Trying to be here
Chris Gleeson sj
Earlier this year, Bill Sultmann, Director of the Edmund Rice Network in Brisbane,
generously provided me with several edifying CDs on the Trinity. They contained
a series of meaty talks by well known American Franciscan priest, Richard Rohr,
which vied for my attention as I wrestled each day with the traffic to and from
my office at Banyo. How you wrestle is who you are.
I have now passed on these CD’s to Bernie Miles, Director of the Campion
Centre of Ignatian Spirituality in Melbourne, who is engaged in a similar daily
wrestle on her way to work from once rustic Pakenham. The car can be a place
to counsel captive children, a means of escape from same, even a place for prayer
and reflection when road rage bristles all around us. Such time can give wings
to the soul.
When beginning several of his talks, Richard Rohr challenges his audience with
the seemingly unremarkable words: ‘Try to be here’. This is the biggest
challenge his listeners will face all day.
After all, it is not an easy task to leave behind the worries of the previous
hour or two, the squabbles of the last thirty minutes, the excitement of some
event to come. Yet God is to be found only in the present—right where we
are—and we don’t need to look anywhere else. Quoting the German theologian,
Karl Rahner, Richard Rohr says, ‘What the Incarnation is saying is that
henceforward God is exactly where we are and only there is he to be found’.
God is simply right where we are—which, of course, is why God is so difficult
to find. We are always looking elsewhere. Benedictine author Joan Chittister
writes beautifully about this:
‘God is not in the whirlwind, not in blustering and show, Scripture teaches
us. God is in the breeze, in the very atmosphere around us, in the little things
that shape our lives. God is in the contradictions that assail us, in the circumstances
that challenge us, in the attitudes that impel us, in the motives that drive
us, in the life goals that demonstrate our real aspirations, in the burdens that
wear us down, in the actions that give witness to the values in our hearts. God
is in the stuff of life, not in the airy fairy of fertile imaginations bent on
the pursuit of the preternatural. God is where we are, including in the very
weaknesses that vie for our souls’ (in How Can I Find God? Edited
by James Martin).
Two years ago, exhausted by the tedium of annual conferences on bureaucratic
compliance with government legislation, a group of Catholic school principals
asked me to take a very different tack and give them a retreat on the theme ‘Reclaiming
our spiritual selves—the art of coming home’. This is the art of
trying to be here, to be present to ourselves and to God.
Surprisingly, a bumper sticker I saw recently encapsulated this very well: ‘You
are a child of God. Please call home’. Home is certainly where the heart
is, and prayer enables us to come home to ourselves. Homelessness can be a spiritual
disease too.
This year we seem to have been talking and thinking a good deal about dance. ‘Dancing
with the Stars’ has been a very popular television program, so it was interesting
to hear Richard Rohr describe the Trinity as the Dance of God. For many centuries
Hindu India has developed a beautiful image to describe the relationship between
God and his creation. They talk about God ‘dancing’ his creation.
God is the Dancer, and God’s creation is the Dance. While the dance is
different from the dancer, it has no existence apart from him.
In Gift from the Sea, Ann Morrow Lindbergh likens a good relationship
to a good dance:
‘Lightness of touch and living in the moment are intertwined. One cannot
dance well unless one is completely in time with the music, not leaning back
to the last step or pressing forward to the next one, but poised directly on
the present step as it comes. Perfect poise on the beat is what gives good dancing
its sense of ease, of timelessness, of the eternal.’
Living in the moment is ‘trying to be here’, and this is not easy.
Someone said once that getting into the present is like threading a needle. We
spend a good deal of time wishing our life away, hoping to be elsewhere and otherwise.
I like the postcard which says cleverly, ‘Having a wonderful time. Wish
I were here’.
Those spiritual athletes who play golf, or strive to do so, could understand
Australian champion Stuart Appleby claiming in 2004: ‘Staying in the present
is the secret to playing really good golf’. Indeed, after celebrating the
8.15 Mass in the Xavier College chapel one morning, I found in the pews a list
of quotations—the remnants of what appeared to be a thoughtful religious
education class on prayer. I was struck by the words, ‘Stay in the moment.
That is where the Invisible Lover is, as close as your breath’.
Trying to be here, living in the present moment, has much to commend it. It is
not the only place where we can find God, but heaven is to be discovered here
too. Let me conclude with a portion of Joan Chittister’s fine book, In
Search of Belief:
‘Once we turn away from childish notions of heaven, we find it where it
has always been—inside ourselves. Because God is, heaven is—like
God—everywhere.
‘A disappointed disciple, the Talmud teaches, seeing studious rabbis pouring
over the Torah in a plain anteroom of heaven, asks of the angel who is conducting
him through paradise, “Are those sages in heaven?” And the angel
answers him, “Oh, no, friend. The sages are not in heaven. Heaven is in
the sages”.
‘Try to be here—it is worth trying.’
