I’ve recently been reading through the book The Discernment of Spirits again for the first time in over a decade. In it, Fr. Timothy Gallagher describes an experience of God’s love that St. Elizabeth Ann Seton had as a teenager. She describes an idyllic spring morning spent alone in a beautiful meadow overflowing with new life. The sky was clear blue and the air was perfectly warm. She writes that over the course of a couple hours, “she prayed, sang hymns, cried, laughed…and laid still to enjoy the heavenly peace that came over her soul.”  Then she describes what happened interiorly during that encounter with the Holy Spirit. Her words stopped me in my tracks:

“…I am sure, in the two hours so enjoyed, [I] grew ten years in the spiritual life…”

I read that line and immediately went back to read the entire excerpt again. She finds herself on holy ground. Her heart is so open to the Lord that she experiences a fresh outpouring of the Holy Spirit that compresses a decade of spiritual growth into a single day.

As I reflected on her story, the way her attention was fully focused on God in the present moment stood out to me the most. The ability to consistently choose where our attention goes is increasingly rare in our “attention economy”. The world, the flesh, and the devil make sure there is an endless stream of distractions available to pull us away from the present, from the gift, and from the grace the Lord has prepared for us in this moment…and in this one…and this one.

The temptation will always be there to become preoccupied with the past, anxious about the future, or distracted by countless things that are neither important nor urgent. The enemy of our souls is quite content to keep us living anywhere except where God is present: here and now. So let us choose, each day, to fix our attention on the One who gives life rather than takes it. I pray that you choose to be so present to the Lord in this very moment, whatever the circumstances of your life may be, that you become aware of the holy ground upon which you stand. I pray that from this place of openness, you receive a fresh outpouring of the Holy Spirit that accomplishes in you what might otherwise have taken decades.