life in the fullness

I have been reading some of Thomas Merton's writings while on sabbatical, and I have come across often his insistence that we live in the fullness of time. We don’t have to rush after it, what we seek is already here and if we give it time it will make itself known to us. 

In contrast, Wayne Muller in Sabbath gives an accurate description of the world as I’ve experienced it up to this point. He names (in “Hurtling Toward the Eschaton”) that we, the Western world, act as if progress is our new messianic eschatology. We live as if coming to the end of progress will bring about bounty, and mastery of nature, and health & wholeness for all. There is no time to rest because we are on an important mission. ‘We never rest on our laurels, we never rest at all. Every moment is a necessary investment in the divinely ordained and completely unquestioned goal of progress. What we are building for the future is infinitely more important than whatever we have right now.’ We cannot rest because ‘the sooner we get into the good and perfect future - the only place we will ever be truly happy and at peace - the better off we will all be.’ Yet every time we reach the future, it vanishes into the present.

This theology of progress tells us that when we get to the end then, and only then, can we lie down in green pastures, and allow our soul to be restored. 

Oh my. Muller’s description of life in the West seems all too familiar. It is the lived experience of so much of my adult life. 

Yet it is Merton’s description of life that resounds and echoes within the recesses of my soul. The promised land is here, now. If I live connected to the rhythms of life, of birth and growth and death and new life, of rest and dormancy, if I live in ways that honor the sacredness of all of life and am open to seeing the Divine in the world wherever it chooses to be found, then I find that the present is more expansive than I can hope to understand. I find health and wholeness and abundant living. 

And I find that all the way to heaven is heaven, every moment full and ripe with experience of the Divine.