Faith and the present moment
Great faith is a kind of emptiness. It is trusting in the goodness of God to such a degree that one is able to abandon all things to Him. It is to give up all plans, loves, ambitions, even one’s very understanding of oneself, and to cast all these things into the infinite abyss of the benevolence of God.
It is to become like little children.
It is to live always in the present. Whenever we exit the present, we encounter our selves, our plans, our relations to all things, our attachments. Yet in faith these are to be cast into God, consumed in His great fire and emptiness.
“The present is the meeting place between man and God. Outside of the present, we only meet ourselves, or, more correctly, a counterfeit of ourselves: our disappointments, dreams, and illusions.”
Fr. Wilfred Stinissen O.C.D. - Eternity in the Midst of Time
To have faith and to live in the present is to trust that God will provide all the things we need in each moment. Even the right actions we should perform, the right ideas, the right things to say. As Meister Eckhart said, we lose even the place within us which God is to act - rather, He Himself is the place of His own action, and “we” are lost in Him.
“If it be the case that man is free of all created things and of God and of himself, and if it also be that God may find place in him in which to work, then I say that so long as that is in man, he is not poor with the most intimate poverty. […] Poverty of spirit is for a man to keep so free of God and of all his works that if God wishes to work in the soul, he himself is the place in which he wants to work; and that he will gladly do.”
Meister Eckhart - Sermon: Beati pauperes spiritu
Eckhart in the above passage speaks in his usual daring way. It should be pointed out that when he speaks of being free of “God”, he is referring to the standard apophatic mystical way - that is, eventually one must put away concepts of “God” and rather experience God Himself, which is darkness to the intellect.
Eckhart’s point in the above is that, so long as there is a kind of “centre”, an ego or self, in the person then this is not the deepest poverty of spirit available to a person. We have not yet returned to the childhood innocence of the garden.
We are still eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, where we judge all things as good or bad with respect to this “centre”, this ego-self. What is “good” is good for “me”, what is “bad” is what is bad for “me”. Yet this is illusory, our sense of self, this ego, is simply a recurring pattern of thoughts and impressions, with no great reality of its own. It is not our true self grounded in God, which accepts all things in perfect faith.
According to Eckhart, God wants us to be a wide open space, or rather, God wants us to be dissolved into a kind of emptiness, in which he then creates a space for himself to act. To dwell in the present moment, letting go of all notions of self, all thoughts, clinging and plans - to lose this “centre” in the darkness of faith - that is true poverty of spirit, true faith.
Then there is just light-footed joy and spontaneity. Actions without the actor. Love loving in the eternal now.