"The music of what is happening can be heard only in the present moment, right now, right here.
"....To pitch a tent in the wilderness of Nowhere (now/here)...is an act of radical trust--trust that God can be encountered at no other time and in no other place than the present moment.
"To stand stubbornly in Nowhere; rejecting the restlessness that urges us to move on, silencing the voices that entice us into tomorrow, and blowing off the demonic whisper, 'Look busy--Jesus is coming,' is an act of unflappable trust in the presence of God, who dwells only in the unreduced immediacy of what Martin Buber called the 'lived concrete.'
"There is only now.
"Being in the now removes us from endless and fruitless self-analysis. ...[I]n the absence of self-observation, guilt and shame mysteriously disappear. Removed from the sphere of our feelings, thoughts, and analyses, we are free to hear the music of what is happening. Lost in Nowhere, we are found in the infinity of the eternal Now.
"Quite often I find myself dissatisfied with living in Nowhere. Preferring agony or ecstasy to the ordinary and mundane, I try to pump up each moment with gaudy significance.
"[But] It is only through immersion in the ordinary--the apparently empty, trivial, and meaningless experiences of a routine day--that Life is encountered and lived. Real living is not about words, concepts, and abstractions but about experience of who or what is immediately before us."
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The above are excerpts from Chapter 11 of the book Ruthless Trust by Brendan Manning. We recently finished reading and discussing this book at my women's Bible study (a group I've been a part of for about 11 years or so.) Of all the books we've read in our time of meeting together, I believe The Shack and this book have been the stand-outs for me. This is the first book I've read by Brendan Manning, and I hope to read more.
I so respect an honest writer and pilgrim. Someone who describes the essence of the human and Christian experience. Who doesn't try to gloss over the absurdities in life. Who doesn't try to stuff God into a church building or keep Him confined in the physical words of the Bible like a genie in a lamp.
We must let God do His own confining...which He ultimately and astonishingly did in Jesus the man, the Christ...and which I believe He does through moment by moment revelation of Himself.
God is simultaneously willingly confining Himself to our perceptual capacity while also stretching and even exploding the perceived barriers of our world and experience at any and every moment that we are open. Paradoxically, beautifully, God's self-imposed confinement is our tremendous enlargement, our escape. He seems to use whatever means at hand to get to us. If we can stop and be. If we can dwell in this moment, and let it be whatever it is. Not trying to manipulate it because of guilt, expectations (from ourselves and others), perfectionism, what others think, and on and on. We are after all, human beings. Why do we resist the way God made us?
How on earth do we be right now and here? It seems too hard and too easy. It seems a cop-out. It seems like a justification for not doing all that we think we should be busily doing as a Christian. (OK, using any excuse to justify not obeying God is wrong. But even this statement is open to discussion in how one defines "obedience to God". We should probably stick with what Christ said, "Love the Lord your God and your neighbor as yourself" (Matthew 22:37-40, Luke 10:27). Everything else falls within or is subservient to these two commandments). Even as Christians who profess belief in God's amazing grace...still...we think we must do SOMETHING to earn that baffling grace. We must perform. We must do. We are lousy gift receivers. It just can't be real that we simply say thank you and bask in being loved by Love Incarnate. Learning to be in the here and now starts with a trust that we are really loved, not because of ANYTHING we do, but simply because we exist, because we are, because of God.
Sadly, yet very humanly, a big part of our resistance to living in now and here--Nowhere--is that we don't really believe the happy ending to the story of human existence. We don't believe it; we don't trust that God actually cares. Distracted and befuddled by the frenetic hub-bub and pain of our past and debilitating worry about our future, we are incredulous that God is there, in eternity, in all of his glory...and yet here in this earthly moment in all of His Love. Caring. And loving us. That all of our moments of dwelling in the wilderness of Nowhere will culminate in the Moment Eternal in the high country of Everywhere with the Unknowable, Knowable King of Love.
The too wonderful, crazy, irrational truth is...God is here in this excruciatingly mundane, bleak, ordinary moment. We can not confine Him. But He willingly and lovingly chooses to confine and condense Himself extreme into our ordinary everyday. To infuse our stark life landscape with His heaven. To meet with us. To be with us. To Love us.
We can only hear His music right now, right here.
