the now of now

I walked into the dining room this morning and stopped at the sight of this light on the table, sunlight illuminating a candle that was my grandmother's, a saucer that belonged to some mysterious but loving caretaker for many years before I found it in a box of china in a thrift shop, a book (on my comps list) that arrived last week and surprised me with its maple-leaf cover almost as much as it surprised me with the beauty of many of its essays. The sunshine comes in brief rectangles these days, and we take what we can get.

Here is a bit from one of those surprisingly lovely essays:

In contrast to the temporality that Heidegger derived from Pauline apocalypticism, [the temporality of the kingdom Jesus preached] is not a futurally oriented temporality, full of anxiety about what is coming next, of fear and trembling at the uncertainty of the time. On the contrary, the coming of the kingdom lays anxiety to rest, for the rule of God, which is in the midst of us, sustains us. Rather than something futural, this is a presential time, a time of presencing, which lets today be today. By trusting oneself to God's rule, the day is not drained of its time. Today is not sacrificed to tomorrow, spent in making onself safe and secure against tomorrow. It is a temporality of trust, of trusting oneself to God's rule, and in so doing to time and the day.

John D. Caputo, "Reason, History, and a Little Madness"