Practicing the Present: The Art of Being Self-Conscious

May 25, 2019May 25, 2019 ~ John Koessler ~ 2 Comments

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Before we had to put her down, my dog, Gidget, never seemed to worry about the future. She did have a sense of time—or at least she seemed to know when I was due home from work. If she thought at all about the future, it was never very far into the future. And she didn’t worry about death. Right up to her last breath, she never gave it a thought. When we took her to the vet to have her put down, she had no clue what was coming. I don’t know if that made it easier or harder for us.

Many of us live in a world of strategies, five-year-plans, and future goals. My dog’s life was lived entirely in the present. If she had a sense of the future, it extended only as far as the next few moments. She looked forward to the cookie that I tossed her when she came in from outside. But she didn’t wake up in the morning and think about what she was going to do that evening. Even if she could, she would not have asked me to mark an important date on the calendar. As far as I could tell, she existed entirely in the present tense.

Yet her experience is not what I mean by living life in the now. Practicing the present doesn’t mean that we live our lives with a kind of animal immediacy, thinking only of what we need or desire in the moment. It is not reactive living that responds to whatever stimulus I happen to be experiencing in the moment without reflection. Christian living in the present tense demands a kind of self-consciousness that is guided by the Holy Spirit and filtered by the truth of God’s Word. It is a reflection of our capacity to act as a volitional being created in the image of God.

We don’t usually think of self-consciousness as a virtue. It is a trait of an awkward soul. Our image of the self-conscious person is one of shuffling timidity. It is the aspect of someone who has no confidence but is nevertheless self-absorbed. The self-conscious person is one who is continually engaging hand wringing and apology. Even worse, self-consciousness seems to us to be the path that leads to unhealthy introspection, if not to outright narcissism.

We are suspicious of introspection because we associate it with the kind of navel gazing that is characteristic of eastern mysticism. Are we really supposed to sit on a mat and think about ourselves? Such an approach seems to be looking in the wrong direction, especially for Christians who are oriented toward doing. We suspect it would be better to turn the focus away from ourselves. We would prefer to be busy rather than spending extended periods of time thinking about ourselves.

We are right to be suspicious of morbid introspection. Any practice of self-conscious introspection that is not informed by both the truth of God’s Word and the hope of the gospel can only move in two directions. Either it will lead us in the direction of denial, so that we persuade ourselves that we are better than we really are. Or it will move in the direction of shame and despair. Introspection alone does not necessarily lead to a genuine self-understanding. Genuine self-understanding in turn does not always lead to hope.

When we stop and engage in self-conscious introspection we continue to feel the momentum of all that preceded that moment. This is why our initial experience may be unsettling instead of peaceful. In a sense, our minds and our lives are still in motion. The jumble of thoughts, worries, that have been stirred up by the turbulence of our lives comes rushing into that quiet space and we can’t help feeling like we should move with it. We may be distracted at first and agitated. We feel like we should do something. If we are determined to be still and wait for the disorder to settle down, we soon discover something else. We have been in motion because we have been busy but that is not the only reason. Those who wait out the initial storm often realize that they have been in motion because we have been in flight. Perhaps it is a flight from ourselves. It may be a flight from God. Usually, it is a combination of both. As the dust settles in that quiet space of reflection, we begin to see those aspects of ourselves and our lives that we have been trying to keep at bay.

For me, this usually happens at night, when I am forced to stop moving. I lie down to sleep, but the momentum of the day continues. I rewind the events of the past day and watch them again, evaluating my performance. I am like an athlete watching a video of the game that just ended. I criticize my actions. I replay my conversations, improving my responses with all the things I should have said when I had the chance. After I have sorted through all the remains of the day, I turn my attention to the more distant past and begin to sift through my memories like an archaeologist looking for clues. From there, I project into the future with the past as my template. Will it get better? Will it be worse?

I am not alone in this. The intersection of the past and future at the point of the present is a pattern we often find in the Psalms. But the psalmist does more than simply review the past and speculate about the future. The psalmist ponders the reality of God’s presence. When you read the Psalms you discover that The psalmist intentionally directs his gaze toward God. This is an exercise of the intellect. It is an exercise in reasoning. He doesn’t blank his mind in an effort to unite with God’s essence. He argues with himself and takes stock of the facts. “This is what my situation is,” he says. “This is what God has done in the past. Is it really possible that He will deal differently with me in the future?” The implied answer to the psalmist’s question is no. This sounds like it could be a pep talk, and in a way, it is. But it is more. It is the psalmist’s attempt to detect God’s presence on the landscape.

Several years ago, I visited the Civil War battlefield in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. As I walked the grounds, I noticed that there were photographs displayed throughout the park. Some things had changed. The people in the pictures were gone. They had died long ago. But the basic features of the landscape were still the same. I recognized the same rolling hills and the same great boulders portrayed in the faded photographs. The recognition sent shivers down me. Suddenly this historic battle no longer seemed like an artifact of history. It was as if what was past had somehow been transported into the present. Something similar happens for the psalmist as he traces the lines of God’s faithfulness onto the landscape of his present experience. As he surveys the future, he expects those features to remain. The circumstances may change, but God’s presence will remain the same. When we engage in this kind of introspection, we are trying to do the same. We are examining the landscape of the present to find the recognizable features of God’s presence in our lives.

In contemplation, we do not try to work ourselves into a state of spiritual bliss. We do not need to elevate our feelings or put a good face on our bad mood. We do not need to be spiritual giants to practice the present. Is it the spiritual work of ordinary people. It is a discipline that helps me to align my perspective with God’s by tracing His presence on the landscape of the past, present and future.

John’s latest book Practicing the Present: The Neglected Art of Living in the Now: will be released by Moody Publishers in June and is now available for pre-order from Amazon.com. Order your copy today.

Secular Eating and Daily Bread

June 20, 2018June 26, 2018 ~ John Koessler ~ Leave a comment

Wendell Berry has pointed out that most eaters these days are passive consumers. “They buy what they want–or what they have been persuaded to want–within the limits of what they can get” Berry explains. “They pay, mostly without protest, what they are charged.” It seems as though we can get almost anything but that does not necessarily mean that we can always get what we want. We can only get what is made available to us. It certainly does not mean that we can always get what we really need or what is good for us. Berry points out that specialization of production leads to specialization of consumption. To explain how this affects our eating, Berry points to the entertainment industry as an analogy: “Patrons of the entertainment industry, for example, entertain themselves less and less and have become more and more passively dependent on commercial suppliers.”

Anybody who has spent hours scanning the vast selection offered by their cable provider, only to give up in disgust or settle for something they have already watched once or twice before and for which they are paying too much, will understand his point. Just as we have lost the capacity to entertain ourselves and must now settle for options chosen for us by the entertainment industry, we have also lost the ability to eat for ourselves. We are dependent upon food that has been selected and prepared for us by those who are far more interested in our wallet than our health, despite the nutritional information on the back of the package. We are what Berry calls industrial eaters. “The industrial eater is, in fact, one who does not know that eating is an agricultural act, who no longer knows or imagines the connections between eating and the land, and who is therefore necessarily passive and uncritical–in short, a victim.”

Eating and the economy are obviously linked. We must buy our daily bread since most of us do not produce it for ourselves. Those who do produce food are in the business of selling it. But eating is a matter of economy in a much larger and more theological sense. The term economy comes from the Greek word for household. It speaks of more than buying or selling. An economy is really an ecosystem. It is part of a larger whole. In this respect, every community is also an economy. Daily bread is much more than an individual act of consumption, it is a community enterprise.

The communal implications of eating are in evidence all through Scripture. They are embedded in the Law of Moses, which required growers to leave behind the grain that was dropped in order to provide for the poor (Lev. 19:9–10; cf. Ruth 2). They are implied in the biblical rule of hospitality, an exercise which always involved eating (Rom. 12:13; 16:23; 1 Tim. 5:10; Heb. 13:2; 1 Pet. 4:9). The link between eating and communion was especially evident in the practice of sacrificial meals. Several of Israel’s sacrifices involved eating in God’s presence. This was most vividly portrayed in Exodus 24, which describes how the elders of Israel ate and drank in God’s presence. In 1 Corinthians 10:18 Paul calls those who offered such sacrifices participants in the altar. In saying this he seems to be drawing a parallel with the Lord’s Supper in an effort to persuade the Corinthians to pagan idol feasts (1 Cor. 10:16, 17, 21).

Eating is a communal activity that is tied to the means of production and the well-being of the community at large but it is also a sacred act. In other words, our problem is more than the fact that we have been turned into industrial eaters. Our chief difficulty is that we have become secular eaters. We fail to see the connection between God and our daily bread. Food is still a common feature of the church’s life, but eating is not generally viewed as a context in which we experience fellowship with God. We expect to have fellowship with others but God is mostly on the sidelines when we eat. Indeed, we do not even see our observation of the Lord’s Supper as a meal in any real sense. We regard it as a valuable symbol but do not consider it to be spiritually sustaining in any meaningful way.

In the Genesis account, we find that four of the most fundamental aspects of human life are interrelated: the need for daily bread, work, community life, and fellowship with God. They were not originally the separate and unrelated spheres which we so often experience today. It is just here that Jesus chooses to engage with us on this subject. He does not speak about our quest for daily bread from the comfort of Eden before the fall. He faces it head-on in the broken world in which we now must make our way. His message to us is that the God who provided for our needs in the garden continues to provide for us in the fallen world. He teaches us to pray that our Heavenly Father will provide our daily bread (Matt. 6:11; Luke 11:3). He tells us not to be anxious about what we will eat, drink, or wear because our heavenly Father knows we need these things (Matt. 6:31-32).

But how can we not be anxious in a world where the ground that bears its fruit also produces thorns and thistles and where we must eat our bread by the sweat of our brow? Jesus does not say that our daily bread will come without effort, but rather that we must not think about these things like orphans. “Thank God that this Father is so compassionate and realistic that he appraises the little things in our life (included a warm sweater and our daily bread) at exactly the same value that they actually have in our life” theologian Helmut Thielicke observes. “Thank God that he accepts us just as we are, as living men, with great dreams, but also with many little desires and fears, with hunger and weariness and the thousand and one pettinesses and pinpricks of life that fill even the lives of the great of this earth (one need only to read their memoirs).” Give us this day our daily bread.

Back in the Saddle

August 4, 2011August 4, 2011 ~ John Koessler ~ 5 Comments

Regular followers of my blog–all three of you–will have noticed that I have been on hiatus. I wish I could give you a really spiritual reason for this. For example, I would like to say that I spent the past three months in a cave in the wilderness seeking God and have now come with new insight. Or I preached to thousands. Neither would be true. I did spend some time on the beach and I did do some teaching.

Actually, the reason for my absence is much more mundane. I got busy. Then I went somewhere for a month without a good internet connection. I found the absence of regular internet refreshing…and frustrating. I experienced less stress, partly because I wasn’t subjected to minute by minute descriptions of the stock market’s decline, the deficit battle and assorted other ills. But I also found myself getting anxious. Why? Because I wasn’t able to get minute by minute reports of the stock market’s decline, the deficit battle and assorted other ills. Plus, even from a distance, I could feel my small flock of readers drifting away to other, more attractive blogs written by famous people. Now I am back, trying to suppress my ordinary anxiety and think of something meaningful to say on my blog.

“Care is a question addressed to the future in fear and trembling” Helmut Thielicke observes. “It is the fearful question of what is going to happen.” It is not a frivolous question, even though most of our fears about the future are never realized. Sometimes the lowering clouds do foreshadow a storm. “But the one care that should concern us,” Thielicke warns, “is that we do not throw away our trust in the Lord who would sleep in our ship and is able to walk upon the waves.” Cast your care upon him, for he cares for you.

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