From the Book “The Power of Stillness” comes an interesting thought (first from a previous post of September 18,2020)
“Ever feel like you′re missing out on the most important things in a day? You′re not alone! Sister Sharon Eubank shared: Sometimes I am so pressed with everything I have to do that I don′t even know what the priority is. I′ve started asking the Lord every morning when I wake up, ′What is the one thing you want me do do today?′″
This “just one thing” mentally can be refreshingly simple—and in different ways. Sometimes we like to say out loud in family planning sessions as a reminder, “We have only one thing to do tomorrow—His will. That′s it.” Although that one thing invariably includes lots of different pieces, it feels reassuring to remind ourselves what we′re really trying to do and why we′re trying to do it at all.
When approached in this way, our lives can begin to flow out of our moment by moment responsiveness to God′s will rather than complex configurations of competing loyalties to the day′s various tasks. Catholic mindfulness teacher Thomas Keating similarly wrote about scripture′s emphasis “on listening and responding to the Spirit rather than initiating projects that God is expected to back up, even though God had little or nothing to do with them.”
Even compared with whatever Big Exciting Plans we may have been trying to get God on board with, learning to rest in the adventure of seeking His will and receiving each moment with gratitude can open up a life far more exciting than any other glamorous alternative.~ The Power of Stillness (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2019), 100-01. . . . Now continuing:
. . . . In the same spirit, what if, rather than waiting for the distant future, could we glimpse and experience eternal life now?
In 1836, at the very moment when Joseph Smith’s ministry was unfolding in Ohio and Missouri, Henry David Thoreau began encouraging people to “find your eternity in each moment.”8 Jewish theologian Abraham Heschel also later encouraged people to “live the life of eternity within time.”9
This idea is not unfamiliar to Latter-day Saints, who see glimpses of the glorious future of heaven in our own messy, day-to-day living here. Instead of an otherworldly unrelatable, incomprehensible mystery, we understand this eternal life to be God’s kind of life. “Rather than just measuring a life span,” as Adam Miller puts it, ‘”eternal’ names a certain way of being alive, a certain way of holding life as it passes from one moment to the next.” 10
This way of being alive involves, in part, seeing and relishing the divine in the routine, mundane details of life. As William Blake once said, “If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear unto man as it is, infinite.”11 That doesn’t mean that we are aspiring unto something mystical that departs from our current experience. On the question of what eternal life is like, Miller proposes: “It’s like this. It’s like now. . . . it’s like doing whatever you’re now doing. Eternal life is just like doing what you’re doing right now, but doing it the way God himself would do it.”12
That is the aspiration of the Saints. Instead of transporting ourselves somewhere else, we are on a mission to build heaven on earth—starting in our own lives and homes.
The Unsuspected Power of the Present Moment
For those around us who hear such talk and as theological distraction, it’s worth reminding ourselves again of the wide open span of positive consequences documented as arising from deeper levels of mindfulness. These range from a measurable decrease in various types of chronic physical pain, to a surprising relief that can come to those facing depression, anxiety, and eating disorders like anorexia and bulimia, to the cultivation of greater attentiveness for those who struggle to focus. There is even growing evidence that the cultivation of mindfulness combined with other healthy activities, can literally change brain pathways.
Along side all the effort to examine the objective benefits of mindfulness for mental-health problems written by leading cognitive psychologists, for instance, they do not explain why mindfulness can impact depression so substantially. Instead they state it in a kind of awe: “There is an unsuspected power in inhabiting the moment you’re living in right now with full awareness.”13 ~ Jacob Z. Hess, Carrie L. Skarda, Kyle D. Anderson, Ty R. Mansfield (Salt Lake City, Deseret Book, 2019) p.101-03 ,
