A Contemplative Moment

The Sunday group that I belong to is currently reading "A Contemplative Life," by Joel Goldsmith and the question was posed, does anyone live a contemplative life? A contemplative life defined by Goldsmith is, I am consciously one with God, I am instantaneously one within the good necessary for my experience. The unfoldment of scriptural truth is, “I and my Father are one.” The initial answer from several was no, it cannot be achieved. The initial look at the question may lure you into thinking no one does, as we may think it refers to all of the time. The question posed does not state all of the time, and so in reply, the answer is "yes" we do for brief instances, fleeting moments. And as we mature into our spiritual growth, we start having longer fleeting instances.

One of the real issues is that in this US culture, we think or expect it to happen at the moment we envision it or desire it. We have Wendy's, McDonalds, drive thru coffee dispensers, and just by slowing down to go thru a drive thru, we do get whatever super sized we want at that instant. And off we zoom, with an eye on the time.

We have not learned patience, and not really let go, as we still have an expectation tied to those brief instances. We WANT a spiritual life and a contemplative life now! We want that fleeting moment all of the time, now, not years from now. This culture has a focus on time, and possibly one of the reasons is that this country is a young country. The other part may be our Puritan ancestors coming over on the Mayflower and engraining into all of us not to waste time. We do not see buildings, or history beyond maybe three to four hundred years old. In other parts of the world, buildings, monuments, and generations of tombstones of family members are within walking distance, and are thousands of years old. Those cultures also seem to be not as wired into "what time is it" as we are.

So we keep running, and running as the following poem speaks of.

“Now I become Myself” by May Sarton

Now I become myself. It's taken
Time, many years and places;
I have been dissolved and shaken,
Worn other people's faces,
Run madly, as if Time were there,
Terribly old, crying a warning,
"Hurry, you will be dead before--"
(What? Before you reach the morning?
Or the end of the poem is clear?
Or love safe in the walled city?)
Now to stand still, to be here,
Feel my own weight and density!
The black shadow on the paper
Is my hand; the shadow of a word
As thought shapes the shaper
Falls heavy on the page, is heard.
All fuses now, falls into place
From wish to action, word to silence,
My work, my love, my time, my face
Gathered into one intense
Gesture of growing like a plant.
As slowly as the ripening fruit
Fertile, detached, and always spent,
Falls but does not exhaust the root,
So all the poem is, can give,
Grows in me to become the song,
Made so and rooted by love.
Now there is time and Time is young.
O, in this single hour I live
All of myself and do not move.
I, the pursued, who madly ran,
Stand still, stand still, and stop the sun!

We do not take the time to understand, to reclaim our lost self, and see the sun stand still. Have you noticed that when we have stop running, we then notice that time is irrelevant, and the only relevancy is seeing and being love? It is this moment that counts, as this is the only moment we really have. We have only now, only this single eternal moment opening and unfolding before us day and night. I have noticed that for me, when the sun stops, I am being of service in some way to someone. I am living my life thru love.

As Jack Kornfield writes in “A Path with Heart”

“Each state we encounter will succumb to the next. There is no way to avoid the transitions of our life. The chief means of entering them gracefully is to practice them mindfully over and over again. It is like learning to ride a horse: over and over again walking, trotting, cantering, over smooth and rough terrain, mounting and dismounting, starting and stopping, until it becomes possible for us to move through life in a graceful conscious way. In moving through the difficult stages of our lives, we can learn to trust our heart to these cycles and their unfolding as surely as we can trust roots to go down and leaves to push up through the earth in our garden We can trust each petal of a flower will open in the right order from outside to inside. We can trust that whatever calls our attention to practice – our body, our personal history, the community around us – in or out or retreat, it will bring to us what we need to live fully and genuinely in the timeless here and now."

Namaste