This Place Called, "Here"

I invite you this morning to open your eyes, ears, hearts, and sacred imaginations to the present moment.  What do you see around you?  Go ahead and name aloud the paintings or pictures or furniture and furnishings that are around you.  Now what do you hear?  I hear the whirling woosh of the ceiling fan and a car engine revved up as it fires to life and the soft bark of my dog in response to the car driving away.  What do you smell?  I have the scent of coffee and cereal that I can still taste on the tip of my tongue.  Or may you have candle burning bright letting loose an aroma in the room. 

We all live in this place called, “Here” and the time called, “Now”.  The funny thing about time is that you can be physically present in one place and mentally as far away as the planet Pluto.  I can be standing right in front of someone, and my mind can be ruminating on a conversation I had two hours ago or worrying about something that might happen.  Oh, I can play the “Let’s imagine the worst-case scenario” with the best of them!

But the truth is all we know is this moment.  Our memories are not machines or mental file cabinets where we just retrieve perfectly preserved pieces of time.  One study conducted soon after September 11, 2001, had people write down where they were on that tragic day.  They wrote down their location, in their own handwriting.  A few years later, they were asked the same question.  Now if our mind was a computer, we would just access that memory and repeat it.  But what the researchers found was that people had told themselves another story.  Maybe they had merged their experience with another’s story or tended mix up the actual day with something that happened a week or month later.  Malcom Gladwell has done some great reporting on this.  See video above.

I say all of this to suggest what mindfulness and positive psychologists are trying to teach us ~ that there is only this present moment.  What we recall from the past is not as solid as we think, what we perceive about the future may or may not come true (although self-fulling prophecy can play a role).  So this moment right here is what we have.  This isn’t new, it is as old as the first book in the Bible we read this story:

Jacob came to a certain place and stayed there for the night, because the sun had set. Taking one of the stones of the place, he put it under his head and lay down in that place. ¹² And he dreamed that there was a stairway set up on the earth, the top of it reaching to heaven, and the angels of God were ascending and descending on it. ¹³ And the Lord stood beside him and said, “I am the Lord, the God of Abraham your father and the God of Isaac; the land on which you lie I will give to you and to your offspring, ¹⁴ and your offspring shall be like the dust of the earth, and you shall spread abroad to the west and to the east and to the north and to the south, and all the families of the earth shall be blessed in you and in your offspring. ¹⁵ Know that I am with you and will keep you wherever you go and will bring you back to this land, for I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you.” ¹⁶ Then Jacob woke from his sleep and said, “Surely the Lord is in this place—and I did not know it!” ¹⁷ And he was afraid and said, “How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.”

 

The power of place is where you are…the power of sensing God in this moment….the power of saying, “How awesome is here and now”…NOT because everything is perfect, but because God holds and enfolds us.  May this truth settle and sing and saturate your life this day and week.  Amen.