The Power of Now

I am 53 years old, and I’m just now beginning to understand the very difficult and often unhealthy relationship I have with time. Time, to me, has been both a god and a devil, something I’ve inadvertently bowed down to and worshipped, something I’ve unwittingly let manipulate me and distort my relationships and my purpose.

Perhaps some of you have heard the line “Today is all we have.” Or, put another way, “Yesterday is history; Tomorrow is a mystery: Today is a gift, which is why we called it ‘the present.’” I’ve had to come to terms with the fact that I have frittered away so much of my life in either regretting my past or worrying about my future. As a good friend of mine once told me in his inimitable Brooklyn NY accent, “Tobes, you know what your problem is? You got one foot in the past, one foot in the future, and you’re just pissing all over the present!”

My friend Georgie is right, unfortunately. That is pretty much how I’ve lived a huge portion of my life. But I don’t know why. It’s certainly not been something I’ve wanted to have happen. But I DO know that it has everything to do with my mind. Eckhart Tolle, in his epic book The Power of Now, says that while we like to think that we control our minds, the truth is that our minds actually control us. And the particular way our minds control us is by filling our heads with thoughts of the past and of the future – past regret and future worry. And because our minds are so hell-bent on the past and future, that sets up a situation in which we can’t be here. Our bodies and physical selves may be “here,” but our minds can be in so many other places. And whenever our mind is somewhere other than right here, right now, where our bodies are, we are missing out. We are, to quote my somewhat crass friend Georgie, pissing all over the present. And that, my friends, is a huge recipe for regret. Because the more we allow our minds to pull us either back to the past or ahead to the future, the more we are missing – really missing – in the here and now. And the present – once it is past - is something we can never, ever get back. 

It was January 7, 2001. It was my mother’s 70^th birthday. I had called at about 4 pm to wish her a happy birthday. Dad was taking her out to dinner about 15 miles from their home in Petoskey, Michigan over to mom’s favorite restaurant in Charlevoix. At 12:20 that night, my phone rang in Exeter, New Hampshire and my brother told me that my folks were in a horrible car accident and my mom was dead….Dead? But I just talked to her! I just wished her a happy birthday…But everything can change in the blink of an eye, in what Don Henley and the Eagles call “a New York Minute."

Time is a sort of devil, isn’t it? Time messes with us in so many ways and on so many levels. Our minds - and American culture in particular - has convinced us that we have to stay busy, that we must always be productive, as if making the most of time can be equated with getting the most stuff done. There’s a great story in the Christian scriptures about this very thing. It’s recorded in Luke’s gospel and involves Jesus visiting the house of two sisters Martha and Mary...

   "As Jesus and his disciples were on their way, he came to a village where a woman named Martha opened her home to him. She had a sister called Mary, who sat at the Lord's feet listening to what he said. But Martha was distracted by all the preparations that had to be made. She came to him and asked, 'Lord, don't you care that my sister has left me to do the work by myself? Tell her to help me!'

    Jesus replied, 'Martha, Martha, you are worried and upset about many things, but few things are needed - or indeed only one. Mary has chosen what is better, and it will not be taken away from her.'"  (Luke 10:38-42)

You can see the struggle, right? You can feel the tension and grasp the trade off, right? Martha is playing the hostess. She wants to show her love and respect for Jesus by straightening things up, by making the house look nice, and by fixing him a really good meal. But Mary…Mary senses that when Jesus is around the only thing worth doing is devoting 100% of her attention to him. She sits down at his feet and listens. She focuses all of who she is on the here and the now, knowing that you don’t get Jesus in your house very often nor for very long. Two sisters. Two good and loving sisters who took radically different approaches to honoring Jesus.

Now to me the question this story raises is not so much which sister is right and which sister is wrong. It’s more about how satisfied does each sister wind up being with the approach she took. Martha is agitated, frustrated, running around like a chicken with her head cut off, and pissed that her sister isn’t helping her. We know how unsatisfied Martha is by what she says and how she reacts. This could have and would have been a very different story had Martha been internally happy and content with her attempts to make Jesus a nice meal. My hunch is that had that been the case, Jesus wouldn’t have said anything to Martha at all. He wouldn’t have criticized her or told her that Mary’s choice was a better one. But her agitation revealed the truth about where focusing on being busy and over preparing can lead. Martha missed the present. She missed the gift, the gift that can only be experienced in the moment. And she can’t get it back. We can only imagine how Martha must have felt when Jesus left her house that night – never to return - for he was dead in a matter of weeks. Talk about regret! Talk about not being present! Everything CAN change in a New York Minute.

We who have screwed up badly in our lives, who are addicted, or who have messed our most important relationships are particularly susceptible to regret, aren’t we? Once we mess up our lives, we are so quick to play the “what if” game with our lives and our past. If I just wouldn’t have gotten that third DUI…If I just wouldn’t have lied that one time…If I just could have stayed with my family… But we did. And it’s done. And there is no going back. We can’t change or undo the past.

Similarly, we who struggle with addiction, depression, unemployment, or many other difficulties are equally susceptible to worries about the future. How am I every going to get my life back? What if my family doesn’t hang on and wait for me to get clean and sober? What if I can’t find another job? What if…what if…what if?

But one thing we can be sure of is this: if we are regretting our past or stressing over our future, we are not showing up in the present. We are not being “mindful,” as our Buddhist friends would say. We’re not here, not living in the moment, not living one day at a time.

Jesus said that we should not worry about the future. He said the each day has enough troubles and challenges of its own. But you know, as much as I love and respect Jesus, speaking as someone who really struggles mightily with worry and regret, with incessant negative thinking about both the past and the future, that kind of instruction about “just being present” is not all that helpful. Telling someone who worries not to worry is like telling someone not to picture a pink elephant. It can almost do more harm than good. We’ve got to be able to give somebody more than that, Jesus, with all due respect.

And in fairness to Jesus, he did give us more than the admonition not to worry. He actually gave us two critical assurances. In some ways we could argue that the two main thrusts of him ministry were specifically designed to bring us more fully into the present. First, he focused relentlessly on forgiveness, on getting us to understand and believe that God had wiped clean the slate of our past. There is no question in my mind that one of the main reasons he was so focused on forgiveness in his ministry is so that people wouldn’t waste so much of their lives regretting and lamenting their past and their mistakes. Second, his desire to pull us more fully into the present had everything to do with the assurances he gave us about the certainty of our future with him, with his notion of heaven. When he told his disciples that his Father’s house had many mansions, many rooms for all of us, he did so in hopes that we wouldn’t waste another moment of our lives worrying about the future. He wanted us to know that our ticket had been punched, that our future was utterly secure. 

When we think about these two concurrent prongs of Jesus' ministry, it makes a lot of sense, doesn't it? It’s almost as if Jesus directed his entire ministry to assuring us about two things: 1) our complete and utter forgiveness – that God has forgiven our past and 2) that we have a place to which we’re going, a ticket that has already been punched for an eternal future with God.

And if we can accept and fully take in these two crucial assurances – about our past and about our future – maybe then we can open the door to a truly amazing present. For me, what has helped begin to put a dent in my piss-poor relationship with time and with my overly unruly mind, is various forms of mindfulness meditation, silent, prayerful practices designed to get me into the here and the now, to this exact moment. Breathing based practices have become huge for me – anything that gets me to focus on my in and out breaths. Why? Because we can only breathe in the present. Breathing is a physical, tangible activity. It is the single most present thing we have, God's most powerful drawing card, the most compelling physical gift God has given us. It’s a gift that says, “Toby, this is what you have, right here, right now.” 

Buddhist Mindfulness meditation is a powerful tool, as are so many of the ancient practices of monastic Christians, practices like centering prayer and the Jesus prayer. And this is what I’ve been doing on Tuesday nights with my little Living Vision community up in up in Petoskey, Michigan. I meet with a small group of people in a yoga studio – from any religion and no religion – to help us all learn how to use silent meditation forms and prayer to come more fully into the present, into the here and now. These ancient, silent practices can help anyone be more mindful in the moment.

I could never claim that I’ve got all this figured out in my life. I'm not even close to being able to say that I’ve finally and definitively escaped my past regrets and future worries. But I do know I’m on the road. I know that to be the most effective servant I can be, I need to be here - right here, right now. I know I need to show up for this moment, whenever and wherever this moment happens to be. May it be so for all of us!

Love, Relationships, and Impermanence - A Valentine's Day Reflection

 

On February 14, 2015, while I certainly do celebrate and give thanks for all the love in my life, what seems most on my heart this Valentine’s Day is the reality of love’s impermanence.

In so many ways the world tries to convince us that love is forever, but human love is oh-so-temporary and fragile. My mother, one of the most loving people many of us had ever known, died suddenly and tragically on her birthday in a car accident 15 years ago. In that single, icy moment we lost her. Her memory endures; her spirit is arguably still with us, along with her wisdom and legacy. But in most every tangible way, her love is gone; my relationship with her is no longer available to me. Death happens. Its arrival for all of us is an ultimate certainty, though its timing remains a mystery. And it is our human relationships that get caught in death's crossfire.

But it isn't only death that can rob us of loving relationship. When we fall in love romantically and begin to open and ultimately give our heart to another, we do so at tremendous risk. For while two people may fall in love together, walk through their courtship together, encounter the chapters and seasons of their lives together, perhaps even have children together, one of the two – acting unilaterally – can simply walk away from the relationship at any time, call it quits, taking the love away with him/her. This has always struck me as tremendously unfair, tragic, and even devastating. Romantic love’s utter impermanence continues to blow its cannon sized holes in my fragile heart well into my 50’s. And to be clear and fair here, I have been on both sides of this cannon. I have fired the shot and I have been its target.

But the loss of love that comes from a parent's death or from a romantic break up are child’s play when compared to the most unthinkable lost love of all. It's a possibility that haunts me every day, and far too many people I know have experienced it. I have but one and only one child, an amazing 7 year-old daughter. The love she has brought into my life and the love she has unleashed in me is beyond all measure. Every day, as I do my absolute best to love, nurture, protect, and celebrate her, I am aware that even she and her immense, incredible love are not permanent. I have no guarantees that she will be with me tomorrow, much less in 20 or 40 years. Children her age and younger die every day, every hour, every minute all over this fragile world, Car accidents and cancers, starvation and S.I.D.S., drones and drownings claim the lives of innocent children constantly. And what can we do about it? Nothing…

The impermanence of human love and human relationships is everywhere apparent. It is a defining characteristic of being human. And while our hearts resist this truth at every turn, we must, somehow, learn to live with it. Our minds must somehow come to grips with it too. Gratitude, it seems to me, is one very important part of how we do that. Being thankful and expressing our gratitude for those relationships we cherish absolutely lightens this load we carry around in the form of a deep, unsettling truth. 

Impermanence is knit tragically into the very fabric of our being, and though we try not to talk about it or acknowledge it, every now and then, something happens – perhaps in our own lives, in the life of a neighbor, or even on the evening news – that reminds us that none of our human relationships last forever, though the feelings and memories attached to them might.

I wish I could end this blog entry with a solution, some cyber inoculation against our innate human vulnerability where love is concerned. I grew up in the Christian tradition, which claims that God’s love is eternal and I believe that. The Apostle Paul wrote that "love never ends." Maybe not, but relationships sure do. And in those times, when a loved one is taken from us or simply walks away, faith's aphorisms provide little consolation.

I'm sure that to many readers, this reflection feels entirely negative and pessimistic, but that is neither its intention nor its spirit. I've come to believe that the most negative thing we can do is deny or resist the fundamental impermanence of our relationships, for in doing so we take them for granted and lose sight of their power in the here and now. Conversely, if we can come to grips with their impermanence and live in their somewhat shadowy light, there may be some profound gifts in store for us.

To be human is to live with what Pema Chodron calls “a certain groundlessness.” She and many of the great Buddhist teachers call us to sit with, accept, and even “lean into” this terrifying truth. That "leaning in" is what I am endeavoring to do even now on this Valentine's Day. And perhaps, just perhaps, if we have the courage to do that – to sit with and lean into the utter impermanence of human love and relationships - we will discover the profound beauty, goodness, and love that is ours in this one, single moment we call “now.”

                               “The past is history; the future’s a mystery.

                          Today is a gift, which is why we call it the present.”

A Mindful Messiah

Mindfulness is all over the news lately. On New Year’s night, the NBC Evening News  reported that several violence-ridden high schools are teaching mindfulness meditation to their students and seeing amazing results. Books about Mindfulness by people like Thich Nhat Hanh and Jon Kabit-Zinn are flying off the shelves. Even American business executives are experimenting with this Eastern spiritual discipline to bookend their workday.

Mindfulness has been defined as “maintaining a moment-by-moment awareness of our thoughts, feelings, bodily sensations, and surrounding environment.” (http://greatergood.berkeley.edu) I also like John Kabit-Zinn’s abbreviated definition of mindfulness as “presence of heart.”

While some Christians may consider Mindfulness a foreign concept, a discipline that seems more Buddhist or Hindu, and thus lying somehow outside the Christian framework, I would like to challenge that notion. I see Jesus as a Mindful Messiah.

Mindfulness, at its core, is about being fully present in the here and now. It is about tuning into one’s breathing and becoming completely aware of one’s body in space and noticing everything that is immediately before us. A mindful person is keenly aware of this moment and doesn’t want to miss any of its giftedness or possibilities. That strikes me as being exactly like Jesus.

I made this connection a number of years ago, while making a systematic study of the four gospels. I noticed that almost everything Jesus did was done on the way to doing something else. It was when Jesus and his disciples were on their way to Gerasa that the famed Gerasene Demoniac came from the tombs to accost Jesus, and Jesus healed him. It was while Jesus had crossed to the other side of the lake and began to address a large crowd, that Jairus, one of the synagogue leaders, fell at Jesus feet and pled for the life of his dying daughter, and  “Jesus went with him.” It was while Jesus was pulling the disciples away from the crowds to a quiet place that Jesus noted their hunger and said, “We must give them something to eat,” and the 5000 were fed. It was while Jesus and his followers were just entering Jericho that the blind beggar Bartimaeus cried out, and Jesus stopped to heal him.

In all these and dozens of other instances, Jesus was on his way some place to fulfill some purpose. But being fully present, aware and mindful of where he was, each and every step of the way, Jesus consistently responded to the moment, to the holy now. And to reinforce his way of mindfulness, he even focused on it in his parables.

In his famous Good Samaritan tale, Jesus includes two priests who were on their way to somewhere or something important. And when those priests encountered a beaten and bloodied man – right in front of their eyes – they, in their busy-ness and preoccupation, crossed to other side of the road and walked right passed him. It is as though those holy men were focused on the future - the meeting they were to attend, the sermon they were to preach. And in that preoccupied, future-focused, non-mindful state, they failed to assist their brother in need, the one who was right in front of them. But the Good Samaritan – the one who stopped, dressed his wounds, lifted him onto his own donkey, and carried him to the nearest inn – that man was on his way someplace too. He had people to see and things to do. But he was mindful, in the moment, open to the possibilities of the here and now. It’s not too much of a stretch to say that it was the mindfulness of that Samaritan that made him “good.”

In his famed Sermon on the Mount, one can see further evidence of Jesus’s teaching on mindfulness. “Don’t worry about your life, what you will eat or drink or what you will wear…Look at the birds of the air; they don’t sow or reap or store away in barns…Can any of you add a single hour to your life by worrying?...Therefore I tell you, do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.”

Centered, grounded, and mindful of every moment, Jesus walked through each and every day responding to what was immediately before him, possibilities that, like breath itself, come only in the holy and gifted now. Jesus was of such incredible use to God precisely because he was so uniquely present in each moment, so mindful.

Mindfulness is a much a Christian practice and virtue as it is a Buddhist and a Hindu one. If we want to be more like Jesus, we must learn to be mindful, to be fully engaged in what is immediately before us. May it be so.

P.S. - For a great 4 minute summary of Mindfulness from Thich Nhat Hanh, check out this address : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xD7i6VUOriI