St George's Cathedral, Cape Town

Sermons by Sergio Milandri, St George's Cathedral, February 2004

We are our past
We are our future
We are our present

We are our present

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Good morning to you all. We’ve been looking at the last two weeks at how rich and full our past and our futures are and how they give us meaning and substance, how they carry all that we are and how they affect our experience of living, but today is probably the most important piece and that is, how do they affect our present moment? How do we live our present moment and what is in our present moment? It’s curious that in the English language, present is also a gift and it is good to remind ourselves that the present is indeed a gift. We are presented with this moment as a gift. What do we make of it? What is the quality of our moment to moment existence? How do we use each moment, how do we appreciate it, how do we defend it? We don’t often realise that we are actually expending ourselves as each moment unfolds, as if we were given a supply of moments to live our lives through and with each moment we are using them up.

Our lives are made up of a finite number of moments all strung together like a string of pearls. It would be interesting say, if we were each given R10 to go out and spend, to then come back tell how we spent it. It would be an actual spending and would help us to realise what we are actually spending ourselves on. It sounds a bit like the parable of the talents who were given to the servants and when the Master came back asked what they had done with their talents and I guess one day God will ask us, “What did you do with what I gave you? What did you do with your moments, did you sing, did you weep, did you live?" This same moment is given to all of us, no one has a benefit above others. We all have the same moment, it is our common bond, our inheritance, our shared moment. This is all we have, it is only now that we are alive, this is the only moment that we have to interact with each other. This is the only moment we have to meet with God, to be aware of God in our lives around us, in our moments. This moment is a symbol, it’s a piece of the bigger whole, a sample, you go to a material self and you cut a little piece off and you take it home and see what it looks like at home and if we could cut a piece of our lives off this moment to show us the way we live, like looking through a pinhole. As children we used to make a shoebox with a scene inside and make a pinhole and look through the hole to the landscape inside. Each moment is like a pinhole that we look into our lives and see what content, what substance, what horizon, what (manifest?) fills our lives, the pieces of the puzzle, each of which is necessary, however similar it is to other ones, because then the puzzle is complete. It is sad to say there are a few pieces missing in the puzzle, however big it is.

Some of us hang onto the more special moments, the more special pieces as if they are the moments of glory, the moments that we want to justify ourselves with, the moments we want to remember and say “My life is worth something because of that moment when I did this." But we are inclined to let the other moments slip away, the many less important ones, as if those are the only moments that count. Others of us are still waiting for the magic moment to happen, one day, the moment we’ve been waiting for when all will come together, when all will make sense and we will vindicate our whole existence and be happy, but as we all know, those moments are long in the waiting. I said in the last two talks that our past and our future can be the greatest thief of our present, they can draw us back to the past to relive happy moments or great moments or to fight things that were not right and there struggle and want to fix them, but we’re back in the past. Or we go to the future where we idealise and long for things to be better or different. If we are to live fully, we need to become aware of how we move through the moment and to guard its boundaries and guard its content and not let it slip through our fingers. We must become aware of the moment and notice the present, notice what is in it and what is not in it and what is needing our attention, what is drawing our focus. The past if it does draw us out, needs to be reflected on and resolved. It’s not to cut off the past and walk away from it. There’s no such thing, because we carry the past within us. We cannot walk away or sweep it under the carpet, but we do need to have it resolved and to become our gift.

So, if the past does put pressures on us, a good test is, when we remember things, to notice what emotions come up with them. If there’s pain, if we are drawn back into the difficult emotions that were present then, the chances are that we haven’t done our work of resolving that we need to do. We need to go back to that event and relive its feelings and allow them to touch us and as we feel those feelings to share them with Jesus, and through him, to have them made complete and whole. Whole in a sense that they are resolved and reincorporated in ourselves, not that we get rid of them or change them. When they have been felt through and prayed through they will change and no longer have those active affects on us, but they will become healthy memories. They may be sad memories, but memories nonetheless that we can in a way cherish, because they taught us compassion and long suffering and patience. So there is this quality about our memories that when they’re unfinished, we need to know that they are needing more work and when we’ve done the work, we can leave them and carry them as gifts, as medals.

Equally the future, when it has that affect of pulling us out of the moment and saying that tomorrow, when you have that deal or when you get that money or when you do that thing you will be happy, then we’re needing to come back to Jesus and say, why am I not trusting you in this moment? Jesus would say, “Listen to the birds, look at the lilies, they don’t sow, they don’t reap, and yet God’s given them such beauty and they’re here today and gone tomorrow, how much more you?" When we live for tomorrow because the present is intolerable, we’ve got out of touch with something that we are wanting to live into. Something of our fragility, something of our presence, something of the beauty of this moment is lost to us when we start eating up tomorrow’s resources because the present is inadequate. Again, we’re needing to sit with Jesus and let go of that. We don’t know tomorrow and if we eat tomorrow treats now, we will lose the surprise of tomorrow, it will never live up to our expectations and so we need to let tomorrow be there for tomorrow. If ever we are in doubt about the meaning of this moment, the content of this moment, if this moment becomes boring or dead or empty, if it feels directionless or meaningless or we ask what do we do with it, if it is heavy on our hands, we’ve lost the context of it. It’s this moment that is the hinge of the future and the past, it is this moment that connects all of who we are and when we sit down and perhaps don’t know what to do with it, or don’t know how to kill time (what a sad phrase, to kill time), we’ve lost something. When we switch on the television, not to rest because we’ve had a full day, but to avoid facing what to do with ourselves, we’re avoiding being present, being ourselves, and we lose our very being.

If ever we lose a sense of what it is this moment is for, let us remember that the whole meaning of our lives is to give life, and to sustain it. We do that by loving, the resources we have are to love and to equip our relationships and what we need to be doing in whatever moment, whatever form it takes, is to be improving our relationships. The one command Jesus left us with is that we love God, our neighbour and our self. But are we in fact doing that in our moment? Are we saying, we’ll love tomorrow, we’re too tired today. Love is something that only happens in the present. If I’m not loving now, I certainly won’t be loving tomorrow. Love either is or it isn’t and the person I am is either a loving person or not a loving person and it’s now that I need to be loving.

The gospel we read was of Jesus and the beatitudes, again the English is interesting, they are the BE-attitudes, the attitudes to being, “blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh," “blessed are you who hunger now, for you will be satisfied," "blessed are you who are aware now and responding now." Luke 6:17-26. Woe to you now who are locked in your riches and locked in your blindness. It is now that life is and that life is happening and here that we find that our moment is indeed that which we long for in our lives. There’s such a sweet tension to being fully present in the moment, because that is the most difficult aspect of being, but we can face who we are right now. That is the risk. It’s easier to say, when I’m this or when I’m that, if this could have been and that could have been and so to avoid facing ourselves. But the present moment presents us with a mirror and says, this is me now, this is who I am, these are my strengths, these are my weaknesses. How do I then live, how do I respond, how do I give of myself, how do I spend myself? This is the most precious thing that I have, to be here, and I can either deepen and enrich all that I love or I lose the very life that I have. May we be found to be fully present to God, to others and to ourselves in each moment so that we can be doing the work of loving, of living, of growing and of deepening our lives in God. Thank you very much. These talks will be on the website www.christianspirituality.co.za if you would like to look at them at some stage. It’s been a great pleasure and a privilege being with you these two weeks. Thanks very much.

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