JANUARY IS REALLY going by fast for me. All the work I put off over the holidays, I feel, needs to get done “now.” My scribbled “to do” list is keeping my time filled, but not in a full-filled way.
It isn’t just a January thing for me, this time filled but not full-filled thing. Even as a winemaker, I admit that I don’t take the time as often as I would like to follow my own “Six Ss” of wine enjoyment — to see, swirl, sniff, sip, savor and swallow.
Call it taking time to smell the roses. I want to make more time for now. The kind of now with sights and scents and feelings. Not the present marked only by a check mark.
I have to admit that the “now” has rarely been very present for me. I love history, for example, and that takes me back a few centuries. I love geology, too, and that takes me into even deeper time.
This is not to say that total immersion in a good book, or for me in the Good Book, isn’t important. I just want my investment in time to also help me better pay attention to what is happening beyond my study desk or the winery’s barrel room.
And I’m working on it.
Over this month, I am paying attention to the four minutes a day of sunlight we are gaining now that we have passed the winter solstice. On walks around our gardens, I’m noticing flower bulbs poking their heads up and have you noticed pussy willows are already getting fuzzy?
I recently brought out of my library a book I had forgotten I had. Its title is “God In Search of Man” by Abraham Joshua Heschel, a preeminent Jewish scholar of the 20th century. He writes, “Every moment is (God’s) subtle arrival, and man’s task is to be present. His presence is retained in moments in which God is not alone, in which we try to be present in His presence, to let him enter our daily deeds, in which we coin our thoughts in the mint of eternity.”
That may sound a bit mystical, and I will admit to that being a bent of mine, too, but our Lord is the Lord of all time and God’s present is the present moment as much as God’s love and grace. Let us be glad in it … moment by moment.
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Issues of Faith is a rotating column by religious leaders on the North Olympic Peninsula. Don Corson is an Ordained Deacon in the Lutheran Church (ELCA) and the winemaker for a local winery. He is also the minister for Prince of Peace Lutheran Church in Forks. His email is ccwinemaker@gmail.com.
