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 . . .

Prayer brings together what we too often separate

Prayer brings together what we in our ignorance too often separate. Prayer that follows the path of the embodiment of God joins together Divinity and humanity, spirit and matter, sacred and secular, mystical encounter with God and walking with a friend. Anyone whose praying perpetuates some sanitary separation between all these things isn’t walking the same path God-in-Christ has walked.

With every step the Beloved takes, there’s a deeper penetration of the Eternal into the temporal, and there’s a fuller incorporation of the temporal into the Eternal. That’s why we pray, “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”

Heaven and earth are one in Christ; Divinity permeating and pervading not only our humanity, but all creation as well.

The end of head-trip religion

The downward and inward move of God in the Incarnation of Christ brings an end to any religion that would make prayer into a mere head-trip. The Incarnation is an invitation to touch God, taste God, love God. It is first-hand and personal experience of the God who is ultimate reality, and it is the experience of this Reality in our bodies, on this earth.

This radical embodiment of God in Jesus makes all bodies, indeed, all matter—the earth included—sacred.