Presence

Part of my daily prayer involves thinking about God as presence. I started out thinking about God as omnipresence, but I wanted to avoid the thought of filling up a space that was there first. I think of presence as being there even before space. Instead of presence being within space, I think of space as a concept within presence, where presence is the very fact of existence.

Last Saturday at the folklife festival, I saw two sisters performing. The older sister is thirteen, though to look at her, she might have been older. She was playing fiddle in a group, and she stood poised, her foot tapping, her bow moving confidently and jauntily. She was smiling at everyone, and her eyebrows would go up as the music lilted. She clearly was enjoying the songs, and encouraging all the audience to enjoy them too. My thought, looking at her, was that she exuded presence. Not a self-important or ego-based stage presence, but something much more engaging. I suppose in the past, from my own struggles, I might have thought stage presence was basically the absence of stage fright, but this was something different. This was a positive and powerful thing.

In the next number, the girl performed with her younger sister, who played the harp. The younger sister is maybe about nine. She has the same expressive eyebrows, and a softer version of the same poise. As she was playing her harp, she looked out at everyone and smiled with each pluck of a string. My sense was that she had full expectation that she was pleasing the audience, and she was drinking in the love, reveling in their appreciation. I looked at their mom, then, who was in the back, as I was, watching and cheering them on. I thought, what could their mother have given these girls to have them be so confident? It must have been a deep and constant appreciation of their presence, with no judgment waiting to happen. Their great musical ability must have arisen in an atmosphere of permission, not pressure.

I had a little remorse, then, about my own parenting. Had I not, all too often, focused on absence instead of presence? - Noticed things that I saw as wrong or lacking, and tried to find ways to fix or develop them? I saw that this would always be counter-productive, making it seem like there were gaps and holes in my childrens’ being, engendering self-doubt and fear. My next thought was to be grateful that I’m not the parent – God is. It’s God’s being that determines what they are, and no foolishness on my part can change any of that. Indeed, since presence is substance, presence determines what we all are. So the only influence I can have had on them, all this time, is what comes from my presence. Things that come from absence – worry, fear, foolishness – can’t have any influence, while what comes from presence – my love – will always be felt. I realized that even now, I don’t have to look for ways to fix any results of my absence-based approach. The way to help – and really heal – any seeming gaps in confidence and presence is simply to see what’s present and love it. In other words, see everything that’s good (since, after all, God is all presence and God is good.)

This might seem like yet another refrain of “accentuate the positive”, but here’s what’s different about it for me: presence and absence are not complementary opposites. They don’t act the same way but in a different flavor. Two illustrations:

1) Though we have flashlights to use to get rid of darkness, there’s no such thing as a flashdark. There can’t be any device that can throw a beam of darkness into a place and get rid of the light. This is because darkness is not a positive quality. It has no presence of its own, no ability to move itself around, no ability to determine anything.
2) Artists often work with negative space. They train themselves to see the spaces in between the objects, and to use these spaces when considering the balance of their composition. But in real life, negative space doesn’t have presence. You might see the space between two trees, and it might look like some kind of a beast. But that space has no power to come hulking out from its place and sit in front of you. It can’t grow bigger and change the shape or size or position of the trees that delineate it. It can’t make any difference about anything at all. And whenever you move, the negative space changes. It has no continuity nor ability to maintain itself as an entity.

So if God is presence, there is really never any need to focus on absence. The way to fix any problem is just to look at what’s present. Then any sense of absence simply falls away.

This is a radical approach for me. It means no more diagnoses of any problems. No more thrashing through how to fix things. No place for annoyance, irritation, despair. Or, at least, a quick path out of them: a simple question – what’s present here? A reminder that it’s useless to focus in on absence, since absence has no substance. A reminder that all I am comes from elemental goodness itself, which is as present as God, who is presence itself.

I can feel this presence of myself as the expression of the presence of God. From this perspective, anything I need to attain seems easy. It comes out of the infinite substance that is already mine. I don’t need to conjure up something to fill in gaps in my achievement. I just have to live in God as a flower lives in the morning – supple and fragrant with the life force whose flow is my being.