“Being and Becoming . . . Awake”
“The human journey is one of becoming.”[1]
“Awake, sleeper, rise from the dead. And Christ will shine on you.” Ephesians 5:14
“In God we live, and move, and have our being.” Acts 17:28
“The Great Awakening.” It may sound familiar. It is the term given to numerous religious movements that swept through the United States from the 18th-20th century. They were slightly different in emphasis due to the protestant ministers like George Whitefield and Jonathan Edwards that were leading them. But they shared this in common; a specific calling to an individual conviction of sin and the need to be a more moral person. In other words, they promoted yet again, the false idea that spirituality is about behavior modification rather than deep transformation. So in fact The Great Awakening is a very ironic paradox, because in truth it put people further into their religious sleep.
Some good friends recently sent me a couple of bags of Starbucks coffee, with an attached note that in addition to other benefits, it does wonders for helping keep people awake during sermons. Though they were joking, they are not far from the truth. However, it’s not the sermons that put people to sleep (well maybe sometimes), but the constant attention given to the part of our small, fictitious selves that has been led to believe that our lives, even and especially our spiritual lives, are about doing, accomplishing, getting, and giving. Jesus told a parable in Matthew 25 about the need to stay awake. But how does that happen? Especially when we are inundated by a pseudo-spiritual emphasis on the externals, which is not significantly different in substance from that of the society in which we live; it’s just packaged differently, wrapped in a thin-coating of religiosity.
Becoming a human being, rather than a human doing, and Being Awake is not comprised of an instruction book with “How To’s”, so popular in protestant practices. Nor is it a set program with a one size fits all formula for faith. Rather it is a stripping down and doing away with all that one considers most essential to their small self, and a movement into something, and someone, much deeper. It is a movement, precipitated and performed by the Spirit, from blindness to seeing, from skimming surfaces to diving into the depths, from hypocrisy to authenticity, from posing and pretending to being genuine, from death to life, from religious relativism to eternal truth, from a focus on information, education, inspiration, and indoctrination to lasting Transformation.
What is needed for this? A stripping away of the egoic small self in which we exist and a movement into the true Self in which we live, and move, and have our being. And how does this happen? Quite possibly in a number of ways—there is no set system or set of instructions for how God chooses to work in, with, and through each person. We’ll delve deeper into this next week. But for now be certain that transformation that leads to awakening and greater awareness is not the result of our own volition.
So, dear reader, are you asleep?
Are you focused on the “doing”, rather than being and becoming?
If so, are you open to how The Spirit may work, or where it may lead you on this path to transformation?
I leave you with this thought from Benner:
“Jesus urged people to watch and listen—in short, to pay attention. Once we pay attention to something , we are ready to be gripped by it and drawn into awareness and wakefulness. It can start right now. In fact, there is not time other than the present moment in which it can happen. All that is required is to be present to yourself in this moment.”[2]
[1] “Spirituality and the Awakening Self”, David Benner. vii
[2] IBID.