Be Awake
Richard Rohr reflects upon Jesus’ teaching his disciples to “be awake,” which Richard understands as the key to authentic religion:
In Mark 13:33–35, Jesus tells his disciples, “Be awake. Be alert.… You do not know when the Lord of the house is coming, whether in the evening, or at midnight, or at cock crow, or in the morning.”
Most of us probably hear such a passage as if it were threatening or punitive, as if Jesus is saying, “You’d better do it right, or I’m going to get you.” But Jesus is not talking about a judgment. He’s not threatening us or talking about death. He’s talking about the forever coming of Christ, the eternal coming of Christ … now … and now … and now.…
Christ is always coming; God is always present. It’s we who are not! Jesus tells us to always be ready, to be awake, to be fully conscious and expectant. It’s the key to all spirituality, because we usually are not.
Most of us just repeat the same routines every day, and we’re upset if there are any interruptions to our patterns. Yet God is invariably and ironically found in the interruptions, the discontinuities, the exceptions, the surprises—and seldom in the patterns. God has to catch us literally “off guard”!
I often say to myself “Just this!” even amidst the things I don’t want, I don’t expect, and sometimes don’t like—“in the evening, or at midnight, or at cock crow, or in the morning.” [1]
The great task of religion is to keep us fully awake, alert, and conscious. Then we will know whatever it is that we need to know. When we are present, we will know the Presence. It is that simple and that hard. Too much religion has encouraged us to be unconscious, but God respects us too much for that.
In the Garden of Gethsemane, the last words Jesus spoke to his apostles were, “Stay awake.” In fact, he says it twice (see Matthew 26:38–41). The Buddha offered the same wisdom; “Buddha,” in fact, means “I am awake.”
Staying awake comes not from willpower but from a wholehearted surrender to the moment as it is. If we can be present, we will experience what most of us mean by God, and we do not even need to call it God. It’s largely a matter of letting go of resistance to what the moment offers or to quit clinging to a past moment. It is an acceptance of the full reality of what is right here and now. It will be the task of our whole lives.
We cannot get there by any method whatsoever; we can only be there. The purest form of spirituality is to find God in what is right in front of us—the ability to accept what the French Jesuit and mystic Jean Pierre de Caussade (1675–1751) called the “sacrament of the present moment.” [2]
From Surprised by God
John Chrysostom, commenting on the story of Lazarus, observed that “many are offended when they see any of those who are pleasing to God suffering anything terrible.” Yet the hard truth is that those who are “dear to God” are no more exempted from the sorrows of this life than are non-believers. Nor would they want to be, Still, now, no less than then, it is a hard truth to hear that someone we love—and someone we know loves God and is loved by God—is ill. We inevitably find ourselves asking some form of this question: why does an all-powerful, all-good God allow any evil or suffering at all? If God in fact does love us, and if, as my eight-year-old son puts it, God “has it in him” to keep us from sorrow, then why is anyone ever ill or in trouble? There is, in short, no good answer for us to give to that question. We can offer no adequate theodicy, no righteous justification for God. Instead, we have to live with what we have received: the hope that when all is said and done, God will show himself to be worthy of our confidence. Until then, we pray and we wait. We pray the prayer of the prophets—“How long, Lord?”—and the prayer of the apostles—“Come quickly, Jesus.” Above all, we pray the prayer of Jesus— “Father, let your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”
Green, Chris E. W.. Surprised by God: How and Why What We Think about the Divine Matters . Cascade Books, an Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers. Kindle Edition.
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