Another View 2-6

Beatrice Bruteau, author of The Grand Option, overwhelmed me with this suggestion: “…we can…freely and responsibly create our meaning from moment to moment as we go along.” What? She suggests most of us live as “an accumulation of our pasts,” and encourages a shift of consciousness from the dead past to the living moment.

I will call her story The Parable of the Coral. She asks, “What do you think of when you meet the word coral?” Most of us think of that pinkish stone found on reefs, often polished into jewelry. However, a biologist knows “coral” really means the little animal, called polyp, that leaves behind this stony mass that had been its skeleton. The tiny animal is not the stony mass we designate “coral.” It is, rather, “a mass of soft, moving protoplasm, interacting with its environment, like any other active being.”

There begins the lesson. Coral is not at all what I have always imagined it to be -- it is something quite different. She then becomes the teacher. Our tendency is to think of the coral as static, fixed, accumulated matter. Such is our lives, she muses. “We build up our lives as the coral builds up its reef, and then we think of our self as the reef rather than as a living act that from that moment to moment is adding on to the reef.”

Why am I, are we, so habituated to the artificiality of a remembered past? Or, for that matter, to a fantasized future? What is it about the moment that is so scary, so frightening? A primary core value of Jesus seems to be focused around the concept of kenosis, or emptiness. Philippians, for instance, reminds us that Jesus knew the “form though not equality with God, but emptied himself taking on the form of a servant,” meaning what? Well, that everything others thought about him did not matter. He was not all of their adjectives and participles, nor would he be lured by their accolades nor defeated by their accusations. He would not be defined by them, for they were not his audience. And there, perhaps, is the difference.

At one point, Jesus reminds them in their projections of who they imagine him to be, “I have come from the Father, and I am going to the Father.” In other words, all their definitions of him do not matter. All their projections fail to “stick on him.” He knows where he has come from, and where he is going to. Their approval will not determine his worth or lack thereof. He will defy their descriptions, for this emptiness finds its lowest place in the I Am. There, alone, is his consciousness.

This becomes the launching pad for Jesus living in the moment. Beatrice Bruteau calls this, novelty. It is not unlike the Taoist concept of spontaneity, or what is also called naturalness. The deep structure here is simple: it is a condition when a thing (or being) is what it is by itself without any external impulse or interruption. To stand comfortably within is to stand within a given ness of I Am. It will mean that every moment is lived fully because it is fresh, never lived before, and therefore unrepeatable. We are “existing in the midst of a great ‘still’, not a moving picture at all.”

To live otherwise is to not receive each moment as resurrection moment. To live otherwise would be to live among the dead past, to walk among the bones of a past that can never knit together meaning in the present. A consistent question asked of me is, “How does one know God’s will?” Most of the time, that is treated as some singular, defining moment that will shape some future from some past.

Well, what if God’s will is happening at every given moment, every second, and that we are constantly “walking into the will.” It is all around us, all the time. So, the only defining characteristic will be how awake am I in this moment. How empty am I, so that God might be seen, experienced, and resurrection grasped? That is novelty, centering ourselves on the “act of living,” breaking out of our limited consciousness.

We are so bounded to time. Hegel was right, “history is what man does with death.” Time causes us to live our lives in tenses -- past, present, future. Jesus was always encouraging the novelty of the now, which is to say, to live in eternity. Time has become our substitute for eternity. The disciples of Jesus were forever doing this -- walking among the dead bones of time. “Who will sit at your right hand, and who at your left,” asked James and John. How time bound. Jesus had just said he would die, and they are struggling with pre-eminence, which is to say, they were not present to the moment. They were living in a future they did not have, and missing the grief of the moment, robbing themselves of wisdom to be learned, a compassion set before them.

Well, it is a sorrowful thing to live in terror to death. That is where “time” invites us, and a denial of everything we say we believe about resurrection and there being no death. Time, for most of us, so it seems, has become some death-defying ticket to immortality -- and there is the lie. What would it mean to practice living in the I Am? It might mean that we would live with Another View.