Each Moment Matters

Today I had one of those awkward moments that most of will partake in at sometime in our lives of riding with a complete stranger in the elevator. This is happens quite often in my job since 1) I am a missionary and part of my job is meeting complete strangers (however I only have one degree of separation with all people due to my good friend Jesus)2) My office is at the top of a five story office building.

The conversation wasn't long and it wasn't really about anything of importance. I try to open it up by talking about how it is easy to forget the beautiful sunshine outside when we spend all day in the office building. The man concurred but instantly turned to reality that winter was not far away. I told him that I was moving out here from much closer places and I wasn't too worried "Beep" We had gone two floors and both parted to go our separate ways.

But being the kind of person that I am, I started to think about this encounter a little bit more and the situation that we find ourselves in each day. I got thinking about this man and his situation of not even thinking about enjoying the outdoors while the sun was shinning bright and it isn't too cold outside, but the fact that winter is almost here when fall has not quite started to bring sick feeling to my stomach like Christmas decoration in stories before Halloween has even commenced.

Lets step back in Philosophical history to a man by the name of Henri Heidegger. Heideggar was an existentialist and one of his primary principles was what he called authenticity and authenticity is the understanding of the experience of something in its present moment but seeing it as it is ordered toward death. That is a mouth full! Think about it this way. We come to know something, say moment, a ray of sunshine coming in from above the dances through the leaves of the trees and sprinkles down upon the locks of your hair and your fell the heat and your experience the sunshine, but don't just experience this, but understand that the experience will pass away to coldness and death! Now I am not proposing that this man in the elevator understood this philosophical principle or anything to do with Henri Heide-who?, but he has been effected by the the progressive thought of our culture and seemed to walk away without even an openess to taste the beauty of the sunshine this day.

Now, Heidegger may be dancing with some truths, but he not putting forth a true Christian view. The Christian view of experience is much more human. It is not something that just stays in our minds and hasn't be effected by the past and won't effect the future. In fact in every moment we are able to reach the heights of experience, to transcend the material into the immaterial through our thoughts and ideas, and maybe even a conversation with the highest of immaterial beings, God! Now let me take a step back, what do I mean by material, I mean things that you can sense through taste, hearing, smell, touch, and see! But we can't see our thought, we can't see our ideas, but we have these immaterial thoughts all the time. And it is proof that they are immaterial because the more we learn, our heads don't get bigger, but it seems there is a spiritual element to knowledge, meaning that it is can't be measured by pure matter or material things.

This must be why St Paul referred to faith with the Greek word pistis , which mean knowledge. Faith is a knowledge of God. It is this very faith that gives us awe at every moment that God is our midst, no matter if we are experiencing a sunrise, a traffic jam, an opera, a bad meeting, or on our knees in the Church. Knowledge of God, is faith! But this faith is not separated from our reason like make of the followers of Luther started to proclaim (and even Luther himself). There is no faith without reason. Think about it, what do we have faith in...well maybe you will say Jesus, but where do you get the understanding that Jesus is who he is...the Scriptures right (and Tradition for those Catholics out there, like myself, but you cannot trust revelation without reason, because Jesus did not try to bypass into our minds a thought of him, but entered the drama of human history, so that we can say we St. John "That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon and touched with our hands, concerning the word of life." (1 John 1:1) The revelation of Jesus in the incarnation becomes the point where knowledge becomes faith. This faith in the God-Man shapes all of human history and each moment of our lives.

We are called to live in the present moment and the present moment must be lived with God. There are so many temptations to just be temporary or just pass through or get by in daily life that we forgot to see God acting in our lives through its common events and the people we meet, the Word of God in Scripture and the Holy Spirit speaking in our hearts. This is the true gift of wisdom! Today, meditate how God is working in your life. Do you only see things ordered to death? Or do you see the connection between death and life? What will you experience today that will dive you in deeper to the eternal hope of glory with God the father!

I close with the words from a Carmelite monk who writes in a book named Divine Intimacy:

The gift of wisdom leads us to peace: the interior peace of the soul who, having tasted God, gives itself to Him without reserve, in complete surrender to His divine will; the serene peace of one who, seeing God in all things, accepts the hardships of life without being disturbed, adoring God's providence in all.