Monday, February 22, 2010

The Future is Always Now

In the early 1980s I did the Erhard seminar training, EST, for short. It was there I had the phrase, "The present is successive moments of now." What I learned from that phrase was to "be here now.." Good grief, how 70s that sounds, but you know what...can you say that you are always present to the moment, every moment? That is what be here now means.

Where have I been? Growing, making renunciations, preparing myself to become a canonical hermit. You might wonder why? And the links listed have to serve as my answer. In future posts I will talk about my experiences with the renunciations as listed by John Cassian. Each is important and difficult. I do not expect this process to be easy, neither do I fear it. God has led me to this place, God will take care of it. As Julian of Norwich said, "All is well, All will be well, and All manner of things will be well."

What does EST have to do with this decision? It is in an effort to always be here now with Christ, in prayer, and remembering the needs of those for whom I pray. Writing will be an important part of my ministry and potentially of my livelihood. I ask your prayers for this wonderful adventure in my life.
Posted by Steve T at 7:36 PM

1 comments:

  1. The future breaks upon this very moment as I write this response, for you see, only free-flowing thoughts, and perhpas the Holy Spirit itself guides my words, I take little time to think about how or what I will say or what I will type. And that is precisely what "Being in the here, now" and in the "moment" is all about, is it not? Let us look back to that one monk who put Gethsemani on "map" of human consciousness so to speak some 40 plus years ago, and many more when you consider when Tom Merton (Fr. Louis) actually began his "approved" and encouraged writing within the monastery walls. We need to seek God, but we need to seek God in the quietness of that utter surrender to that of being here, now. And to be honest, achieving something as seemingly simple as that is painstakingly hard to do. For what does it mean to worship or to focus our spiritual energy on "God alone?" Does such infer the exclusion of Jesus, the Son and the Holy Spirit and the Triune ONE-ness of God? What does "God alone" imply for the simplistic and everyday believer who cannot distinguish between all that readily between the Triune Oneness and the individual personages of the Trinity? Rather, cannot we conclude that the Phrase "God Alone" encompasses the very persons and beings of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit while at the same time declaring and exaulting in the divine Oneness and Unity of their Being? This then should settle what it means when we instinctively utter "God Alone" and what we truly mean by it, for we are not simply saying that God is God is God alone, but that God is as much the Trinity as God is the Oneness of God's essence and being. And granted, this has nothing to do with responding to, or commenting on "The Future is Always Now" although I did sort of begin in that vein, the future is as we make it, and as we act upon it as we take the Gospel with us into the World. No doubt the Holy Spirit guides us, but a great deal of the onus rests upon us and our free will, and the decisions we have to make, and whether we make those decisions based on ethical and Biblical principles might make all the difference as to determining what type of people we genuinely are.
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