Our Inner Emily and How to Live in the Present

My eighth grade English teacher had us read the play, Our Town by Thornton Wilder. Mr. Greco was trying to teach us how to identify the theme, or the author’s message – that which lies beyond the mere retelling of a plot. My thirteen year-old brain, which up to this point had leaned toward Betty and Veronica comic books (I aspired to be Betty), was suddenly reeling with deeper thoughts about life – its transitory nature and the inability to freeze a moment, to appreciate beauty in the present. I was reminded of a lyric from my then (and now) favorite movie, The Sound of Music, when the nuns pondered, “How do you keep a wave upon the sand?”

In Our Town, when Emily tries to keep that wave from receding, when she goes back in time to a routine morning with her mom in the kitchen, freezing its simple beauty, she finds that it can’t be done. She cries, “Oh earth, you’re too wonderful for anybody to realize you. Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it? – every, every minute?”  The Stage Manager responds, “No. The saints and poets, maybe they do some.” Emily concludes that humans are blind.

Now, decades past, Emily’s soliloquy, which encapsulates the theme of Our Town, still affects me – especially when I recognize a precious moment – in the moment. As I rock my baby grandson to sleep, taking in his smell, and each of his tiny sighing syllables, my inner Emily pleads, Can’t time just stop for this moment?

But there is no freezing of sweet moments, just as there is no fast forwarding through grief, when news of a car accident shakes your core and you want time to arch past so that every breath is not a primal scream…how could this have happened?

The futile human desire to hold on to time, or to sweep it forward, is a thing that the Bible speaks to. The prophet Isaiah said, “You will keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on you.”  Note the present tense. The verb, “is”.  That is the part Emily missed. Mr. Greco might say it is a key theme of the entire Bible. For God meets us only in the present. In fact, he identifies himself as I AM.

If we keep our focus on the God who IS, then all moments can be redeemed. We need not live in the shame of past mistakes or be anxious about future frailty. We need only “Be still and know that he is God.”  He is beside us, before us, eternally present, beyond time itself.

Psalm 46:1 says, “God is our present help in times of trouble.”  Only when we “stay” our minds on him, can we find that perfect peace, even in the midst of trouble. How is this done? By memorizing Scripture. By praying without ceasing. By getting to know God better by studying his word, both alone and in community.  All in the present, but informing our future, and redeeming our past.

Emily was right in that we cannot keep a wave upon the sand. We cannot freeze a hug, a sunset, a burst of laughter. And when experiencing profound grief, we cannot beam ahead. Emily implored her mother to look at her, really look at her. But the moment flew by unrecognized.

The only way to go through moments with hope and even joy is to breathe in God’s presence, to seek him with our mind, not merely our heart. And then to ride the waves holding his hand. 

May that be the theme of our life.