Staying Awake - A Bad Commercial or a Calling?

Advent 1, Year A
December 2, 2007
Staying Awake – A Bad Commercial or a Calling?

This past Wednesday, at the Anglican devotional poetry gathering, a participant made an intriguing comment about Christian enlightenment. Whereas in many other faiths, the believer spends their lifetime in substantial efforts to gain enlightenment – through meditation, body postures, deep and rigorous education of the mind, leading towards a spiritual breakthrough at some distant point – Christianity is virtually the opposite. You are baptized, holy hands are laid on you, your forehead is anointed with the cross, you are fed bread and wine, and wa la! You are a Christian. You’ve made it. You’re in.

So then what? If you were older when you became a Christian, instead of just having been raised up in the faith, you may have experienced euphoria – joy and in love ness with the world and Christ and the Creator of all that is. Or you may have experienced deep joy at a time when your faith just opened up for you and you found a renewed vision of what it means for you that God shows himself in creation, that God shows himself in your life.

For most of us, those first blooms of conversion and renewed faith wear off. We do good deeds, we pray, we come to church, we join the choir and the committees, and eventually we wonder where the joy is? Where is the peace that passes all understanding? Where did it go? Staying awake and alert to what God is up to becomes increasingly difficult.

I’ve got George Herbert’s poetry at my fingertips right now – compliments of John Coolidge and Richard Cushman! And so I can’t help but notice that Herbert experienced this same arc of difficulty – from being at first joyful, to finding it increasingly difficult to stay awake and alert and ready for whatever God might be doing - Herbert writes about the beginning of his enlightenment:

“When first Thou didst entice to Thee my heart,
I thought the service brave:
So many joys I writ down for my part,
Besides what I might have
Out of my stock of naturall delights,
Augmented with Thy gracious benefits.

And so, full of bravery and with fantasies about the joys God is going to send him, Herbert enters into God’s service …. he serves with fidelity and patience this God who enticed him, who lured his heart into bondage … but instead of going from joy to joy, he gets really sick and writes “I was blown through with every storm and wind… and

Yet, lest perchance I should too happy be
In my unhappiness,
Turning my purge to food, Thou throwest me
Into more sicknesses.
Thus doth Thy power cross-bias me, not making
Thine own gift good, yet me from my ways taking.

Eventually, this good Christian man wishes he were a tree instead!

Now I am here, what thou wilt do with me
None of my books will show:
I read, and sigh, and wish I were a tree –
For sure, then, I should grow
To Fruit or shade; at least, some bird would trust
Her household to me, and I should be just.

The poem by the way is titled “Affliction I”. Apparently, there is more than one poem that Herbert wrote, titled Affliction! So, even our great Anglican poets found waking up to the Divine and staying awake and attentive and ready to respond, difficult to do.

When he was an old man, T.S. Elliot wrote about his conversion and what followed:

All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.

After a long time leaning in the same direction, running the race set before us, as St. Paul says, it becomes difficult to “stay awake, especially when we too, like Elliot, live in the old dispensation – with an alien people clutching their gods …. Actually, we live in a time and place in which there are many forces conspiring to help us clutch at false gods and stay asleep. Retail therapy is one among many common avenues that can lull us into sleep. That’s a particular form of sleepiness pushed at us from every angle during this Advent season – ironic really, as this season has been devoted, from the 6^th century on, to waking up.

But more than that, the pace of our lives and the tiredness that dogs us, makes good sound sleep sounds like heaven. The notion of staying awake and alert at all times sound like a really bad commercial. The truth is that for many of us, the good things that fill our lives – the everyday activities of eating and drinking and marrying and being married, and all the other activities such as picking up the pants at the cleaners, baking the birthday cupcakes, finding candles for the Advent wreath, getting the clothes out of the dryer before they are all wrinkled, making the costumes for the school play … just doing what we need to do to genuinely care for the immediate concerns that confront us seems like enough, like more than enough. Meanwhile there are large scale systems and structures pressing ahead, above and beyond us …. Things which affect economies and ecologies; relationships that are developing and breaking down between communities and nations. How attentive are we, really, to the big picture and the longer perspective? How much can we take in? How awake do we need to be? How awake can we be and still function in our day to day lives? How do we live within the old dispensation that is based in envy and greed and revenge with the new dispensation of equality and freedom, justice and peace that we have been baptized into in Christ? No wonder Herbert just wished he were a tree!

Thank goodness for the Eucharist. "Because in the Eucharist, God comes to us from the future as well as from the past. This Jesus – shaped God is able to lift our gaze beyond the immediate and place it into the perspective of the eternal, where there is bread and wine and rest enough for everyone." We are fed by this eternal perspective, so we can return to the world as awakened, wise and faithful servants. Awake and clearly convicted that all we have now is only entrusted to us as stewards. The truth is we come together primarily to be nurtured and sustained in thinking, speaking and acting continuously from that conviction.

Difficult? Yes. But there is plenty of daily help. Almost every day, I say the prayer by Reinhold Neibuhr, the same prayer that so many others have also found helpful to staying awake and

Living one day at a time;
Enjoying one moment at a time;
Accepting hardships as the pathway to peace;
Taking, as He did, this sinful world
as it is, not as I would have it;
Trusting that He will make all things right
if I surrender to His Will;
That I may be reasonably happy in this life
and supremely happy with Him
Forever in the next.
Amen.

The Rev. Linda Campbell

Resources:

Process and Faith, commentary by Paul Nancarrow, Advent 1, Year A

George Herbert, Affliction 1

T.S. Elliott, The Journey of the Magi