September 2003 (Vol. XVI, No. 8)
BLESSINGS, dear friends! Welcome to a new season ... a time for letting go like the falling leaves of authumn ... a time to simplify, to pause in the silence of deep prayer and ask for guidance: i.e., "How would You have me best use the days of this season to Serve in your Dream for our world?" Then, listen for a word, Divine Hints that may surprise you ... and, trust, trust that you will live into the answer to your request as you hold the question in your heart.
Silence is making-friends-with-time. It does not fight it or waste it; it refuses to run after it. Silence floats free of time, letting the pattern of the moments unfold at its own pace... In silence we break the hold time has on us, and accept in practice that our true home is in eternity.
It's a curious paradox in this life that change is a constant, dependable, and unchanging fact. But when we try to control the moment by denying what is so, we have lost the moment to the past or the future. Trying to alter the moment steals it from us. If we want fruitful change in our lives, we have to move through each moment, experiencing its wholeness, savoring what it has to offer, noticing where we are stuck, and in the process maintain an intimate contact with our deepest sense of self.
They are not long
These days to be
But a taste of eternity.
In each hour,
There is the power
Of a Now
That stretches timeless
In Its core
And knows eternity
Be not more.
We nee to "slow down to a human tempo" and experience time as it was meant to be experienced. We already live in "the fullness of time," and we must give ourselves a chance to realize that we have what we seek. Our hearts and flesh cry out for the living God, Who IS here, right now, among us if we but receive that Divine Presence. The call to take time to be holy is a call to integrate prayer and life, for they are, in fact, one. The call is to live as if all time were Holy time. So, I rejoice to announce to you, it is!
When we accept each moment as a new opportunity for fulfilling our purpose, we are always present, always succeeding, always changing the world for the better. And we are always HERE ... NOW.
Heaven bestows, yet wemust receive.
For what has happened, I give thanks.
For what is happening, I send praise.
For what is to happen, I have faith.
Time is a regulating providence, giving us the chance to make our world at one with the World of God.
I am done with great things
And big things, great institutions
And big success, and I am for those
Tiny invisible molecular moral
Forces that work from individual
To individual, creeping through
The crannies of the world like
So many rootlets, or like the
Capillary oozing of water,
Yet which, if you give them Time
Will rend the hardest monuments
Of our pride.
The destination of human time is death. Eternal time is unbroken presence.
The field of space and time is invisible, but in that space and time is the conscious awareness of the mind of the universe. Within it are mystical experience an high loving. The cosmos is being created in its entirety every eco-second. We are working with God in a process of coevolution.
The spiritual life can only be lived in the present moment, in the now. All the great religious traditions insist upon this simple but difficult truth. When we go rushing ahead into the future or shrinking back into the past, we miss the hand of God, which can only touch us in the now.
To open to the sense, to become really conscious, you have to drop out of the future and the past and remain for a time in what T. S. Eliot called "the still point of the turning world" — the present. The only true reality is the present.
Our relationship to time has become corrupted because we allow ourselves very little experience of the TIMEless. We speak continuously of SAVING time, but time in it richness is most often lost to us when we are busy without relief. We speak of STEALING time as if it no longer belonged to us We speak of NEEDING time as if it wasn't around us already in every moment. We want to MAKE time for ourselves as if it were in our power to o so. Time is the conversation with absence and visitation, the frontier between ourselves and those we love; the hours become ripe with happening only when we are attentive, patient, and present.