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With God, it’s now or never. How could it be otherwise? As St. Augustine noted long ago, neither the past nor the future exists, at least not in any tangible sense. We have memories that we call the past and expectations about the future, but at this moment they exist only in the realm of thought. So if God is to have any tangible existence at all, it must be right now. This is what Jesus was getting at when he said, “The kingdom of God is at hand.” To show what he meant, he healed the sick, fed the hungry and raised up the dead. This was not the promise of a kingdom to come; it was here and now.
But if the kingdom of God is at hand, as Jesus said, what has become of it? The problem with right now, of course, is that we never know quite how to lay hold of it. Before we know it, what is happening right now has slipped into memory. God’s presence has become past tense, and then we want to build a shrine to it. Instead of God, we get religion: God transmogrified into the once and future king. In Christian terms, there is the Son of God who lived long ago and will come again in the future to judge the living and the dead. As for right now, we have oblations, supplications, penances and please pass the collection plate.
If it’s truly God we seek, as opposed to some past glory or future expectation, we must look to what lies closest at hand. “We must confine ourselves to the present moment without taking thought for the one before or the one to come,” wrote the Jesuit spiritual director Jean-Pierre de Caussade. He goes on: “No moment is trivial, since each one contains a divine Kingdom, and heavenly sustenance.” Something of this idea is captured in a Zen story about a man dangling from a vine on a high cliff to escape a ravenous tiger. Two mice emerge from a hole in the cliff and begin gnawing on the vine. In this moment of upmost peril, the man spies a ripe strawberry growing on the vine and pops it in his mouth. How delicious, he thinks. Just so. For those who abide in God’s kingdom, life is always a cliffhanger.
Jean-Pierre de Caussade, The Sacrament of the Present Moment
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