Living in the Present Moment

In both the book of Matthew, Chapter 6 and the book of Luke, Chapter 12, Jesus asks why the people feel so anxious. In truth, he says to them, they have everything they could ever want already present within their own hearts, where dwells the kingdom of God. Consider the lilies of the field, he tells them. Watch how the flowers accept the light of the sun, the falling rain, the wind that blows across the land, receiving all of it as a gift of life.

The passage speaks to us still. We often live as if time is escaping us, and our sense of worry and fretfulness overtakes us, sometimes along with or because of fear and anxiety. These are the things that consume far too many hours in our day, when what we need to do is stop, if even for only a moment, and enter the quiet place within.

Allowing Ourselves Time to Just Be

The least helpful advice anyone can give us is to tell us to be practical, to think ahead, to shape up and get it together. We know all that. What we need to hear instead are words reminding us that we are sent here by God to have this human experience, to feel the precious and exquisite pattern of the days. It is in this camouflage three-dimensional reality that we apprehend the essence of our spiritual selves through how we feel while we live within the barriers of time, and discover they open our consciousness after all into far deeper recognitions. T.S. Eliot wrote these lines about just that in The Four Quartets, in “Burnt Norton”:

“Time past and time future
Allow but a little consciousness.
To be conscious is not to be in time
But only in time can the moment in the rose-garden,
The moment in the arbour where the rain beat,
The moment in the draughty church at smokefall
Be remembered; involved with past and future.
Only through time time is conquered.”

Nothing is ever solved by the feeling of anxiety. Let it go. In its place allow trust, like the lilies of the field, the kind of trust that senses all is well, no matter how it seems otherwise. Because it is.

And seek not ye what ye shall eat, and what ye shall drink, neither be ye of doubtful mind.
For all these things do the nations of the world seek after: but your Father knoweth that ye have need of these things.
Yet seek ye his kingdom, and these things shall be added unto you.