Elizabeth Ruth Obbard, Life in God’s NOW, New City, 2012, 81pp, £5.95
At the core of this very brief book is the truth that every moment is sacrament. Bernard Cook once wrote that the fact we are embodied spirits means that we exist symbolically which is to say sacramentally. Every moment is as a ‘glass darkly’, translucent of God’s mysterious presence. As our author says: “If God is not found in the here and now we will not find him in musings about the future or futile regrets over the past.”
For many of us to live in God’s now can be a new way of living. In the past we were so busy doing God’s work that at times we could mistake it for our own. We have more time now. We can look inward in a more sensitive, forgiving and penetrating way. Perhaps we can learn to eschew the doing many things, extra things, and do well and consciously only what we have to do, even if it is only the afternoon siesta.
Implied in this is the desire to surrender to God all we have and are. It is to discover that all the time God has been working through us and through those who are nearby.
There is only one vocation to which we are all called: to follow Christ. This little book, based on the teachings of the 18th century French Jesuit Jean Pierre de Caussade, will nudge our memories now fading that there is only one thing necessary.
Frank Regan, April 2012