In the now, we could experience the beauty and peace of the now, the generosity and grace of God's gift of time, the sweet attentiveness of ministering angels working behind the scenes, the security of the marvellous order and predictability of the universe, and sense God's Presence in Whom we live and move and have our being.
Instead of knowing God, we play God and secretly judge the mistakes and shortcomings of others; then we cater to them and use them to forgive us, reassure us, and comfort us to take away pain and guilt. Some of our methods are sophisticated and others are crude. But the misuse of people and nature only increases our guilt.
Of course, when we were little kids we lived in the now all the time (although much of such time was also spent in our imagination). Little kids take delight and joy in everything around them. They experience the moment. Their imaginative life is innocent and God wants them to spend a lot of time playing and pretending.
But when we start to get older, we miss the joy of the present and instead dwell in the imagination in an unhealthy way. No longer is our thought life based in innocence and the joy of discovery. The adult who is lost between his ears is hiding there. When TV and trivia don't hold the attention and fill the mind, the only escape from seeing what a failure they have is in thinking.
Having failed in reality, he or she relives the past and worries about the future. Thus thinking does a double duty of providing escape, and at the same time the illusive but futile hope of rearranging the past to suit the ego better or scheming how to get out of one mess or another.
A young person has pipe dreams, but the older person has worries. What has happened is trauma--the trauma of sin and failure--and the memories are trauma based. The worries and scheming are based in faithlessness, and the worries are based in fear--fear of failing again.
You see, our real failure is not so much how we squandered money, missed some opportunity, or ruined our health or relationships (though there are usually plenty of these, though the ego manages to blame someone else), our real failure lies in having failed to meet life with patience and wisdom. In a million million moments, we had our chance to be patient, but we were resentful or angry instead.
We had our chance to have faith, but we were impatient and played God trying to make something happen. And when we had our chance to live by principle and do the right thing, we went for the expedient--for selfish advantage.
We therefore have knowledge of failure, and now instead of looking forward to the future and new challenges and successes, we look forward to failure. And all our time is spent worrying and scheming to avoid more failure.
Somehow we know deep down that having failed to develop character in many small but character building moments in the past, when the next temptation comes along, we won't have the substance to resist. We will give in again (as we always have in the past), and then hide in distractions, pleasure, imagination, worry or the scoundrels last refuge--religion.
More and more, the things around us remind us of failure and loss. Having lived recklessly and foolishly, we are acquainted with loss. Having failed our families and loved ones, we are acquainted with guilt and fear for what we have made them. We know that without true faith and discernment, they are vulnerable.When we are guilty, everything is tinged with fear. Fear of being found out, fear of being exposed, fear of what our wrong might bring upon us. And behind it all is a prevailing fear of God.
Our separation from God and our guilt for living improperly translates into fear, anxiety and a low grade paranoia. For example, guilty parents, who have been impatient, angry and cruel to their child, experience fear and anxiety when their child is sick (fearing it being visited upon them for their wrong).
Parents who have abandoned their child to the public schools, to the peer group and to popular culture, will experience fear when their child goes to college or leaves home. In their heart, they know that their faithlessness and pressure has made their child into a conformist who will follow others and be led into danger and error. They fear the child's character weakness, naivete and vulnerability for which they, the parents, are responsible.
A wife who resented her now deceased husband and always gave him a hard time will begin to experience guilt when everything around the home that reminds her of him becomes now negatively charged. Everything becomes a reminder of lost opportunity, lost love, lost time, and now a lost chance to ever make things right.
Young people, relatively innocent, yet egos by nature, are often self conscious over many bodily things. A pimple can make them self conscious. A young med student will begin to fear having every condition he learns about in med school. These forms of self consciousness with resulting anxiety usually pass, as we outgrow them.
But when a person gets older and experiences more and more moral failure, just about everything in the environment begins to become a reminder of failure or a dreaded occasion for more failure. In short, the soul is guilt stained. And the stain of sin makes the ego afraid and anxious over anything that reminds it of its wrong.
"There is a balm in Gilead to heal the sin sick soul." This beautiful line from an old Gospel song speak of the sin sick soul. You don't hear this term anymore. Strange isn't it that we live in a therapeutic culture, where everyone is looking for pain relief, anxiety relief, depression relief, and all manner of therapy to take away pain and help us feel good, yet no one talks about how the underlying cause of our pains and dis-eases might be a sin sick soul.
Perhaps now you can see the proof of original sin right before your eyes. We are egotistical and self conscious by nature. Born with an ego separated from God, and born with fallen body, we are self conscious, awkward and a bit anxious over how we are. This is by nature and is not our own sin or wrong, just our inherited nature that we get from our parents.
But once we grow to maturity, we begin to acquire our own personal set of failing and wrongs, and these begin to stain the soul.
What we need is to re-find God, to be reconciled to Him, to find redemption from inherited and personal wrong, to be reformed so as to be able to live properly, and to experience revival, literally a revivification by sharing in God's life and enjoying His approval and good pleasure.
The soul would be healed, the memories are wiped away, and the present would become innocent and joy filled again. The future full of promise and hope.
Perhaps now you can also see that the following beautiful words that begin with R are not just idle words-- but refer to real life things that really mean something.
Redemption, repentance, reconciliation, rebirth, revival, reformation, and reunion refer to real meaningful life events, which the seeking person awaits.
Just remember that these things are very sacred and beautiful, much too marvellous for words. They begin in the soul and are a result of the touch of God. They involve the relationship between a soul and its maker.
You cannot make them happen, nor can some person on the outside. Rituals, music, preaching, and all manner of man made staged events are shallow and cannot bring about the inner changes.
At best they are emotional hypnotic external experiences that are a substitute for the real thing. They become wicked and dangerous when they interfere with a person's actually finding the real thing, and instead gets caught up with personalities, study and ritual.
Involvement with the trappings of supportive or exciting people who offer their services under the guise of religion or spirituality can actually make a person permanently worse off if in getting involved with the false externals, he or she becomes so guilty in the process that s/he fears and avoids the real God of conscience. The guilt and anxiety of awakening to conscience can make the person cling even more tenaciously to the false reassurances, support and reinforcement of the external interlopers and their rituals, assurances, music, and study.
Therefore you must wake up to see the shallowness and falsity of external staged events, pompous words spoken with guile, and forced study. Stand back and recover your senses. The guilt or anxiety you experience is not for abandoning the external substitutes, but it is honest guilt for having gone along with the charade in the first place.
If you will, listen to the meditation that has the sole purpose of helping you awaken from your hypnotic involvements and re finding your inner ground of being.
Fear not, beloved of God. If you have gotten involved with shallow external people or groups, you were only temporarily delayed. Your love of truth will eventually awaken you to see something wrong or unfulfilling about all the external trappings, and one day you will find the real thing.
Likewise, if you have a deep love of truth, you were probably drawn to external substitutes because the nice words and sentiments they held out were close to what you were looking for. But when you saw the deceit or enslavement hiding behind the nice words, you rebelled and ran from them.
Likewise, you may have had hypocritical parents or other authorities when you were young, and seeing their hypocrisy may have tempted you to hate and reject religion. In other words, you threw the baby out with the bathwater.
Know now that the guilt you feel is only for having hated and resented those people and their betrayal. Realize now that they are victims; forgive them. And when you forgive (drop your resentments), you too will be forgiven.
Your other error, for which you will also one day be repented, is of course that of doubt. You saw something a bit false about what everyone else was doing. They all seemed to be succeeding and living the good life. They were earthy and ambitious, but they talked a good game. They appeared to have something you did not. You resented them and felt guilty for the resentment. So it was tempting to embrace them and join them to get what you wanted and to take away the guilt for resenting them.
You doubted the inner testimony about them. Inwardly and wordlessly, you knew there was something false about their way of life, but you became impatient with God and doubted the inner way. You wanted what they seemed to have, so you gave yourself over to them. You studied, sexed, took drugs or alcohol, partied and became ambitious just like them. But you never felt comfortable with it.
Now year later, you are ready to repent of having doubted and abandoned your true lodestar. Now you must simply stand back and wait upon God. Inwardly and ever so gently, He will show you your errors one by one. And when He does, just bear the brief pain of seeing your error. Don't try to do anything about it. Just bear the temporary pain, and soon it will refine in the sad-glad of repentance. Sad to see your wrong, but glad to come clean.
