What it's like when God is more than a mere idea

What I've been saying in these recent posts is more than mere empty words, I assure you. I was once assaulted by a disease that, while the doctors told me it probably wouldn’t kill me, it made me feel like it was. A couple years later, my marriage collapsed. And a year after that, my closest friend took his life. I know what it’s like to live when life feels a lot like hell.

But I also learned in the midst of it all about the power of the present.

I learned to make friendship with each and every moment.

My body felt like it was killing me, but I was not, in each breathing moment, dead. My marriage of twenty-three years fell apart and I fell into an emotional free-fall, but I was not, in each breathing moment, falling apart. My friend’s mind broke, but my mind was not, in each breathing moment, broken.

In each moment I was alive, breathing. And so long as I stayed in the moment, life came to me and even (believe it or not) I could taste the most exquisite happiness. I learned the habit of returning to the moment every time my mind pulled me into the woulda, shoulda, coulda’s of the past, or I head-tripped through fantasies about a better future.

In the present I learned to taste God and that taste of God was nothing like what I’d known of God when God was a mere idea.

Moving beyond how trapped you feel

Worry, anxiety, and ambition robs you of the gift of what is coming to you now. Of course, it’s possible that your now is full of pain. Perhaps you have cancer. Maybe a loved one has died and you’re full of grief. You might be living with depression or someone has betrayed you or you’re losing your business. And frankly, now is not where you want to be. But the truth is, right now you are not dead, even if cancer’s trying to kill you. Right now you might be broke, but there’s still life in you. Yes, you might be telling yourself all kinds of stories about how bad things are, how things might be different “if only,” how trapped you feel. And yes, these videos seem to play in your mind unceasingly, dragging you into the past and paralyzing you as you look toward the future.

But they’re not real, not really. They may have been real, and they might become real, but they are not real right now.

Right now, the birds are singing. You’re breathing. Blood is moving through your veins. There is someone, somewhere who loves you. The sun is shining above, even if it’s raining around you. In this moment, things are not as bad as your mind tells you they are. In this moment—if you can wake up from the dream long enough—there is enough beauty to give you pleasure, to gift you with an exquisite and unexplainable happiness.

How unconscious are you?

When you decide to awaken from the dream-world in which you're living, you become aware of how unconscious you are to this present moment.   Test this: ask yourself how much of the drive to work or home you actually remember; evaluate how much of this morning's meal you actually tasted. Instead, when you wake up to the present, when you're fully awake now to God, to yourself, to the world around you, there is a new quality to your experience of this present moment.

Jesus said, “Do not worry about tomorrow” (Matthew 6.34).

With these words, he liberates us from the pull of the past, the tyranny of tomorrow. He’s inviting you now to wake up from the dream and enter the splendor of the Kingdom of God which is here among us, within us (Luke 17.21); he is urging you to step into the gift of the Eternal Life now.

A dream-world is where most people live

We spend a great deal of our lives living somewhere other than where we are. Our minds dwell mostly on the past or walk around in the mind-made world of the future. But no one meets God anywhere but where they are now. The past was, of course, very real, but it’s not real now. And the future will be real, but it’s not here yet.

The past is only a memory and the future is merely a dream.

And so long as you spend the bulk of your time in these two dreams worlds, you’re essentially sleep walking through the present; the present moment is the only time you really have. In this "dream" state (which seems very real to you) God will be merely a head-trip—ideas and doctrines—no more real than the phantoms in your dreams.

Sadly, this dream-world is where most people live, it’s likely where you’ve lived for quite some time.

It's time to wake up.

The wireless device as tyrant

The wireless device, a morally ambiguous piece of equipment, has become a tyrant. What Thomas Merton said in 1961 is eerily prophetic: "This becomes a kind of religious compulsion without which people cannot convince themselves that they are really alive, really 'fulfilling their personality.' They are not 'sinning' but simply making asses of themselves, deluding themselves that they are real when their compulsions have reduced them to a shadow of a true person" (New Seeds of Contemplation, p. 85-6). The modern person doesn't live by text alone, but the continuous stream of texts, Facebook updates, and tweets suggest that many, too many, of us believe that WiFi is the very air we breathe.

How many meetings are interrupted now by coworkers glancing at an incoming text? How many romantic evenings are botched by a screen lighting up? How many people must die before we learn to turn things off?

Get free.

Put the thing down for awhile.

Be human.

If you can't, name it for what it is, an addiction, and get help.