The Rev. Dr. Stuart Higginbotham
The Feast of the Transfiguration, 2023
The Presence within the Present Moment
You may have noticed that I have a slight stammer. It comes and goes and usually flares up around words that start with “r” for some reason. It’s an annoying thing. There are two possible reasons that I have this little quirk, I think.
The first possible reason is that I was shocked really badly in the third grade using one of those big orange extension cords. My teacher, Mrs. Lawrence, gave me an old TV, a computer keyboard, and the extension cord and challenged me to make a computer out of it. Lisa says that I was one of those children who needed extra work because I would finish my assignments and then, let’s just say, start wandering around and looking for things to do or asking questions. Some may call it annoyingly precocious; I call it curious and advanced for my age. But Lisa’s probably right.
I went to plug in the big orange cord one day, and my little fingers were holding the metal prongs. It was a very strange feeling, electricity, and I remember not being able to move. Mrs. Lawrence saw me frozen there, I guess, with my hair standing up on end. She came running over and shoved me away, took me out in the hallway, and called the other teachers to help. They came out and wondered what to do. I was just standing there watching them talk. One of them said to get a paper bag in case I was hyperventilating (which I was not).
She came back with a very large paper grocery sack from Jade’s Super Foods down the street, and they put the entire bag over my head and clinched it pretty tight around my neck. I could clearly hear one of them ask “now, what do we do?” I went back to class and did fine, but I do wonder if that is where my stammer came from.
If I’m honest, though, I think my stammer comes from somewhere else. My entire life, I have struggled to stay grounded in the present moment. When Brandon invited us in his sermon last week to trust the moment, it helped me connect the dots for today.
Ask the staff team at Grace or anyone who has served on the vestry (to say nothing of my family), and they’ll tell you that I am, shall we say, prone to having random ideas come into my head. I am wired to be curious, to imagine, so I struggle with ideas swirling in at any given moment.
I guess it’s a good thing on one level, so long as some of the ideas are eventually helpful, but when you’re responsible for building and supporting a team who does such an incredible job holding the many aspects of this complex community’s life–to say nothing of helping care for your family–it is important not to run after every butterfly. And I fail at this more often than I would like.
When I am celebrating the Eucharist or preaching from memory or having conversations sometimes, I do struggle to stay grounded in the present moment. Thoughts come swirling in and just as I want to say one thing, another idea or association is standing there and gets my attention. So, maybe the stammer kicks in that way.
Or maybe it is because of the jolt of electricity.
I can see myself so clearly in Peter when he and James and John are standing there on the mountaintop witnessing this incredible moment. There stands Jesus, in gleaming brightness, talking with Moses and Elijah. The disciples are speechless–at first. I imagine their eyes, really, as they lift their hands to their foreheads to shield themselves just a bit from the intensity of this theophany, this encounter with a glimpse of the essence of the Divine.
What must that moment have been like, to behold that? To be caught up in that experience?
Peter’s thought comes swirling in at that point: It is good that we are here. Let us build three dwellings, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah. The commentary is included in the dialogue here: he did not know what he was saying.
Their participation in, their awareness of, the present moment is broken by a thought to somehow capture it, contain it, and even control it. Let us somehow put parameters on the immediacy of what is happening just now. Let us, somehow, put language on the realness of what we are experiencing.
We hear all the time now how important it is to be in the present moment. The deep teachings of mindfulness practice have now been caught up in our Western consumer culture, so we often hear how being in the present moment can, actually, help us be more productive. And there it is: this ever-present Western and American expectation to produce something. We are always seeking to build something, to put some structure on what we experience, so that we can vouch for the time we spent in that moment.
How many of us have felt guilty for sitting outside on the patio watching the birds when we know we could be doing something more productive? Yes, we may have things to do, but do we always feel the guilt, and what does it mean that the feeling of guilt is always there?
Jesus always took the time he needed to make sure he was grounded. Notice how he goes into the desert at the beginning of his public ministry. Notice how he took walks alone to breathe and renew his spirit. Notice how he went into the garden when he knew the clash was culminating between his teaching and the expectations of the religious and political establishment.
The teachings around the present moment are important. In my own life, I am seeing more and more that the point is not just to stay in the present moment. Oftentimes, the present moment is not particularly pleasant for us. Why would I want to stay there? So, to say “stay in the present moment” really isn’t connecting with what the deep teaching actually is.
Rather, the deep teaching is this: can we become aware of the true presence of the Spirit within the present moment? Our present moment can actually be any number of things, and we can associate many things with it: pleasant, unpleasant, blissful, or terrifying. Those are emotional states and associations, really, and they are superficial and impermanent. But our practice of staying in the present moment offers us the opportunity to sink beneath or within where we can discern the presence of the Spirit that is always flowing within us, that connects all of life into a wholeness that surpasses our ability to understand it.
One of my Buddhist teachers taught in a lesson once that within any moment, we may, as she put it, fall through the gap into the spaciousness of what is really most true, most real. Fr. Thomas Keating and others in the Christian contemplative tradition all connect here on this point.
Rather than resting in the present moment long enough to fall through any gap, Peter yields to his thinking mind’s pattern of coming up with ideas. And who wouldn’t want to somehow capture that moment, to have something to keep close at hand, to return to again and again when life got hard. We all need talismans, as it were, relics and reminders that hold memories and help us feel like we can be close to something or someone again.
The Gospel story today shows us how the Spirit, in reality, so often counters our grasping tendency by enveloping us in a cloud of unknowing. We have this encounter with the realness of the Spirit, our thinking mind and ideas come swirling in, we lay out a plan, and then we are enveloped by a cloud that reminds us of the truth underneath/within/beyond our good ideas. More and more, I see this bright cloud as God’s grace. Can we see it as a grace when God overshadows our well-laid plans, so that we can rest and trust even more in the Spirit’s presence in our lives?
Maybe this is the lesson for us to reflect on as we step forward these days, when so much around us feels tense, angry, hateful, and honestly ignorant. How are we convicted, challenged, and encouraged to yield our pursuit to contain and control? How can we behold God’s goodness, God’s presence within life, and open our hearts to celebrate?
To put it another way, if we can imagine ourselves in this story, what if we could say, with Peter “Master, it is good for us to be here”–and then stop talking.
Thoughts on a Contemplative Reformation 
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