Last weekend, like many around the country, we gathered with
family to celebrate the 4th of July. After a beautiful day on the water – boating, swimming, and
playing around the lake – we gathered at waters edge to enjoy the fireworks
display. The scene was gorgeous -
a sea of boats anchored out in the water before us, brilliant blasts of fiery
color expanding across the night’s sky, and the ooooo’s and aaaaah’s of the
community rejoicing in each new spectacle of light.
Jackson, my four year old son, was on my lap at the time,
curled up in a blanket on the dock.
At one moment, just before the glorious finale, he exclaimed (quite out of the
blue), “This is the best.” We all chuckled
and smiled, knowing that he was right but marveling in the fact that such a young
kid could recognize it. And then,
as the sky erupted with the anticipated finale of rockets and booms, I look
down to find Jackson. . .
. . . fast asleep.
Just when things were heating up, right before the moment we
were all waiting for, Jackson nods off (don’t they call that narcolepsy?). As the intensity mounted, as the thrill
of light and sound was just beginning to overtake him, he drifted into slumberland. Unthinkable!
Yet, in a spiritual sense, we do it all the time. The thrill of religious experience is
universal. Anyone who has had an
encounter with the living God knows what I’m talking about. It changes you. It awakens you to a new reality. It gives you new eyes to see and a new
heart to love. It moves you to
forgive when you feel like retaliating.
It inspires you to give when selfishly you’d rather take. At times, it can even urge you to
sacrifice something very dear to you for the sake of another or for the greater
good.
What I’m talking about here is what the Christian tradition
calls conversion, and our lives
represent a continuous invitation to be drawn deeper into relationship with the
God who created you in his image and longs to bring you to fulfillment
according to that sacred design.
Yet many of us, just when we think we’re on track, just when
a religious experience has inspired us to a heightened level of consciousness,
we fall asleep. I’m not talking
about backsliding here into sinful patterns of behavior, though this is
something we’ve all experienced.
Many of us can fall asleep spiritually when we’re being the most religious. Instead of opening ourselves to the ongoing invitation of
God to challenge and renew us, we opt for all the externals of religiosity and
can’t imagine what more God could ask of us.
As Richard Rohr notes:
We become religious and take on a
certain kind of jargon, a certain kind of external behavior. But conversion, which demands a great
transcendence of the ego, never really happens. I think in many cases that’s why so many people are,
unfortunately but sadly true, turned off by religion and by religious people,
because they don’t feel they are encountering the real! They don’t feel,
when all is said and done, that they’re encountering Christ. They’re encountering a religious
persona, a mask, a sort of stage presence we take on.[1]
We may be feverishly engaged in all kinds of religious
activity, but are we open to the change God wants to enact in us? We might be militant about our prayers and rituals, but are we really listening? Our Christian faith maintains that the only true religious path is the one that leads us to
participate in the will of God.
Jesus reminds us, “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter
the kingdom of heaven, but only he who does the will of my Father who is in
heaven.”[2] Ablaze with all the lights and sounds of our own religious actions, we often find ourselves asleep to the transforming power of God. Perhaps its time for all of us to awake from our busy slumber, arise, and ask, with open minds and humble hearts, what God really asks of us today.
This is a fantastic post! Right on!
ReplyDeleteThanks Andre. :)
Delete