“Just one more, Lord. Let me get just one more.” This moving refrain sustained medic Desmond Doss throughout a memorable night in Okinawa, a night dramatized in the film Hacksaw Ridge. When Doss’s battalion evacuates a suicidal battlefield, Doss remains behind in the gathering dusk, hunched in grief over a comrade’s lifeless body. “I want to do your will,” he tells God, “but I can’t hear you.” Then comes the distant cry: “Medic!” He runs toward the voice, drags the wounded soldier to the ridge, and lowers him to safety. Another voice calls, and Doss responds — again and again. Through the night, he singlehandedly saves 75 men.

While Doss’s battalion retreated that evening after hours of horror, he knelt paralyzed at the thought of what was to come. But one voice called him to one act, and that act to another. As rescue followed rescue, a bleak future was recast as a present of hope.

Living in the present, rather than the past or the future, has long been recognized as a key to the spiritual life. The past cannot be changed; the future often proves entirely different from our imaginings. The present is where God makes known His will, desiring intimate union with the soul.

Of course, we must reflect on our past actions in order to grow as persons. And we must plan for the future. But if we allow past or future to become our only reality, dwelling on bygone wrongs without praying for the grace to forgive, finding joy only in future events that might never transpire, we miss the One who wishes to meet us now.

Seventeenth-century Jesuit Jean-Pierre de Caussade wrote luminously on this topic in Abandonment to Divine Providence: “The present moment is the ambassador of God to declare His mandates. The heart listens and pronounces its ‘fiat’” — its “may it be so.”

We must cultivate an ear that listens for God’s voice. Like the wounded soldier calling to Doss, God calls to us through the neighbor knocking unexpectedly upon our door, the broken dish that alters our afternoon’s plans, the interior suggestion to call a sick friend.



The value of the present became very clear to me this summer. A close relative underwent a heart procedure during my annual six-day retreat. The evening before, a Sister left a beautiful note assuring me of her prayers and reminding me: “As we gaze upon the loving crucifix, He only expects our many acts of gratitude.” It was both courageous and wise of her to exhort me to gratitude when a potentially dangerous procedure was following weeks of suffering. As I knelt before the monstrance that day during Eucharistic adoration, my pained heart, which would have repeated just one aspiration, “Jesus, help me,” was strengthened to add a second: “Thank you, Jesus.” It was all He wanted. Had I bemoaned the past or agonized over the future, I would have lost the present moment in which He whispered His love.

Sr. Maria Veritas Marks is a member of the Ann Arbor-based Dominican Sisters of Mary, Mother of the Eucharist.