Just This: Prompts and Practices for Contemplation

by Richard Rohr

the sacrament of the present moment The great task of religion is to keep you fully awake, alert, and conscious. Then you will know whatever it is that you need to know. When you are present, you will know the Presence. It is that simple and that hard. Too much religion has encouraged you to be unconscious, but God respects you too much for that. In the Garden of Gethsemane, the last words Jesus spoke to his apostles were, “Stay awake.” In fact, he says it twice (see Matthew 26:38–41). The Buddha offered the same wisdom; “Buddha,” in fact, means “I am awake.” Staying awake comes not from willpower but from a wholehearted surrender to the moment—as it is. If you can be present, you will experience what most of us mean by God, and you do not even need to call it God. It’s largely a matter of letting go of resistance to what the moment offers or of clinging to a past moment. It is an acceptance of the full reality of what is right here and now. It will be the task of your whole lifetime. You cannot get there by any method whatsoever; you can only be there. The purest form of spirituality is to find God in what is right in front of you—the ability to accept what the French Jesuit and mystic Jean-Pierre de Caussade (1675–1751) called the sacrament of the present moment.