The Grace of the Present Moment

'By living in the present moment, we exercise the virtue we need most, ...: hope, trust in the final triumph of Mary's Immaculate Heart.

From Rorate Cæli

By Roberto de Mattei

Centuries pass, circumstances are different, but God does not change, the Catholic Church is the same, and the struggle continues to be that between the two cities that oppose each other in history like two armies. The theology of Christian history assures us that the City of God is always victorious; Our Lady's apparition at Fatima assures us that the historical triumph of the Immaculate Heart is near; the historical and logical analysis of revolutionary dynamism, assures us of the irreversibility of the counter-revolutionary movement. However, those immersed in the struggle miss the great horizon of the battlefield, which sometimes seems shrouded in fog or the shadows of night. There is a risk of losing our way, but more importantly, of losing sight of the ultimate goal of our battles and our path. For the path is long and it is not linear. We advance along winding paths, with wide curves, sometimes the terrain is steep and impassable, sometimes flat, descending then suddenly rising again. Overall, the certain movement is ascending, but not straight. We climb to the top, but passing peaks, skirting chasms and cliffs, through an uneven path. And the enemies that assail us are of all kinds. Such is the history of humanity, such is our life. And when the night of confusion falls, the darkness of chaos, fear assails us.

A French writer of the 1930s, Louis-Ferdinand Céline wrote a novel entitled, Voyage au bout de la nuit (Journey to the End of the Night). In this novel, Céline attributes to an officer of the Swiss Guards, who immolated themselves at the Tuileries in 1793 to defend Louis XVI, a song that says "Notre vie est un voyage / Dans l'Hiver et dans la Nuit / Nous cherchons notre passage / Dans le Ciel où rien ne luit " (Our life is a journey / in Winter and in Night / we seek our passage / in a Sky without light").

This romantic pessimism does not correspond to reality. It is true that we often advance in the darkness of night. But night is always followed by the bright dawn of day. And by day and by night the supernatural light that guides our path never fails. 

When we advance through the night, our path is lit by a torchlight, which illuminates our steps, even though it does not allow us to see far ahead or behind. This torch is the grace of the present moment, which through its albeit limited beam of light, allows us not to stumble, not to lose the path, to keep the right direction.  

It is to this grace of the present moment that Our Lord refers when he says, "I will be with you forever, until the end of the world" (Mt, 28-18-20). Every day, no one excluded, but also every moment, because there is not a moment in history or in our lives that is removed from His grace.

The present moment is the one that brings us closest to eternity, because the present moment "is." The past is no more, the future is not yet here, but it is in the being of the present moment that we encounter God, who can be defined as an eternal present, because God is Being by essence.

 We will be judged by God in the present moment, which will be that of our death. Our life, knows shadows and lights, highs and lows, or at least the possibility of highs and lows, different peaks, because no one is in more danger of falling than those who aspire to be perfect, but the moment of truth will be that of our death.

Sometimes we think that, then, God will take stock of our lives and judge us according to an arithmetic average. This is not so. The image of the scale is deceptive. Our life will not be judged as a whole, but in a single moment, what we might call the snapshot of death. 

If we were to conceive of judgment as a scale in which we weigh the amount of evil or good we have committed, we might make foolish calculations whereby today's sin might be balanced by tomorrow's act of virtue. It is not so. Of course every failure counts, as does every correspondence to grace, because every act has consequences, but not in the sense of an arithmetic average. What really counts is the last moment of our lives, the flash at the finish line, and no one knows what the image will be in that flash of time that will be consigned to eternity. No one knows what is the last grace we will receive and whether we will correspond to that last grace. And no one knows the moment of one's death. 

That is why we must live in the present moment. Our life is not a movie, with a happy ending, but a succession of photographic snapshots of the present moment.

Living in the present moment means never becoming discouraged, but living abandoned from moment to moment to Divine Providence, which knows the profound significance of that fleeting moment. By living in the present moment, we exercise the virtue we need most, especially in these days: hope, trust in the final triumph of Mary's Immaculate Heart.