Advent: Awake

Awake is such an interesting word. What are you like when you're awake?

I have one daughter who insists she's awake when I first come into her room to get her up for school. Her eyes are shut, she's unresponsive to prodding, and ignores my entreaties to get up for school. If I come back in ten minutes, she won't have moved, but she'll swear she was awake all along.

Another daughter will audibly protest at being disturbed, but she's been known to go have lengthy conversations and even to go downstairs, eyes wide open;; only to have no recollection of the experience two hours later when you pry her from bed a second (or third, or fourth) time.

The third daughter springs out of bed alert, jumps into her clothes and is ready to face the door before you can say jack sassafras, but even she has been known to smack the alarm clock into next week and then complain that it never went off.

What does it mean to be awake, anyway?

I think a lot of us imagine ourselves as fully awake and alert, like the Buddha on the day he was born. According to Buddhist Scriptures, Siddharta Gautama came out of his mother's womb, looked around and presciently announced that this would be his final trip around the karmic wheel.

Being awake is a learned process, begun with the incoherent grunts that suggest we actually might be human, and running up the spectrum to the point that we actually know where and who we are, if nothing else. Usually we stop there, and become awake to our desires and needs.

Wake further. Learn to hear the lonely cry of the child seeking approval from her parents; the torment of those who struggle through life without friends to laugh, love and live with; and the pain of those whom the world was chewed on for too long and too well.

Wake still more, and discover that you have the tools within you to be the one who sets prisoners free, teaches the lame to dance, and even breathes new life to the dead.

Be awake.

Advent: When waiting is agony

Today’s the first day of Advent, the season when Christians traditionally mark with anticipation the birth of Jesus.

To the extent that we think of it, we usually think that Advent carries less importance than Christmas. It's an easily skipped prelude to the main event of the Incarnation, when the eternal, unchanging and unknowable Tao changed and became mortal for the first time and was an unremarkable baby few people outside his own family even noticed.

That’s so wrong. Oh God, we desperately miss the point when we do that.

Advent is a heavy season, darker even than Lent and that brutal Saturday when Jesus lay decomposing in the Tomb. Advent is heavy, oppressively so. It hunches our shoulders, bows our necks and furrows our foreheads with grief, with anger and despair.

Advent raises the accusing finger of human history, of every war, of every holocaust and genocide, every year of children’s lives stolen in slavery, every refugee denied safe harbor, every hour the wicked sit enthroned and defended by the powerful, and it points that finger in the face of the Almighty, and it demands justice.

“Don’t you give a shit?” it asks, and heaven’s only response is “Be patient.”

And the years grind slowly on, and God stays silent, and his people are patient, and they grow old and die; and another generation replaces them and it too is patient, and grows old and dies; and so does another generation, and another and then another.

“Come into the darkness,” the generations cry together. “Come into the darkness and make a difference.”

This month join the cloud of all the others throughout the ages who waited for something they knew was missing, even if they couldn’t express it. Learn the longing they felt, and decide with them if it was worth the wait.

Welcome to Advent.


Copyright © 2019 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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