bad. Such a view of prayer keeps them from so much of God. True prayer is, as I’ve said before, as natural as breathing, as earthy as talking a walk.