Now–the dwelling place of God
In the immediate experience of the Presence, the Now is no mere median point between the past and the future. It is the seat and region of the Divine Presence itself. No longer is the ribbon spread out with equal vividness before us, for the past matters less and the future matters less, because the Now contains all that is needed for the absolute satisfaction of our deepest cravings.
Why want, and yearn, and struggle, when the Now contains all one could ever wish for, and more? The present Now is not something from which we hurriedly escape, toward what is hoped will be a better future. Instead of anxiety lest the future never yield all we have hoped, lest we fail to contribute our full stint before the shadows of the evening fall upon our lives, we only breathe a quiet prayer to the Now and say, “Stay, thou art so sweet.”
Instead of anxiety lest our past, our past defects, our long-standing deficiencies blight our well-intentioned future efforts, all our past sense of weakness falls away and we stand erect, in this holy Now—joyous, serene, assured, unafraid. Between the relinquished past and the not-yet-traveled future stands this holy Now, whose bulk has swelled to cosmic size, for within the Now is the dwelling place of God himself.
In the Now we are home at last. The fretful winds of time are stilled and the nostalgic longings of this heaven-born earth-traveler come to rest. For the one-dimensional ribbon of time has loosed its hold. It has by no means disappeared. We live within time, within the one-dimensional ribbon. But every within-time-now is found to be a continuance of an Eternal Now, and in the Eternal Now this temporary now receives a new evaluation.
We have not merely rediscovered time; we have found in this holy immediacy of the Now the root and source of time itself. For it is the Eternal who is the source of our holy Now, no, who is our Now; and time is, as Plato said, merely its moving image.
Thomas Kelly, A Testament of Devotion