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131 The Holy Surprise of Right Now If you can see your path laid out ahead of you step by step, then you know it’s not your path. —Joseph Campbell Inside Brooks Brothers’ windows it’s July. Sport shirts on sleek dummies speak in turquoise, polo, Bermuda and golf. Outside, it’s very much the first of March. The sport shirts say today’s tomorrow and the present tense be damned. They tell me to forget that here’s the only place we have. They claim what matters most is never now but next. I’ve heard this argument before. It leaves me sentenced to the future, and that’s much worse than being sentenced to the past. The past at least was real just once . . . What’s called religion offers me the same. Life’s never what we have but what’s to come. But where did Christ give heaven its address except within each one of us? So, anyone who claims it’s not 132 within but still ahead is contradicting God. But why go on? I’m sick of learning to anticipate. I never want to live a second or a season or a heaven in advance of when I am and where. I need the salt and pepper of uncertainty to know I’m still alive. It makes me hunger for the feast I call today. It lets desire keep what satisfaction ends. Lovers remember that the way that smoke remembers fire. Between anticipation and the aggravation of suspense, I choose suspense. I choose desire. ...

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