Carpe diem! Everyone wants to seize the day. But as Irish novelist, John McGahern, says: "There is nothing more difficult to seize than the day!" Why? Because we don’t really know how to seize the day. And I am still learning.
For example, a young man once wrote to the German poet, Rainer Marie Rilke (1875-1926) complaining that he wanted to be a poet, but his daily life offered little in the way of inspiration. His life was not the stuff of poetry, he complained: too much drudgery, too many pressures, life in a small village. How could he write poetry out of such life? He concluded by saying that he envied Rilke's life as an admired poet, living in a big city, meeting exciting people. Rilke wasn't exactly sympathetic: "If your daily life seems poor to you," he replied, "than you aren't poet enough to call forth its riches. For a poet, there are no uninteresting places, no uninteresting life." The day is there to be seized.
Robertson Davies (1913-1995), a renowned Canadian writer, recounts something similar. He tells of an incident where he received a letter from a young man asking him to write a letter of reference for a financial grant so that the young man, a budding writer, would have money to go off to a Mexican resort to work on his next novel. Davies replied that would not write the letter, not because he didn't want to support him, he wished him well as a writer, but because he felt the young man had a false fantasy as to how he might seize the moment and write his novel. Davies cautioned him about false romanticism: "You want to write something deep and inspirational between drinking margaritas and walking the beach". Nothing much will come of that, he warned. Stay home and write your book there. Annie Dillard, the Pulitzer Prize-winning American author gives similar advice. She prefers to do her writing in a plywood shack with no view. For her, it's easier to seize the moment in a quiet, hidden place than on some public perch that offers a vista of the world.
What these examples point to is that we often miss the moment because we have an overly-romantic, false, notion of what that means, like the two would-be writers who sought help from Rilke and Davies. How do we seize the day?
To seize the day is to meet God in that moment. It is to see Him in that place and have your spirit connect with His spirit in that hour. And when God is experienced in a moment, that moment is transformed – the mundane becomes filled with meaning; the routine becomes rich.
Every season, whether chronological, cultural, or spiritual, brings with it a certain spirit, mood, and feeling that we sometimes capture and sometimes miss. The same is true for the various periods of a day – the opening of the Word in the morning; the drive to work; the meeting at the office; the lunch with a friend; the strategizing time in the afternoon and the family dinner in the evening – when you see God in each of these periods, you have seized the moment.
But they can be easily missed. Who among us hasn't spoken words to this effect: "I was so busy and pressured this season that I missed enjoying the days." "I couldn't get into Christmas this year, because I was so busy." "I missed reflecting all this year. I was so preoccupied with so many things that it came and went before I even realized it was here. You know how these things happen!"
Indeed we do. Many things keep us from meeting God in the hour - preoccupation, tiredness, distraction, heartache, anger, daydreams, stress, hurriedness. It's easy to miss a special season and it's even easier to miss an ordinary morning, afternoon, evening, or an entire day.
What do we do so as to not miss them? We need to open the Word first thing in the morning and pray. Simply put: If we miss praying some morning there is, as our experience makes evident again and again, the real danger that we will also miss the entire day. The day will come and go and we will not meet with God in the moments of the day – we don’t see Him at work even through the mundane and the ordinary. A day will come and a day will go and we won't seize it ... and then it will not matter much, in terms of God’s mercy and grace and joy in our lives, whether we are walking a beach in Mexico or sitting in a plywood shack.
