Life should be a process of waking up. I was recently
thinking about some of my own waking up experiences. I define waking up
experiences as times when you realize that something is other than what you
thought it was, when you become aware that what you know is insufficient, or
skewed, or seen through a lens that distorts your vision. Paul talks about
seeing a dim reflection in a mirror in 1 Corinthians 13:12, and Rumi says “Wake
up, wake up! You have slept millions and millions of years. Why not wake up
this morning?”
Father Richard Rohr had a recent series of daily messages
about corporate sin, the sin perpetrated by powers and principalities that we
often fail to see as sin because we benefit from the system. Reading these
reminded me of one particular waking up experience. I woke up to the way I was
swept up in a materialistic, acquisitive culture, and how incompatible that was
to my faith.
I was not asleep to the disparities among people, both
within our country and in the world in general. I’d participated in mission
trips and I knew that I had significantly more resources than most of the
world’s people. But the waking up was the recognition that I was allowing
myself to be swept along in the general current of American culture, which is
oriented toward acquiring, holding, and protecting assets, and that this way of
living did not feel healthy for me as I sought to practice being a faithful
disciple of Jesus, who had very few assets.
It’s interesting how we pick and choose which parts of
Jesus’ teachings we want to follow and practice, or any of the Bible’s
teachings for that matter. Some of my waking up experiences have been around
the recognition that I cherry-pick which of Jesus’ examples I try to follow and
which I choose to ignore or explain away as irrelevant or unrealistic.
I realize that to live in our culture I will need certain
assets to function effectively in the vocation I feel called to practice. But I
am also aware that much of what I have is superfluous. While I am far from
living as simply as Jesus did, I am continuing to work to detach from the
desire to acquire and hold material assets because it is an expected practice
of our culture. It requires attention and discipline, because even in the
Western Church, we don’t necessarily advocate for going against the grain of
our culture with regard to materialism.
What experiences have you had of waking up? Are you
fighting to stay asleep? These are questions worth pondering, and questions I
return to time and time again.
