Waking Up

"You are waking me out of this sleepiness  into awareness that my life, my thoughts, my body, my tasks, my loves, passions, and sorrows are gifts from You, to be discovered and received this day."  Gunilla Norris. from Being Home, her book of common prayers.

I read these words last week and they struck me as true. The words struck me as useful. To be awakened into awareness is an amazing thing. I suffer from selective hearing and seeing.  I tend to hear what I'm listening for and see what I'm looking for.  And hear and see little else. Awareness on the other hand involves noticing what's going on around me and noticing everything. I've been working on this problem and opportunity for several years, but I still have a long way to go. Norris goes on to define this awareness as something as large as life. And life includes my thoughts, my body, my tasks, my loves, my passions and sorrows. Furthermore, she says, each of these things is a gift from God. Yes, my ability to think, to breathe, to function,  and to love are gifts from God,

Growing up I heard a lot about talents and talented people.  If one excelled in music, for example, it's because s/he had a lot of talent. Then it followed if you weren't any good in music, it was because you weren't talented. In my case as a  musician, I learned that the harder I worked, the longer I practiced, the more often I performed, the more talented I became. I think gifts work the same way. We are given these gifts, but they do little good if we don't open them and breathe life into them. These gifts do no good if  we don't use them for our own benefit and the benefit of others.

Norris states that these gifts include our passions and our sorrows.  It's easy to believe that God gives us passions to fuel our life and our loves, but would a loving God give a gift of sorrows? Does God intentionally make us suffer from time to time? Wouldn't only a cruel God do such a thing? Instead of God giving us sorrow, I prefer to think that God gives us the gift of dealing with our sorrows in redemptive ways. I prefer to think that over time the sorrows, that are a natural part of living, increase our capacity for love and for joy.

"You are waking me out of this sleepiness into awareness." Sleep is a very important part of our lives. The experts usually suggest eight hours of sleep as the optimum amount of sleep. Many people, however, require much less and other people require  more. Regardless of how long you sleep and how deeply you sleep, it's more important that after you sleep, you wake up. Excluding the phenomenon of dreaming, only waking people can be aware. And we need to be aware of everything and not just what we're looking for. Drowsy driving is dangerous. Drowsy living is unfortunate.

Finally, Norris says that these gifts are "to be discovered and received this day."  "NBC is working with a group of astrophysicists to create a new day of the week."  Dave Foley. Ha Ha !  But we don't need another day of the week, do we?  We need to wake up to the seven days we are given. Seven days give us plenty of time to be what we need to be and to do what we need to do. You don't create these gifts, you just receive them. Then you open them, take them out of the box and be grateful for the bounty you've been given. Learning to wake into awareness is perhaps the greatest gift of all.