Celebrate the present moment

There once was a man who was walking in the jungle. As he got farther and farther into the jungle, he became somewhat disoriented and got lost. Of course, there was always the ever-present danger of some of the more powerful and aggressive animals lurking in the jungle. It happened that as he was walking along, trying to find his way, he began to hear the roar of a tiger.

Now he paid very close attention to how far or how close that roar sounded in his ear. As he continued through the jungle, the sound of the tiger got closer and closer; and he knew the tiger must have caught his scent and was now on his trail. So he began to run for his life. The sound of the tiger got louder and louder. He tried to run faster and faster, even frantically.

Not being careful to look where he was going, he ended up stumbling and falling over the edge of a cliff. As he was falling down the cliff, his fingers were dragging along the side. He managed to catch hold of a very small, precarious bush. He held on to that bush for dear life.

As he held on, he became very concerned as he noticed some of the roots of the bush starting to feel the strain of his weight. It was a small bush. As he looked above him, the tiger that was chasing him was now standing over him, drooling, ready for a meal.

As it happened, he looked below him a long distance down, and he saw there another tiger waiting, with mouth wide open, drooling, ready for a meal.
There he was, caught in the middle between the tiger above him and the tiger below him, desperately hanging on to this little shrub, pulling out at the roots.

In the middle of this ordeal, right about eye level, he happened to notice a little indentation on the side of the cliff. And inside that little space, he noticed – to his amazement – a wild strawberry growing. Even more amazing was that the strawberry was a beautiful, juicy, red, ripe strawberry.

You know what he did? He actually let go with one hand of the bush that his life was hanging by. And he reached out and took that strawberry, and he ate it.

And he said, “How delicious.”

The present moment is that precious moment when we taste the strawberry.

I suspect that many of us come to worship, holding on precariously between the past and future. Both of them are roaring at us, demanding our attention, waiting to “eat us up.” We can be eaten up by looking back at the past or fearing the future.

But if we give all our attention to these two tigers, we can miss the gift of the present moment, the delicious strawberry before our eyes.

But there is a certain “letting go” that has to happen first, letting go of our predicaments, our grudges, our jealousy, our need to control everything.

Let go of our preoccupation with the tiger above and the tiger below. We have to let go of holding on, let go of control, in order to celebrate “how delicious” is the present moment.

“Seek first the Kingdom of God,” the Gospel of Mathew says. Surely part of what this means is to “Seek first the present moment, where God is…” The paraphrase is also on target: “Give your entire attention to what God is doing right now” (Matthew 6:33).

“Consider the lilies of the field,” Jesus said, “how they grow.” Notice how Jesus uses a close-up, zoom lens. “The birds of the air…the grass of the meadow.” These are all alive and growing right now. They speak to us of God’s care, God’s love of variety, God’s beauty. “Glory be to God for dappled things,” Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote. God’s glory can be seen all over the natural world – flowers, trees, bushes, strawberries, tomatoes. “Every common bush aflame with God,” as the poet wrote.

Can we allow ourselves to experience the goodness?