Advent 1: Wake Up and Dream

Isaiah 2:1-5
Psalm 122
Romans 13:11-14
Matthew 24:36-44

A recent cartoon in the Sentinel shows a man and a woman in bed. They both look worse for wear, and she says to him, “Gravity seems stronger on cold mornings.” How difficult, how unpleasant it is to wake up; espcially as the days get shorter and the mornings colder; that’s when the snooze button on the alarm becomes your best friend – just five more minutes you think to yourself, you tell you partner, just five more minutes. You want to put off that moment of stark reality – of pulling back the covers and hitting with your feet that cold floor – for as long as you can. And there goes the alarm again. “You know what time it is”, it seems to say “it is now the moment for you to wake from sleep; the night is far gone, the day is near.” (Romans 13: 11, 12) It is no surprise that so many of the world’s religions and spiritual traditions, Christainity included, use the image of “waking up” to represent spiritual awakening or conversion. Waking up, whether physically or spiritually, shakes you up. It jolts us into reality, whether the reality of the morning or the reality of our lives. The expression, “wake up and smell the coffee”, exists for a reason, and also intimates at the human propensity to avoid waking up at almost any cost.

Anthony DeMello was a Jesuit and psychotherapist, as well as a prolific writer and speaker on spirituality. He wrote once: “Spirituality means waking up. Most people, even though they don't know it,
are asleep. They're born asleep, they live asleep, they marry in their
sleep, they breed children in their sleep, they die in their sleep without
ever waking up.” As we enter the season of Advent in which we prepare ourselves not only to celebrate Jesus’ coming “to visit us in great humility”, but also to greet him on “the last day, when he shall come again in his glorious majesty to judge both the living and the dead” the message is clearly one that calls us to wake up; to wake up to who we really are, to wake up to the possibilities of what we are called to be, to wake up to the inevitable end of all things, to wake up and realise the extent to which we pass our lives asleep. And yet, we have to accept how unwilling most of us are to wake up, the extent to which we really do live our lives asleep; and while staying asleep may shield us from some of the more unpleasant consequences of waking up, it also keeps us closed to experiencing real beauty, as Anthony DeMello continues: “[those who will not wake up] never understand the loveliness and the beauty of
this thing that we call human existence.” Let face it, we miss a lot when we are asleep. Lying in bed under the covers keeps us from facing the harsh, cold morning, but it also keeps us from seeing and experiencing the real beauty of glistening frost on the grass, or the sun’s rays lighting up the skies, flooding the mountaintops around us with light. Only by waking up can we really engage with the world and with God. Only by waking up can we dare to envision what it truly good about us and about our world. If you will pardon me, I want to again quote DeMello because he puts it all so beautifully: “You know,” he says, “all mystics – …no matter what their theology, no matter what 
their religion – are unanimous on one thing: that all is well, all is
well. Though everything is a mess, all is well. Strange paradox, to be
sure. But, tragically, most people never get to see that all is well
because they are asleep. They are having a nightmare.” Ironically, he equates sleeping with nightmares, and conversely, I would suggest we can equate waking with dreams. It is only when we are really awake that we can dream; dream a new vision for ourselves, for the present, for the future, because when we are really awake we know that “salvation is nearer to us…than when we first became believers” and we can dare to wake up and dream.

Look at the vision which the prophet Isaiah dreams for the people of Israel in his prophecy when peoples “shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks’; when “nations shall not raise sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more”. (Isaiah 2:4) These are not the words of the someone who is asleep, but rather of one who is completely awake, awake to possibility, awake to God’s plan for a renewed heaven and earth, awake to hope. That kind of dream – the dream of vision, not the dream of fantasy – entails, more than anything, being awake to the reality of life in all its challenging facets. Living awake lives means living self-conscious lives, refletive lives. It means we do not simply go along with the status quo, or even with our own initial visceral reactions to people and situations. It means we never step back from asking the hard questions, or follow the path of least resistance. It means being ready to greet the fullness of God’s reign wherever we may discern it, and no matter how uncomfortable it may make us feel. It means living consciously, as opposed to accidentally. Only when we live in this way can we be ready to enter fully into the life of God’s kingdom and God’s purposes. Jesus tells his followers “Keep awake…for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming”. (Matthew 24:42) If we are to enter fully into God’s vision and God’s reign, then being awake to it starts right here and right now so that we can recognise it when we see it in part, and so that when it comes in its fullness we are not taken by surprise, neither are we left behind.

As the days grow shorter, the temptation is to sleep, to hide ourselves beneath the covers and protect ourselves from the increasing cold. And we can live our entire lives like that, asleep, protected and warm. Yet, Advent’s call is to attend always to the light in the midst of the dark, and allow that light to awaken us and draw us out of ourselves, to awaken us to the beauty and reality of life and of God’s vision; to awaken us to real life; to awaken us, so we can dream.