Wow! The depth of Spirit's riches and wisdom and knowledge! How unsearchable its decisions and how inscrutable its ways.
*Romans 11.33, Christian Scripture
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A woman was strolling through a meadow, contemplating nature. She came upon a field of pumpkins. A majestic, huge oak tree stood in the corner of the field. She sat under the oak tree, musing on the odd twists in nature that put tiny acorns on big branches and big pumpkins on tiny vines. She thought, "God blundered with Creation! He should have put tiny acorns on tiny vines and big pumpkins on big branches."
Getting sleepy, the woman stretched out for a nap. A few minutes after falling asleep, she was awakened by an acorn bouncing off her nose. Chuckling, she rubbed her nose and thought, "Possibly God was right, after all!"
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It is important to allow ourselves to move past opinions about how something should or could have been or be. "Moving past" does not mean not having opinions; it means not allowing your opinions to have you.
Coming back, again and again, to this moment is what we do in meditation. We open the hand of thought again and again. And opinions are only thought; we see them for what they are: insubstantial.
Our opinions, including judgmental thoughts, are like the first time I discovered the water mirage on a highway. We never got to the water, it was not there. So, our thoughts, our opinions.
All that is not illusion is. Clouds are clouds, and mountains are mountains. Rain is rain, and sunlight is sunlight. All we can live is. What is? Is. That is enough. No need to keep arguing with what is, clinging to wishing it were otherwise. That only leads to suffering.
We come into the moment and return when we forget it, abandoning ourselves to just this, so to life. We know through intimacy. Knowing life is intimacy with life. Intimacy with life is communing with life, not the stuff passing in and out of life. All the stuff distracts from intimacy with life and passes while life remains.
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In theistic religions, often one looks outside the self in accepting life as it is. To accept life as it is this moment is surrender to God, often referred to as trusting or yielding to Divine Providence, or Governance. The contemplative Christian idea of Sacrament of the Present Moment is seeing this moment as filled with Spirit and communicating Grace to us.
In consenting to this moment, then, one consents to God. In consenting to God, one is led to consent to this moment.
If one trusts God, the Infinite, for positive change, one can only do that from now, nowhere else. The now is the eternal moment, or eternity. If such change were to occur, it would still be this moment, for there is only this moment in God, the Eternal, the Is. Hence, the prayer for and the answer are now in Is. This one moment is filled with God, so filled with all potentiality: God is the Potentiality. All possible futures in relative time are eternally present in God, now. So, the changes are already present when the prayer is given.
Still, one can trust God without imaging God anthropomorphically or separate from creation or one's own true self. The idea God can fit within a way of living which does not objectify God and claim God acts on nature from without.
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Let us wed this one life wholeheartedly through the actuality of things as they are. This is the way of the Way. Spiritual practice is practice in things as they are. We practice pumpkins, acorns, branches, and vines. Now, is that not a wonderful practice?
*Brian's book, An Ache for Union: Poems on Oneness with God through Love, can be ordered through major online booksellers or the publisher AuthorHouse.
