The Sacrament of the Present Moment: this phrase, used by Jean Pierre de Caussade in his famous classic Self Abandonment to the Divine Providence, tells us that we have to be open to life in the present moment at all times. Abandon yourself to the present moment and all that it contains, let your mind be aware and clear and not clogged by debris that prevents you not merely thinking, but actually focusing properly. We know God when we are quiet and still, and we are open to his embrace. We do not know him when we are full of our own thoughts and worries of one type or another. The self-abandonment to the Divine Providence is openness to the present moment. This present moment may be a very pleasant moment, or it may be a very threatening one.
Sometimes unpleasant things happen to us out of the blue, and sometimes we are thrilled by the wonders of grace that come to us day by day and moment by moment. But one thing is certain; we have to steel ourselves to what is given to us at that particular moment, and learn from it. Self-abandonment to the Divine Providence means giving of ourselves fully to God as he shows himself to us now with all the glories at hand as well. Then we can begin to live as we ought to live, and thoughts of a merely egoistical level pale into the background and eventually dissolve into thin air.
The self-abandonment of which de Caussade spoke is giving of ourselves fully to God in the present moment. To be aware of him in the hush of quietness when there is no thought, no speculation of any type at all, only quietness and availability, is the way in which we know the presence of God. We cannot know God by thinking about him, as the passage in the Cloud of Unknowing has already reminded us: "By love may he be gotten and holden but by thought never."
But how do you love? - this is the problem here. If I tell you to start loving your neighbour, as indeed you will find prescribed both in the New and the Old Testaments, you will end up absolutely frustrated. Love cannot be manufactured or evoked. The more I try to love you, the more hypocritical my affection will appear. If I really want to love you - and I should certainly want to love everybody - I have to put myself at ease. Egoism has to go completely, and I have to be quiet before the essence of reality. Putting self before all else is a certain way of not knowing what love is about. But if I can begin to put self behind me, then love will come in front of me, and I can start to love, primarily myself, for we must love ourselves before we can love other people. Our love then goes to other people as well, as it grows in ourself, but until it is firmly rooted in ourself, it will remain unstable in other people.
Remember the first and second commandments: "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and with all thy soul and with all thy strength" (Deuteronomy 6.5) and the second which is like unto it; "Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself" (Leviticus 19.18). The love of God is extremely exalting, even if rather impossible for most of us to attain. The love of self seems so selfish that it almost has wrong connotations about it, but if we do not love ourselves, we cannot love our neighbour and we cannot love anybody else either. In fact, both are equally important. We should start by loving God and our neighbour, but we should end by loving ourselves and everybody else as well. Love is of universal sympathy and nobody can be outside its orbit if they are to do the work that God has prepared for them to do. Self-abandonment to Divine Providence, about which de Caussade writes, is basically giving ourselves and everyone else to God, but primarily ourselves. And when we have given ourselves to the Divine Providence, to the love of God, we will be shown the way to love our fellow creatures and also those whom we intuitively dislike.
Anyone involved in psychical studies will realize that there are some people who are not very pleasant, and we have to face the fact that in any of our lives there are moments when we ourselves are quite repulsive. This cannot in any way be obviated or expunged by pretending it does not really exist. What is there cannot be merely wished away. Ultimately, that which is unclean or unpleasant in your mind has to be dedicated to God in complete trust and quietness. Eventually you and that from which or whom you diverge may unite and form a common base. This is the only way in which you can begin to form a relationship with someone whom you intuitively dislike. The intuition may have had very good grounds. It may have been based on something very unpleasant in the past, perhaps long ago, but I would not for one moment advise that you should abandon it, but eventually it should be transcended.
This is the only way in which love can ultimately govern our universe; it cannot be done by an act of the will. The more you try to transcend it by pretending that it does not really exist, or that it is something which you ought to have outgrown long ago, the more it will not move one iota. But if you are quiet, something deeper than you will come and form a pleasant veil over the darkness. And soon light will appear and bring it all to the light. It is only through the light that the darkness is brought up to God and its noxious element ceases to worry you. While we try to escape from our own concerns and will not face our own problems, we cannot know God or our fellow creatures.
Self-knowledge is crucially important, and we should not be ashamed of ourselves if what we find is not particularly pleasant. The same applies to everybody else. None of us here is a particularly pleasant individual. There are saints amongst us undoubtedly; most of us are pretty ordinary folk, and a few are quite unpleasant, but in the end we all are children of God, and we can all be still and quiet and above all not cling on to the things of this world. Then we can move beyond distrust and into a state of rest and quietude. If I have a considerable amount of money or other possessions and I do not trust you, I will never be really easy in your company. If I had a secret which I did not trust you to keep and you knew it, again I would not be relaxed in your company.
But we should have no secrets, for all is of God and all that we have should be acknowledged of God as well. It is only then that we can be completely quiet and happy, but if we are trying to hide something from anyone, or trying to conceal our innermost thoughts, we will never really be at rest. This is not the way of spirituality. This is the way of inquietude and unrest without any semblance of love.
As long as I remember you as a person of ill repute, I will distrust you and get as far away from you as possible. When I remember you as a person of no conspicuous repute at all, I will simply dismiss you from my concern and not think too much about you. This does not get us very far on the path of positive relationship either.
But when I am able to remember you as a friend, then I can trust you. To be a friend does not necessarily require passionate love; it needs simply to trust a person and to be happy in their company. You can only do this when you have nothing to hide from a person and can be quiet in front of them. Then your doubt becomes one of faith because there is nothing to hide any more.
In fact, doubt and hiding come very close together in this scheme of understanding. The more I doubt, the more I will tend to hide; the more faith I have, the more I can reveal of myself to other people, and the less do I care whether they share my secrets or betray them to other people. It ultimately does not matter. The only thing that matters is to do my work properly and with as much love, caring, and solicitude as possible. Then, whether people like me or not becomes increasingly irrelevant. But if I have to put on a brave face and show myself to be superior to others, I can only know that I am really inferior, and in that state of inferiority, I will be in unhappiness and misery also. Therefore, self-abandonment to the Divine Providence is the only way of coming to a knowledge of God and a knowledge of his ways of working among us also. Remember always that nobody has ever seen God, and that God is known by his effect on our being rather than on any relationship that we have had on a level of sensation.
How do I know God? Certainly not by any outer manifestation, only by an inner change in my consciousness. That is the way that a mystic knows God. This is the way in which you may be able to explain God to an arrogant agnostic. They will never have seen God, because God is not visible. But they will see themselves in relationship to God, and what they see may not be at all pleasant. On the other hand, they may thank God when an act of tremendous grace occurs in their life, which changes the whole basis of their understanding of reality.
When a person who believed that they were mortally ill suddenly gets better, or someone in the throes of despair suddenly moves into a state of happiness again, they know the workings of God in their life, and that God is the God who is the creator of all things, particularly themselves through their misery into their strength and goodness. It is in this way that we know how God exists in our life and shows himself. He is indeed a living God, one who lives in us and through us; he lives in other people as well. He is no longer merely a figment of our imagination, but the very basis of our life through whom we can start to do the things that we ought to be doing and showing others what they ought to be doing also. Thus God is a living God, in that he produces life in the world, in us, and in all people.
Numerous people wonder whether the resurrection of Jesus actually occurred, and there are many doubters who feel that it may or may not have happened. In the end, nobody alive at present has seen the resurrection of Our Lord. You may or may not believe, according to your own feeling, but one thing is obvious: those who did know Jesus when he was alive, and met him afterwards in his resurrection form, were changed as individuals. That for me is the positive proof of the resurrection of Jesus. I am not nearly so convinced about the resurrection appearances as by his weak disciples being changed from doubting and fearful individuals to people full of joy and courage, and able to live a new life. That is the way that resurrection shows itself. And it is not only the resurrection of Jesus; it is the resurrection of all life. If I in my life can grow through doubt and unhappiness to a new understanding of reality, God in the form of the resurrected Christ is with me as well, and I can begin to live fully and bring that life to others also.
In other words, you do not need miracles to show you the way of resurrection. Indeed, miracles have often more than one mode of interpretation. It is the change in psyche of the individual that proves the resurrection, and that change can never ever be denied, because it is of the basis of reality. Only when we know this do we know the Lord is with us and that nothing in the world can separate him from us. Once you have known Jesus in this form, you know that he is always with you, and not only with you but with everyone else as well, and that through him a new life opens to the whole created universe. Now at last we begin to see what resurrection means in its fullness: not that I was dead and am now alive, but that the world was in a state of decay and has now grown into a new state of understanding of reality. This, in the form of the living Christ, is available to all people according to their own capacity to accept his new life.
If you do not want to believe in the resurrection, then you will not. There is certainly nothing that will force you to believe it. But if you are open spiritually, you will see more and more for yourself, and the evidence will grow in clarity and veracity. That is the way forward to an understanding of the mysteries of our faith; not through the eyes or the other senses, but through intuition; that same intuition that governs our knowledge of love when we are involved with people who are now dead and yet are closer to us than they ever were when they were still in our world.
I spoke about this, in Chapter 6, when I was thinking about how marvellous things occur through the enigma of God, and we are able to receive him in our state of present disillusionment. But the real God does not simply give us things; he gives us his presence so that we can be with him in one total universe; and one total Christ can take over the whole created universe, not only humans or even animals, but everything that exists, and then a new life comes to us and to everyone, as we begin to see how he works in our own life and how he changes us from glory to glory.
The Sacrament of the Present Moment finds its fruition at the moment of death, when we will confront the life we led on earth and have to come to terms with our various attitudes and attributes, while we were there. Now we are obliged to face our past life in terms of our present relationships. Destruction is the end of our physical bodies, and then we have to face our indeterminate future in an obscure after-life state. St Paul puts it thus in Galatians 6.7-8: "Make no mistake about this: God is not to be fooled; everyone reaps what he sows. If he sows in a field of his own spiritual nature, he will reap from it a harvest of corruption; but if he sows in a field of the Spirit he will reap from it a harvest of eternal life."
The physical body has a limited duration of life; this is why the manner in which we live in the present moment is so important; for what we do in even a moment may determine our future life and that of many other people also. I personally believe in the immortality of the soul, as part of one's personality, where one's moral judgements are made and one's sense of perfection in beauty, truth, and love emanate. But physical death and destruction of all that is beautiful in our lives are unavoidable. This has a final purpose; we must not cling on to any object or personal relationship, beautiful as it may be. God is our eternal home, where all that is beautiful and treasurable here prepares us for eating and drinking the body and blood of Christ, in his everlasting home. He is the Sacrament of the Present Moment, and in him all life is transfigured into an eternal sacrament. This is the Sacrament of the Present Moment in our lives.