Yesterday, a Religious Experience . . .

An odd feeling came over me yesterday evening as I set out from my home to drive to the liquor store for a sixpack of Fuller's London Pride and then to Ledo's for takeout pizza. I had just been napping and I felt a certain post-sleep detachment from everything around me. It occurred to me that all the things I was seeing — the other cars, the stores, the traffic signals, the people — were sort of like on-screen objects in an elaborate computer game.

I don't know if you have played any of the massively multiplayer online computer games like EverQuest or World of Warcraft, but they have become so sophisticated that what you see on the screen is very much like a slice of life. Items that really have nothing to do with the game itself, such as flocks of birds and sunsets, just appear. So when I saw a flock of birds winging against a stunning sunset, and especially when a low-flying helicopter vectored out of the sunset toward my position on U.S. Rte. 40 W., I thought, "These are like things in a computer game. They don't absolutely have to be here ... but they're here!"

And then I thought, "Just as the on-screen details of World of Warcraft are there only because the author of the game put them there, the 'on-screen details' of real life are there only because God put them there. None of this rich panoply of highly improbable stuff that I'm noticing right now, right at this minute, could possibly be here without a Creator God."

"Couldn't my friends who don't believe in God see that?" I asked myself. "Couldn't they see the whole marvelous world as not having to exist at all? As irreducibly contingent, and not in any way necessary?"

The word "thrownness" came to my mind. It seemed to me as if I had been thrown into a world which itself had been thrown into existence for the sheer love of the game.

Which suggested that God is not at heart as judgmental as he is often cracked up to be. The helicopter I saw was probably a police unit looking for an evildoer who had run away into Patapsco State Park, as often happens in these parts of Baltimore County. But the suspect, the police, the 'copter, and I were all part of the same vast tapestry, the same marvelous milieu, the same sublime scenario.

I thought, "My intuition that God is not all that judgmental would astound my friends who know me as a good Catholic." But I thought, "We humans don't know everything. We try to form a coherent picture of God ... but at the end of the day that picture pales in the face of the pure 'thrownness' of creation."

I realized I was having a religious experience. It was one of awe, and it brought a lump to my throat and tears to my eyes which I'd not like to have to explain to my not-so-spiritual friends. And it was one that I hope to capture and memorialize through the "thrownness" of this particular blog post!

The Second Baptism and the "Absurdity of Our Own History"

Enchantments: Religion and the Power of the Word, by Thomas M. King, S.J., makes the case that there are in the Gospels two Christian baptisms, one of water and one of fire. The latter is also a baptism into the Holy Spirit, as distinct from the Word of God (see my earlier post Enchantments and Disenchantments for more on this).

King points to Christ's passion and resurrection — his "glory" — as turning a corner away from the exclusively verbal teaching of Jesus's earlier ministry. Jesus had originally been preaching to a "'closed circle' of listeners, those who [because they were Jewish, like Jesus] shared a common book." But then, "hearing of the interest of the Gentiles [i.e., Greeks who reportedly wanted to see him] he knew that the time of preaching was over; it was time for crucifixion and silence" (p. 143).

"I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all men to myself," Jesus accordingly said at John 12:23. "His [Jesus's] glory would be manifest on the cross," amplifies King, "where all power, all sense and meaning were defeated" (p. 144).

That is, the cross of Christ might be seen as akin to, in another cultural setting, Zen Buddhist koans: "paradoxes which [are intended to] take the disciples beyond words" (p. 144). In effect, finally leaving Jewish words, texts, and meanings behind, Jesus surely knew that now "the phenomena itself would be the revelation. ... By meditating on such a koan, even the Gentiles would be drawn to him."

Yet Christianity, in the earliest centuries following the resurrection, began an organized resistance to any form of spirituality which did not center around "a word that would deliver [us] out of the world" (p. 145). That resistance is carried forward today by Christian fundamentalists who insist absolutely on a literal reading of the Bible. But in the early church, it was the province of "various gnostic and docetist claims." These theologies "included a strong strain of Orphism" (p. 144).

The Gnostics and Docetists, right in line with the traditional Greek (pagan) followers of Orpheus,

... emphasized the saving power of divine truth and generally despised the present world as the work or an "evil creator" who used it to keep humanity in ignorance; the revealed word was from God, but the physical world was from Satan. ... [T]hey believed that divine Truth was calling them apart from their body-tomb and into a world of pure form. (p. 144)

But, King contends, Christ

... did not come to draw his listeners out of their body-tombs. By the events of his Glory (passion and resurrection), the body itself would rise: his own body and the bodies of all who share in it by eating his flesh. ...

And here is the key thing:

The resurrection of the body would prove a stumbling block to all who are seeking a pure teaching, a word that would deliver them out of this world. But the followers of Jesus would not be delivered from history, as the Gnostics, Docetists, and Orphics had claimed, but through history. The world itself would come to deliverance. God had created matter by his word, and in matter the divine storyteller is saying something. If one were to meditate on the koan Jesus offered humanity (the crucifixion), one would be baffled into setting aside the accretions of meaning [found in holy scripture and other verbal texts]. Then perhaps one could have eyes that see and ears that hear; then one might become aware that God is speaking to us apart from the sacred text; he is speaking in the absurdity of history. And that means that the absurdity of our own history is the basis of our response. (p. 145)


The strongest possible refutation of "conservative" or "fundamentalist" Christian views, I would call the passage above. Let me try to say why.

First of all, let me refer to my earlier posts, Is Self-Love OK for Catholics? and More on Self-Acceptance, in which I laid out my own personal experience as being "stunted" and "immature" in my psychosexual development, and in which I suggested that (though I am not myself gay) my situation parallels that of men who, under recent Vatican rules, can no longer be admitted to Catholic seminaries to train for the priesthood, simply because they "present deep-seated homosexual tendencies."

In other words, I find my own "history," particularly as it bears upon my personal psychosexual development, to be "absurd." Little wonder that I likewise imagine the situation of gayness to be a fine absurdity, whatever else it may be practically, personally, morally, or religiously.

For one thing, there is something extra-rational about any sexual attraction, in the sense that it simply happens or it doesn't. At least, though, heterosexual leanings can be rationalized post facto; they ensure the propagation of the species, after all. Homosexual leanings admit of no such rationale.

I don't claim to be an authority on gay culture, but I see gays depicted in movies and on TV as having a sharp sense of the absurd. It is as if the basis of their response to life is already a keen awareness of "the absurdity of their own history." Extending that thought, I'd say gays may even have a leg up into the very type of spirituality Thomas King associates with the second Christian baptism, that of fire and Spirit.

True, their orientation violates the "pure teaching," the holy "word which would deliver them out of this world." The word of God in the Holy Bible, as everybody knows, calls gay sex an abomination.

But baptism — christening by water — remains sacramentally effective for gays. There is nothing about being gay (or being similarly psychosexually twisted) that blocks it from joining the individual soul to the Body of Christ.

So, I would argue, there is nothing about being gay per se — nothing about "presenting deep-seated homosexual tendencies" — which deserves the animus that conservative and fundamentalist Christians have attached to it.


Exhibit "B" in my case that Father King hits the nail squarely on the head, in differentiating second-baptism Christian spirituality from fundamentalism, is that there is no notion more "absurd," from the fundamentalist point of view, than that our species arose out of the blind forces of Darwinian evolution. King's idea that God speaks to us "in the absurdity of history," and not "from the sacred text" — i.e., not just from the Book of Genesis — is as delightful to theological liberals as it is anathema to religious fundamentalists.

Evolution à la Darwin is indeed a modern context in which "the physical world had to manifest some meaning of its own" — where "the revealed word and the phenomenal world [do] not seem to fit" (pp. 139-140). If, as so confounded the Pharisees in Jesus's day, "the visible world could no longer be dismissed as outer Darkness, [since] it too contained a message from God," — specifically, the Word made Flesh in Jesus — then that same perplexity can be said to go doubly for fundamentalists in our day.

"[W]hat if what God says in events does not ... readily coincide with what God says in his Word?" asks King, at one point. "Then, like Job, one must struggle with the apparent ... difference." Or, alternatively, one can simply say, with today's fundamentalists, "God said it. I believe it. That settles it." As Christians we have two spiritualities from which to choose. One is based on the first baptism, the other on the second.


Despite how liberal I may sound above, I personally struggle with my own second-baptism spirituality. For me, hell is getting stuck in the puritanism of the first-baptism mindset. It is a mindset to which, sadly, I find my way at regular intervals.

Something in me desperately wants my life to be without surprise or absurdity, without spontaneity and uncertainty.

Something in me wants to take each ane every verbal formula for goodness and happiness which inveigles me at any givenmoment and slap it onto all of the rest of my life, forever and aye.

Not just my life, either. Everyone else's life, too.

So when I read and am enchanted by a book such as Christopher West's Theology of the Body for Beginners: A Basic Introduction to Pope John Paul II's Sexual Revolution (see my earlier posts, culminating in Theology of the Body, Part 6: The Riddle of the Third Way), I want to impose its charming ideas on my (and everyone else's) world.

But at some point, such dutiful, faithful adherence unfailingly starts to make me feel "thin and stretched," as Tolkien said of his character, the hobbit Bilbo Baggins. Bilbo was locked in thrall to the One Ring, which remained corrosively in his possession.

At that point in my own personal quest, the only possible antidote is to rejoin "the absurdity of [my] own history" — to stop living by a supposedly "pure teaching" and to recognize (yet again) the limits of all verbal formulas, no matter how enchanting, or holy, or sacred.

Enchantments and Disenchantments

Enchantments: Religion and the Power of the Word, a now-hard-to-find 1989 book by Thomas M. King, S.J., offers rare insight into how it is that fundamentalist and liberal Christians differ so radically in their spiritualities.

King is a Jesuit priest who teaches theology at Georgetown University (or did at the time this book came out; I don't know if he still does). He is considered an expert on the thought of the French Jesuit theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, but this book has little to say about Teilhard. It focuses instead on how texts of all kinds — scripture, literature, drama — can raise us up out of this messy phenomenal world into "a vivid world that enchants us with its own compelling truth" (p. vii).

Such a world is the one written of as the Bible's Kingdom of God. Fr. King likens it to, among higher worlds spoken of in other stories and texts, Don Quixote's ineffable "Golden Age" (an "impossible dream," according to the musical Man of La Mancha) and Plato's world of pure Ideas and Forms. In such ethereal heavens, people live exclusively by "the word," or, as capitalized in the Gospel of John, "the Word."

That is, words can be used as incantations to extract a single, set order of affairs from the chaotic whirligig of possibilities that could otherwise arise in the world of material phenomena. Those who live by such enchanting words of law and order are, in biblical terms, said to be righteous souls. Those who decline to succumb to the enchantment of such righteous verbal formulas are said to be lost to evil.

Thus, the first baptism spoken of in the gospels: the baptism "with water for repentance" for which John the Baptist was famous.

But there is also a second baptism mentioned in the gospels: a baptism of fire, which is also a baptism of Spirit.

In the synoptic gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, Jesus undergoes three temptations by Satan in the desert after being baptized by water by John and hearing the voice of his Father emanate from heaven: "This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased." As the Son of God referred to in traditional Hebrew scripture, Jesus knew he was henceforth to identify with and live by a text — specifically, by the Law and the Prophets of his Jewish people, which we Christians now call the Old Testament.

But the Evil One's voice came to Jesus, as he fasted for forty days in the desert, and offered him three temptations which collectively amounted to his, Jesus's, baptism of fire.

The first blandishment which Jesus confronted during his desert ordeal was the temptation to turn stones into loaves of bread — which, had Jesus acquiesced, would right then and there have put paid to the heavenly ideal Jesus now upheld as the supposed Son of God.

The second temptation was yet more problematic, since Satan turned Jesus's ideal itself into a form of temptation. Jesus was asked to renounce his material body by stepping out from the pinnacle of the Temple and walking successfully across the sky (pp. 118-119).

By rejecting that second temptation (see p. 120), Jesus rejected the purely verbal — just as by rejecting the first temptation, he had rejected the purely experiential. The combination of the two rejections left him prey, then, to the third temptation: to seize pure power. The Tempter offered Jesus all the kingdoms of the world as his personal dominion, as if to say, "Since you reject both the purely verbal and the demands of the flesh as limitations on your actions, that seemingly leaves you wholly unconstrained. Why not, then, simply rule the whole world, as my viceroy?"

But Jesus did not fall into this trap of seeming bifurcation, instead finding a happy medium: per King, "[H]e would give first place to the word of God; he would [also] understand the weakness of human flesh (for the word is not everything); and, finally, he would never worship the powers of this world" (p. 120).

The part about understanding the weakness of human flesh is the key one. Those who undergo the first baptism alone, the baptism of righteousness and repentance, often lack "an ongoing experience of the world and their own sensibilities" (p. 120). This is no wonder: such believers are prone, after all, to using only "set phrases with no surprises" (p. 121) to convey the truth, "for surprises are found in experience — not in the inevitablity of a text."

These, then, are today's fundamentalists — as well as the Pharisees and religious authorities of Jesus's time. Both today's Biblical literalists and the contemporaries of Jesus who upheld the Law by condemning Jesus for healing on the sabbath are in righteous thrall to a text which purports to be God's word. Neither outlook is wrong — it just lacks the second baptism, the baptism of fire which (the Gospel of John tells us) also is a baptism of Spirit.

"Something fundamental about Spirit" is, King tells us (p. 140), that "it cannot be captured in words." This is because "it blows where it will and it lacks both measure and form." Spirit is "what God says in events" — that is, in phenomenal occurrences taking place here in the material world.

"But what if what God says in events does not coincide, or readily coincide, with what God says in his Word? Then, like Job, one must struggle with the apparent — or more than apparent — difference" (p. 140). This amounts to the Dark Night of the Soul. This is what the mystics tell us accompanies the temptation — as in "Lead us not into temptation" — that necessarily precedes our baptism of fire and Spirit.

After the second baptism, the baptism of fire and Spirit, we cease to be funadamentalists/Pharisees. No longer in thrall to the Word of God as distinct from the Spirit, we are apt to become theological "liberals." No longer blinded to the weaknesses of human flesh, we develop true compassion.

Yet we are in danger of swinging too far to the opposite extreme: some Christians, so very "liberal," "have felt so deeply their Baptism of Fire, their baptism back into humanity, that all they can recognize is the extent of human ambiguity. They find all talk of Kingdoms and heavenly identities to be a puzzling rhetoric without meaning. These too [like the fundamentalists] would reduce Christianity to a single baptism, [in this case] that of fire, and see Jesus only as a human ideal" (p. 123).

More on Self-Acceptance

At this point, I am tempted to do any one of several things as I pursue the topic of self-love/self-acceptance even further (see Is Self-Love OK for Catholics? for my first post on the subject). I don't know exactly in which direction to proceed next, so let me try this one:

My intuition tells me that the gory details of my own "cracked pot" (see the parable I quoted in the previous post) are idiosyncratic to myself; they may be of little interest (or even repulsive) to others. Or, to the Howard Sterns of this world, they may be diverting to hear about, but really no big deal. Yet I feel the need to allude to them to make a general point: things that happen to us early in life can twist us irrevocably for the rest of our lives.

In that previous post I revealed that I, at 58, am still an unmarried male virgin (technically speaking) with a decidedly unnatural (or "disordered") interest in such grossly immature, voyeuristic pursuits as — dare I say it right out loud — viewing women going to the potty.

It's been that way for me all my life. I can remember being as a young child stimulated in ways I was too small to understand when a female playmate abruptly dropped pants and did her business before me on one of those potties parents use to toilet-train their toddlers. Both of us were a bit too old for that sort of thing by then ... and both of us knew it. It was one of several acts of provocation I remember by this little girl who would grow up to be, if I recall aright, quite a flirt. Another was when she had me remain in her room while she changed from pajamas to clothes, and I found out for the first time exactly how boys and girls, anatomically speaking, differ.


But my point is that, if I have a sexual quirk, it was already with me at a tender age, and I simply never grew out of it.

I was a thumb-sucker till I was 12, a bed-wetter till 16. In my early 40s I had to retire early due to burnout and stress. And I'm something of a confirmed hypochondriac. In an earlier, Freudian age, I would have been called a neurotic from the word go. I have to believe that my neuroses and my sexual quirks are somehow related.

My neuroses are, in that old-fashioned parlance associated with Sigmund Freud, well-compensated. And I don't let my sexual quirks actually express themselves, in terms of my outward behavior. So I've managed to live something which looks very much like a normal life ... for a never-married bachelor of 58, that is.

And I'm a pretty good Christian to boot ... don't commit a lot of sins, do my share of good works, live a fairly clean life, try to care a lot more about others and a lot less about myself.

But in terms of my personal spiritual growth I think I've hit a sort of glass ceiling. I started to notice it as I was reading about and blogging about the "theology of the body," as I did most recently in Theology of the Body, Part 6: The Riddle of the Third Way and in preceding posts. The book which I have been reading on the subject, Theology of the Body for Beginners: A Basic Introduction to Pope John Paul II's Sexual Revolution by Christopher West, talks about our ability to confirm that conjugal or celibate chastity is uniquely blessed by God; we can do this by means of our own inner experience. Supposedly, we can convince ourselves that God's plan for human sexuality allows for either faithful, man-woman, married sex (conjugal chastity) or no sex at all (celibacy "for the kingdom"), depending on our specific calling.

But that, admittedly, assumes our psycho-sexual maturity. If we are not sufficiently mature in our psycho-sexual development, all bets are off.


Take, for example, the issue of homosexuality. The Catholic Church has recently promulgated a new set of guidelines which bar men who "present deep-seated homosexual tendencies" from entering seminaries and becoming priests (see the official document On Priesthood and Those With Homosexual Tendencies: Instruction From Congregation for Catholic Education).

Such men lack "affective maturity" and cannot relate properly — in a constructive, priestly way, that is — to either men or women, it is said. According to Dr. Richard Fitzgibbons in the supporting document "The Psychology Behind Homosexual Tendencies": "These individuals in the priesthood have a significant affective immaturity with excessive anger and jealousy toward males who are not homosexual, insecurity that leads them to avoid close friendships with such males and an inordinate need for attention."

Though I'm not gay, I can surely relate to that — though in my experience it is possible to learn to counterbalance such immaturities of affect, insofar as how one actually lives one's life. (Affect is psychologists' lingo for "the conscious subjective aspect of an emotion."). I no longer get angry, or at least not very often. I no longer let my "inordinate" need for attention run away with me. I don't follow women into rest rooms.

But although on the surface I seem mature and tranquil enough, down deep there's trauma. I don't know what caused it, possibly when I was a babe in arms ... but it's there, and it's not going away. It's ultimately responsible for the "cracked pot" aspects of this particular person whom God loves at this particular moment in time.

I'm never going to grow any further spiritually until I can accept that basic fact about myself, and love myself because of my flaws.


Specifically, then, I've got to find a term to complete the analogy cracked pot:waters flowers::psycho-sexual immaturity:does X. X, in terms of the parable told by Father Joe Breighner as cited in the previous post, has to be some way to redeem the psycho-sexual immaturity which is the biggest stumbling block to my own self-love and self-acceptance.

The best candidate I cam come up with for X leverages the idea which I mentioned above, that deep-seated homosexual tendencies are also psycho-sexual immaturities with their roots in earliest childhood.

Confirmed gays are no more able to change whatever malformation exists deep, deep down than am I ... though mine expresses itself in a different, more oddball (and some would say yet more odious) way.

I feel that my inner, early malformation blocks me from attaining the transcendent redemption of sexual self spoken of by Christopher West in Theology of the Body for Beginners: A Basic Introduction to Pope John Paul II's Sexual Revolution. I assume confirmed gays with deep-seated homosexual tendencies are blocked in the same way.

But neither of us is blocked from the kind of redemption spoken of in Fr. Joe Breighner's somewhat surprising-to-me Spirituality piece entitled "Love yourself because of your flaws." Rather, Father Joe's type of redemption is especially appropriate to the "cracked pots" in the world ... and, when you come right down to it, who among us is anything but a cracked pot, in one way or another?

So the does X in my analogical version of Father Joe's parable would seem to be: works to reverse the recent decision by the Catholic Church not to admit men who "present deep-seated homosexual tendencies" to seminaries.

Is Self-Love OK for Catholics?

The Catholic Review for 01/05/2006 has, in Fr. Joseph Breighner's weekly Spirituality slot (see p. 31), a somewhat surprising-to-me piece entitled "Love yourself because of your flaws." I don't always read Father Joe — he can seem a bit of a lightweight — but I did let my eye course over this particular offering. I was glad I did. It turns out to be one of the profoundest things I've ever read.

"When I really love myself," Father Joe writes in this column, "I cannot hurt myself, and I cannot hurt another person. To me, the answer to world peace is unconditional love." It begins with loving oneself. But what is self-love? It most certainly is not, he says, "being vain or conceited. People who are vain or conceited have a lot of self-hatred covered over by a layer of 'I'm better than you.' "

Specifically, though, what is this thing called self-love? "Loving ourselves as we are," Father Joe writes, "is to love the person God loves at this moment in time" (the italics are mine, not Father Joe's). We all need to make a New Year's resolution, adds this good father, to "accept ourselves exactly the way we are."


Well ... at this moment in time I'm a 58-year-old man, still technically a virgin, whose deepest flaw may be that he has never really grown up sexually. Oh, my body is a standard-issue one for the post-middle-age white American male, but my mind is in many ways stuck in the realm of that of a twelve-year-old, when it comes to the things which interest me sexually. No, I don't covet pre-teen girls, or boys of any age, but I'm the kind of guy who, just for kicks, might love to bore a peephole in the wall of a female locker room (or, better still, the ladies' lavatory).

Whatever else that is, perverted or whatever, it's grossly immature. So at this moment in time, I'm basically just as stunted sexually as I was in seventh grade. The person God loves — and who ought, per Father Joe, to accept himself just the way he is — is a bit twisted, deep down inside.


A parable that Father Joe shares strikes home, accordingly:

A water bearer in India had two large pots, each hung on each end of a pole which he carried across his neck. One of the pots had a crack in it, while the other pot was perfect and always delivered a full portion of water.

At the end of the long walk from the stream to the master’s house, the cracked pot arrived only half full. For a full two years this went on daily, with the bearer delivering only one-and-a-half pots of water to his master’s house. Of course, the perfect pot was proud of its accomplishments, perfect to the end for which it was made. But the cracked pot was ashamed of its own imperfection and miserable that it was able to accomplish only half of what it was made to do. After two years of what it perceived to be a bitter failure, it apologized to the water bearer.

“I’m ashamed of myself,” said the cracked pot. “For these past two years I have been able to deliver only half of my load to the master’s house.”

The bearer said to the pot, “Did you not notice as we walked along that there were flowers only on your side of the path, not on the other pot’s side? That’s because I have always known about your flaw, and I took advantage of it. I planted flower seeds on your side of the path, and every day while we walk back from the stream, you’ve watered them. For two years I have been able to pick these beautiful flowers to decorate my master’s table. Without you being just the way you are, he would not have this beauty to grace his house.’”

I suppose what is being spoken of here is redemption: taking what is cracked and making the very imperfection of it a source of beauty and grace. Father Joe: "Each of us has our own unique flaws. We’re all cracked pots. But if we will allow it, the Lord with use our flaws to grace his master’s table."

What is being spoken of here is, I imagine, redemption. Or as Father Joe puts it, "Each of us has our own unique flaws. We’re all cracked pots. But if we will allow it, the Lord with use our flaws to grace his master’s table." Turning our most distressing flaws to some higher purpose is, I would say, the essence of redemption.


I have to admit it, though: I don't really get it. Or, rather, I see this as the meaning of redemption vaguely, with one eye half-opened. Extending the analogy, the other eye remains wholly blind to it.

For the most part, I think of the "cracked pot" aspects of who I am as things which would absolutely keep God from loving me. I criticize myself for having them, and I condemn and reject myself for ever being characterized by them, but Father Joe says, "Criticizing ourselves, condemning ourselves, rejecting ourselves only guarantees a future of self-defeating behavior."

Instead, Father Joe says I ought (as should we all) to engage regularly in a meditation which begins this way: "I treat myself as if I am someone who is deeply loved. All kinds of events come and go; yet, through it all, my love for myself is constant ... ". This kind of stuff sounds like exactly what my acupuncturist, Sherry, would tell me.

She is one of the many folks in our world today who is spiritual (albeit in a down-to-earth way) without being religious. She profoundly believes in living in the present and not being slave to either the recriminating past or the fear-filled future. What Father Joe, a Catholic, says in this column about loving the person God loves at this moment could have been a mantra from a course at the institute of New Age (actually, ancient) wisdom which credentialed Sherry as a therapist.

So it would seem that New Age can meet Old Catholic (sorry, Father Joe, for the "old") at the intersection of Self-Love and Living Life in the Present Moment!