Your life is like a series of rooms connected by the hall of Time. Behind you stretches a long line of past places, rooms you’ve lived and loved in, rooms you’ve suffered and rejoiced in, some you would give everything to reenter, others you would give everything not to reenter, none of which you can reenter. Before you, the hallway branches in a hundred directions, presenting a parade of rooms you might move through, some you plan to get into, others you desperately want to avoid, all of them hazy and uncertain.
In this series of rooms, the only one you can live in is now. And yet, if you’re anything like me, you often try to live anywhere but the present. I tried to capture the power of this absurd impulse in a poem:
The door is cracked to elsewhen,
Ajar and wooing you astray
With heaps of golden oncewhens
And dreams that never stay.
Recall the vault of past good,
But beware its siren song,
Which lures from the Here and Now
With memories embalmed.
Lotus Eaters know too well
Those long-fondled treasures.
Leave them for the sunny isle
Of living, present Pleasures.
The future seems a canvas blank
On which to scrawl my will,
A fiction I would dwell in,
If Time’s winds were ever still,
But only Now is sacramental,
Where forever meets my story;
This Moment is a burning bush,
A Gift of grace and glory.
Like stone, the past is petrified;
The future flits away.
But in the present of the Present,
God draws near Today.
If we want to truly live, we must practice the discipline of being present. The past is a trap. For now, the future is a fiction. God only presents us with the present.
The Door to Elsewhen
Why is the past so attractive to us? Why do we have whole industries built around the lure of nostalgia? Why does Google Photos house over nine trillion images of memories embalmed? Surely in part because the past is familiar to us. We know it; we’ve been there. We’ve lived in those rooms. They smell like childhood; they’re packed with trophies; they’re full of memories of God-given pleasures. We were thinner then, or prettier, or healthier, or more spiritual, or had more time . . . or . . . or . . .
Many of us spend our whole lives banging our heads against those doors, trying to lay hands on those heaps of golden oncewhens. We schedule class reunions, scroll through old pictures, hoard mementos of these long-fondled treasures. Like the Lotus Eaters in The Odyssey, we can become so intoxicated by the past that we don’t live in the present. Or like Miss Havisham from Great Expectations, we can set all our clocks to one immovable moment and rot away in the morass of “what if.”
We often want the present to be what it used to be, but a river is never the same twice. Once we’ve crossed the threshold of those rooms, we can’t go back. We can see but never touch, remember but never reenter. Of course, we must heed God’s relentless command to recall the vault of past good, but only so the memory can affect how we live in the present, inspiring faith, kindling courage, ruining us to the allures of sin. God does not promise to give back the past. He has too many other good things to give, too many other blessings to bestow, too many other merciful hardships for us to endure.
Besides, the past is seldom as good as its siren song makes it out to be. Solomon cautions us, “Say not, ‘Why were the former days better than these?’ For it is not from wisdom that you ask this” (Ecclesiastes 7:10). Often, “the glory days” were just as perplexing, just as full of hardship, just as baffling as these days, but what we experience as a whisper, memory replays as a shout. Wisdom rejects this naive nostalgia, knowing that providence weaves the threads of life together so that each stitch and knot has a fitting place, beautiful in one particular time (Ecclesiastes 3:11).
Solomon warns about the past because he knows there is no better way to spoil living, present Pleasures than to put them in the dock with the past as judge and jury. Too often, we reject the goods God wants to give us Here and Now because we reach to have the ones he gave us then. When our hands hold the past with white knuckles, we can’t receive God’s new-every-morning mercies. C.S. Lewis flags the dangers of this lust for encore:
On every level of our life — in our religious experience, in our gastronomic, erotic, aesthetic, and social experience — we are always harking back to some occasion which seemed to us to reach perfection, setting that up as a norm, and depreciating all other occasions by comparison. But these other occasions, I now suspect, are often full of their own new blessings if only we would lay ourselves open to it. God shows us a new facet of the glory, and we refuse to look at it because we’re still looking for the old one. (Letters to Malcolm, 34)
Or as Solomon says, “Better is the sight of the eyes than the wandering of the appetite” (Ecclesiastes 6:9). If we are not willing to let the past be the past, to let yesterday’s blessings become faith-fueling memories and not embalmed mummies, we will never learn to live the abundant life our Lord wants to give us today.
A Fiction Yet to Be
The endless rooms of the future also prove unfit to dwell in. In fact, in many ways, they are worse. At least the past has solidity. The way is shut, but we know what happened. But the future is a fiction. For a temporal creature like man (it surely is very different for God), the future is a mirage: lovely to look at, impossible to touch; always coming, never arriving. Even eternity (with God or without) we will experience as a succession of present moments. The future seems a canvas blank, on which to scrawl my will, but no matter how hard I chase after it, Time’s winds keep it flitting down the path just out of reach.
There are, of course, fitting ways to think about the future. God often calls our attention to what he promises to do in the days to come. We should long for the time when we will see him face to face and enjoy being present in his presence forever. And sometimes it is our present duty to plan for the morrow. But we can no more live in the future than we can the past. Pascal issues a devastating warning to anyone who tries:
Let each of us examine his thoughts; he will find them wholly concerned with the past or the future. We almost never think of the present, and if we do think of it, it is only to see what light it throws on our plans for the future. . . . Thus we never actually live, but [only] hope to live, and since we are always planning how to be happy, it is inevitable that we should never be so. (Pensees, 36)
Scheming to be happy in God is not the same as being happy in God. Hoping to live is not the same as living. Plotting out the rooms to come is not the same as abiding. Often, the future is merely a distraction from the present duty or pleasure. As Screwtape points out, “[God] wants men to be concerned with what they do; our business is to keep them thinking about what will happen to them” (The Screwtape Letters, 34).
But there’s a darker side to the future than mere distraction because sin thrives on the fiction of the future. Sin’s promises (which it never keeps in the present) depend on a fanciful time to come. Screwtape again: “Nearly all vices are rooted in the future. Gratitude looks to the past and love to the present; fear, avarice, lust, and ambition look ahead” (77). Sin offers dreams that never stay.
Satan loves a man who tries to live in elsewhen — a fool whose eyes are on the distant horizon (Proverbs 17:24) — because you can’t act in the future (or the past). But his minions fear a man who truly lives in the present “because there, and there alone, all duty, all grace, all knowledge, and all pleasure dwell” (79).
The Present of the Present
Your life is a series of rooms. But the only one you can live in is Now — This Moment. We buck against these temporal limits by grubbing up the past or trying to impose our will on the future, but wisdom teaches us to embrace how God designed us. Now is the only room he gives us in which to be holy and happy.
If you want to be holy now, you must be wholly now. All of our God-given duties impinge on the present. The past is no help. No amount of past faithfulness will keep you from sin (think of David). No amount of past wisdom will keep you from being a fool (think of Solomon). No past experiences of spiritual mountaintops will keep you in the faith (think of Judas). And the future is still a fiction that will have its own highs and lows (Matthew 6:34). We do or don’t do, sin or don’t sin Now.
Only Now is sacramental; God gives grace only for the current cross. Thus, our King teaches us to pray, “Give us this day our daily bread” (Matthew 6:11). Like manna, yesterday’s stock is gone, and you cannot hoard any for tomorrow. His mercies are new every morning. Reader, what does God expect of you today? That’s what he’ll fit you for.
And as Pascal points out, now is the time to be happy in God. This Moment is a burning bush. God invites us to enjoy his presents and experience his presence in the present. After wrestling with how fast the past flees and how uncertain the future is, Solomon concludes,
Behold, what I have seen to be good and fitting is to eat and drink and find enjoyment in all the toil with which one toils under the sun the few days of his life that God has given him, for this is his lot. Everyone also to whom God has given wealth and possessions and power to enjoy them, and to accept his lot and rejoice in his toil — this is the gift of God. For he will not much remember the days of his life because God keeps him occupied with joy in his heart. (Ecclesiastes 5:18–20)
Solomon shifts our attention from the products of our work (either anticipated in the future or hoarded up in the past) to the process of our work. Only in the present process — “enjoyment in all the toil” — does God keep man “occupied with joy in his heart.”
If you want to be happy and holy and truly live, learn the discipline of being present. Let the past go; let the future worry about itself. Put down your phone; lift up your eyes. There’s no better (or other) time than now to attend to God and this Gift of grace and glory. This is our lot.
Like stone, the past is petrified;
The future flits away.
But in the present of the Present,
God draws near Today.
Desiring God