No Future

I have a wonderful spiritual director through The Claret Center in Hyde Park. We’ve been meeting for about 8 months and focusing on how to achieve balance in my life.

In other words, how can I rest? What stops me from renewing? Why do I let my sabbath time slip so easily away? How can I change the spirit with which I go through my days?

She asked me again this week…Well, really, I ask the questions, then she says, “what do you think?”

We sit on folded blankets and cushions on the floor facing each other, and I stared at the hard wood floor for a long time before answering her.

It boils down to this. I live most of the time with my mind in the future. I am very often thinking about all the things I have yet to do. I’m being overwhelmed by the things I haven’t done and I’m asking myself when I will do them. I’m feeling that I haven’t done enough, that I won’t be able to do enough, and that I’m therefore not good enough. There’s some way I need to become, there’s some place I need to get to. That way and that place are not here yet, so there’s some future that I’m half living into, grasping for.

I am RARELY living exactly in this moment now. And so my life flies by distractedly, filled with “never enough”–a week finished, an entire season gone, a year passed, 10 years completed doing my work in ministry. But much of the time it goes so fast because I’m already living in the next minute, the next day, the next week.

What if NOW is enough? What if the whole thing is here, now? What if all of my life, it’s right here, now? All of God’s love, it’s right here now. What if there’s nothing more than this?

I have the sense that if I could stop living in the future, that my days would actually feel longer. My days would certainly be calmer. I would notice more the beauty that is all around me. I would realize what a miracle it is that not only is my heart beating, but so is yours.

This self-examination I’m sharing is not an invitation for you to worry about me. I am in spiritual direction; I’m taking care of myself. But this is an invitation to see if you identify with the anxiety of striving. As we work on all these aspects of ourselves, we work with the same issues on subtler and subtler levels.

There are two widows featured in the bible readings for this Sunday, both of whom gave something away that it seemed they needed to survive into the future. The widow of Zarephath fed Elijah from the last available meal she had for herself and her son. She was prepared to die because of the drought and consequent famine that was going on. But suddenly, there was enough food to last until the rains came. She didn’t die of starvation.

The second widow is the one who gives away her last two coins to the Temple treasury. Jesus points out to his disciples that she has put more into the treasury than the gobs of money that the wealthy are offering.

What did she put in the offering plate that was more than money?

Did she put in all her fear about the future? Did she put in any last illusion that she was in control of her future?

We can’t know what the widow felt when she gave her last two coins away. But maybe she felt free. Maybe she was living exactly in that moment, and what she had to give, she gave. Maybe her whole life was complete in that moment. And she did what was the most joyful, the most generous, the most free.


The image is digitally manipulated by me, from a photograph by Marwa Morgan with Creative Commons license.

7 comments

  1. ginnys3444 says:

    I am so happy to hear that you are meeting with a spiritual director. Your experience with her is already life-giving. From my own experience as a spiritual director and a directed, your life’s journey with God will be enriched as you live in each moment resting in God’s arms. What a blessing you will continue to be as you serve Christ’s Church as pastor to God’s people. If you haven’t read it, I would recommend Richard Rohr’s book, “The Naked Now”. God’s peace and blessings be with you, Nanette.

    • Thanks, Ginny. The spiritual direction is wonderful. Such a gift and blessing. Thanks for your wonderful and supportive words. I do love Richard Rohr’s work, so I’ll look for that book! Peace…

  2. Ani says:

    I am deeply grateful for the honesty and deep introspection with which you are turning with, Nanette, and sharing the fruits of your very intimate-with-truth journey. I can so identify with what you say about living in the future and being left in the present with the burden of never enough instead of the joy of being present to the miraculous, oft-mysterious unfolding of each day of my amazing life. Thank you for this precious invitation to look at an alternative to my striving and for the context of the biblical stories. There is such wealth—and nourishment— in your realizations.

    • Ani, thanks for sharing my blog post with others! I hope that my posts will nourish you as much as your writing workshops, and your generous presence have nourished me!

  3. Meg Fisher says:

    Nanette,
    Ani passed this on, and I’m glad she did. Like many midlife others, I’ve been living in the dawn of this realization about NOW … surelya function of my own time on earth feeling finally finite after blissful decades of infinity. I especially appreciate how you tie this in with the verse from the Bible, the idea that out of living in the present, great generosity does arise. When else can one give, if not now? There is no other time to. I am either giving or not giving, now and now and now.
    I enjoyed meeting you when you were out here,
    Meg

    • Thanks so much for sharing, Meg! It was great to meet you too. My writing is so much improved–I’m jumping into it more–after being in those lovely writing groups with you! Thanks for reading.

  4. Chad reome - classmate '79 says:

    It is a pleaure to read your writings! The spiritual seeker (living in the now), it seems, is prone to living in the future somewhat absent recognition of past accomplishments (which is unfortunate and deserves consideration), and further, bewildered by a dizzying array of choices about one’s own course of action for the future. Living in this reality (world) seems to hasten identification “with the anxiety of striving”; which is a menifestation of “desire” that is rooted in a French word that signifies something missing And it seems we are apt to seek out that which we feel is missing, or not yet completely fulfilled in our lives. That “something missing,” here, with the context of the seeker, is further spiritual development. The pleasure comes in knowing that the quest for continued spiritual awareness is not in conflict itself as the object does not change in the past, the present, or the future.

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