Struggling to live in the present?

There's plenty that can keep us locked in the past or fixated on the future, anywhere but the present.

Some of you are asking (especially on Facebook) if it's really possible to live intentionally, here and now in the midst our busy lives--in a traffic jam, working in a chaotic office, tending a pair of screaming infants, arguing a case in a crowded courtroom.  Can we do it late in life when our minds feel a bit more like sieves, and our old habits seem hard to break?

Yes, we can.  In any place and at any age we can wake up to the gift of each moment.

That said, there are forces at work in us that keep us everywhere but the present.  And we must be honest about them.

We try to sit still.  We seek God in wordless prayer.  We try to focus on one task as we sit at our computers.  We try to be present before the one we love but our brains think they're a Twitter account with 10,000 friends--a new tweet arrives with each new moment and we can't seem to resist a quick glance.

If you can't stay in the present, congratulations, you're part of the human race.

• You're not weak.
• You're not spiritually inferior.
• And you don't lack that prayer-gene that your friend seemed get in spades.

Welcome to the journey.  Learning to live in the present is gonna take some work.

Love above all

What do we intend?  Only love.  The aim and fruit of an intentional life is love—divine and human.  The goal and harvest of a spiritually awakened life is participation in love.  When we love, all of life is prayer. Of course, difficulties and difficult people will try to tell you that love’s too squishy, soft, weak.

Don’t you believe them.

If the cross of Christ has anything to do with love (and it does), there’s nothing weak about love.  This is one reason I’m persuaded by true Christianity.  In Jesus we see the intention of God.  Love.  Love alone.  Love above all.  And love is the ultimate power—irrepressible, unconquerable, eternal.  Through Jesus we know love—not merely as aspect of God, but as the very nature of God—for “God is love” (1 John 4.8). Love is not an emotion we share, nor is it an emotion of God—something like glue that holds the Trinity together.  Love is uncreated.  It is the divine energy that continually inflames our hearts and unites us to God by the power of the Holy Spirit.  Through the Spirit we actually participate in the heart of God, the Source of all things, which is Love.

So your intention, the concentration of your life around love, gathers your energy to this one thing.  You intend to—

• Awaken to the power of love.
• Look a friend in the eye . . . and hold it.
• Speak words that are heart deep.
• Listen without judging or hurrying.
• Smile when you’re tempted to frown.
• Begin that unwelcome task you’ve been avoiding.
• Walk in the rain . . . slowly.

And as you do each thing, gather your heart into the Heart of Love, which is the Source of all things.

Say deep within: “I intend to love in this moment as if there were no other.”

And God will send you grace upon the wings of your simple, earnest prayer.

"Give me an example of focused intention"

Intention. Awakening our spiritual attention. A few of you have asked questions on this site or on Facebook about Monday's post.  Trish writes: "Ok, please give me an example of focused intention. I'm trying to follow you." In my blog post, Jim Brannan, a pilot (who thankfully knows what it means to stay focused on the task of flying an aircraft rather than letting his mind drift to a zillion other things) says intention is a matter of "focusing our attention, sustaining our awareness, checking in with God when our blood pressure goes up, or our anxiety increases. It means being aware of our inner lives in the midst of distraction."

To do this, here is what I'm doing right now...

1. I'm writing to you.
2. I am no where else but here.
3. I keep focusing on these words I'm putting on the page.
4. I keep myself thinking about you and the desire you have to live intentionally.
5. As thoughts come (as they inevitably do) about the emails that beg for my attention, or the meeting later today that will require some energy, or the painful experience that for one reason or another I still cling to, I keep returning with each distraction to this moment, and to the task right before me.

No matter what you do, this the key work you have to do. And it can revolutionize whatever you do: talking with a friend, balancing the checkbook, driving your car.

But intention does not mean perfection. It means that when my dog barks as he did just now wanting to go out, my attention shifts. I'm drawn away from the task. I get up, and open the door, and as I walk, my mind flits to a dozen other things. I recognize them, and invite myself back from the need to follow them. I sit back down and finish this little note.

I could do all this unintentionally, or I can focus my attention, direct my mind, concentrate my thoughts into the heart. Breathe. I can live with awareness and intention. And I'll be a lot happier.

The Simple Prayer of the Most Important People

The most important people today are probably not those we think of first. Kallistos Ware tells of St. Barsansuphios of Gaza (sixth century) who says that in his time there were three persons whose prayers likely held everything together. Because of their spiritual intention, the sun rises each day, evil is held in check, and life goes on. He even mentions their names. John, he says, is one of them. And Elias too. The third, he says, lives in the province of Jerusalem. It could be anyone—a priest, a farmer in the fields, a mother tending her hearth and her children. But it may well be Barsansuphios himself, who was trying to keep himself clear about his spiritual vocation, but humility kept him from saying so.

For those with eyes to see and ears to hear, Ware says, “the world is upheld by the prayer of hidden saints—Christian and, I believe, also non-Christian.”

Awakening to the spiritual life and the vocation of prayer in the midst of daily life is not, as I’ve said before, a cul de sac or private party. Just as a butterfly fanning its wings in Tokyo affects weather patterns in New York, our spiritual intention, our life of prayer, has enormous social and political consequences no matter how hidden our life may be.

Thomas Merton once said:

“I wonder if there are twenty people alive in the world now who see things as they really are. That would mean that there were twenty people who were free, who were not dominated or even influenced by any attachment to any created thing or to their own selves or to any gift of God, even to the highest, the most supernaturally pure of His graces. I don’t believe that there are twenty such people alive in the world. But there must be one or two. They are the ones who are holding everything together and keeping the universe from falling apart.” (New Seeds of Contemplation, page 203)

Who can say what good is happening in this world because of your hidden life of simple, and sometimes bumbling, prayer?

Intention

When you awaken spiritually, you awaken to the power of intention. My friend, Jim Brannan, a savvy pilot and trainer of some of the world’s top pilots, knows this. After our writer’s group last Wednesday he sent me an email that helped me see it more clearly too.

“So where’s the answer?” he wrote. “I believe it’s in your statement, ‘To live a life wholly devoted to God in the midst of this distracting world requires a determination that is not only fierce, but that’s intentional and examined.’ As you say, ‘unexamined life is not worth living.’ To live the life you’re describing requires the power of intention, the power of intentional prayer, focused purposeful prayer. It is praying with expectation, it’s taking God up on his promises.”

Jim’s a pilot. I’m glad he knows the power of intention. He’s not only responsible for those he ferries through the skies, but he’s responsible for training the women and men who vault hundreds of thousands of us every day into the dizzying and dangerous heights.

“An intentional spiritual life,” he says, “means knowing how to live in the presence of God, focusing our attention, sustaining our awareness, checking in with God when our blood pressure goes up, or our anxiety increases. It means being aware of our inner lives in the midst of distraction. It’s living consciously in the Presence.”

The 14th century English mystic we know only as the one who wrote The Cloud of Unknowing—one of the most influential works of Christian devotion—says much the same thing. Those who awaken the power of intention focus their lives around an irrepressible Force for good in the world (chapters 37 and 38).

What’s even better, these lives are not just good, they’re generally happy and pleasant to be around.

In the state we’re in today, we could use a few more of them.