“Stay awake,” I read in Matthew’s gospel today, “because
you do not know the day when your master is coming.” (Matthew 24:42-51).
It made me
realize how very asleep I’ve been, how unaware of God’s presence in my life and
in the world, and how I’ve allowed having a lot of things to do to separate me
from the love of God.
Anthony
DeMello, a priest who wrote several books on spirituality, wrote that, “Love
springs from awareness. In order to truly love, and to know the love that
surrounds us each and every moment of our lives, we must learn two types of
awareness. The first is to see clearly
the other—the person, object or reality—as it really is. And this involves the enormous discipline of
dropping our desires, our prejudices, our memories, our projections, and our
selective way of looking.” “What good is it,” he asks, “if we perform an act of
service for someone whom we have not even taken the trouble to really see?”
The second
awareness is an awareness of self; “to ruthlessly flash the light of awareness
on your motives, your emotions, your needs, your dishonesty, your self-seeking,
your tendency to control and manipulate.
This means calling things by their name, no matter how painful the
discovery and the consequences. We must also become aware of our gifts, our
strengths, and of the ways in which we’re blessed with competence, that we
might appropriately thank the Giver and use these skills for the building of
the reign of God.”
The Psalms
remind us that God’s time is not our time (Psalm 90:3-17). When we busy ourselves with work and chores,
what we’re telling ourselves is that tomorrow, or the next day or the next,
we’ll give ourselves time to become aware of God. But how sad that is for us, to miss the love
that’s poured out for us today. How sad,
too, to ignore the cries of our hearts, to dishonor our deepest self in favor
of a sleepwalking existence.
I don’t t
think that there’s anything wrong with having a lot to do. But during these times we must be careful to
make sure that we also honor the deep desires of our hearts, the longing for
quiet time and reflection that are so essential to our being. And we mustn’t allow the many tasks we have
to do to become blinders which keep us from seeing the Divine Other in all God’s
many manifestations. Because it is only in
this honoring, this awareness, that we can be truly awake to the coming of
Christ in every moment of our lives.
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