When is "the Instant"?
May 29, 1955
The Instant is when the man is there, the right man, the man of the Instant.
This is a secret which eternally will remain hidden from all worldly shrewdness, from everything which is only to a certain degree.
Worldly shrewdness stares and stares at events, at circumstances, it reckons and reckons, thinking that it might be able to distill the Instant out of the circumstances, and so become itself a power by the aid of the Instant, this breaking through of the eternal, hoping that itself might be rejuvenated, as it so greatly needs to be, by means of the new.
But in vain. Shrewdness does not succeed and never will to all eternity succeed by means of this surrogate — any more than all the arts of cosmetics succeed in producing natural beauty.
No, only when the man is there, and when he ventures as one must venture (which is precisely what worldly shrewdness and mediocrity want to avoid), then is the Instant — and the circumstances then obey the man of the Instant. In case nothing is brought into play but worldly shrewdness and mediocrity, the Instant never comes. Things may go on for hundreds of thousands and millions of years constantly the same — it looks perhaps as if it might now soon come; but so long as there is only worldly shrewdness and mediocrity, etc., the Instant comes not, no more than does an unfruitful man beget children.
But when the right man comes, yea, then the Instant is there. For the Instant is precisely that which does not lie in the circumstances, it is the new thing, the woof of eternity — but that same second it masters the circumstances to such a degree that (adroitly calculated to fool worldly shrewdness and mediocrity) it looks as if the Instant proceeded from the circumstances.
There is nothing worldly shrewdness so broods over and so hankers after as the Instant. What would it not give to be able to calculate rightly! Yet no one is more surely excluded from ever grasping the Instant than worldly shrewdness. For the Instant is heaven's gift to — a pagan would say, to the fortunate and the enterprising, but a Christian says, to the believer. Yea, this thing which by worldly shrewdness is so deeply despised, or at the most dressed up with borrowed phrases of Sunday solemnity, this thing of believing, that and that only is related as possibility to the Instant. Worldly shrewdness is eternally excluded, despised and abhorred, as things are in heaven, more than all vices and crimes, because in its nature it of all things most belongs to this wretched world, and most of all is remote from having anything to do with heaven and the eternal.