awakening, day 3

Come to Stillness:

Take a few minutes to allow your mind and heart to be still before God.

Opening Prayer:

Lord, awaken me, you whose love burns beyond the stars; light the flame of my lantern that I may always burn with love. (A Traveler Toward the Dawn by John Eagan)

Psalm for the Week: Psalm 28

Scripture for the Day: 1 Samuel 3:1-21

Reading for Reflection:

Spiritual awakening is a two-sided experience.  It is an encounter with the living God; it is also an encounter with our true self.  It is coming to see something of ourselves as we are and coming to see something of God as God is.

     This experience can be gradual or radical.  It can take place through everyday events or in an extraordinary experience.  It can be one focal experience or a whole sequence that finally falls together for us.  On some occasions, moments of awakening begin with an experience of who God is, such as Isaiah’s—“I saw the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up” (Isaiah 6:1).  Then, in the light of that experience, we awake to who we are—“Woe is me!…I am a man of unclean lips” (Isaiah 6:5).  On other occasions, like Jacob, we may be very much aware of who we are as we seek to escape from the mess we have made of our life (Genesis 27:41-44).  Then we encounter God in the midst of our turmoil—“Surely the Lord is in this place, and I did not know it” (Genesis 28:16).  Awakening can come in a variety of ways.

     Two basic emotions go with awakening: it is both a comfort and a threat.  It is a comfort because there is a sense of awakening to deeper realities of who we are and who God is.  But at the same time there is threat: in that awakening, we recognize that we are not what we ought to be and that God is something far more than we thought.  And so there is an ambivalence in genuine awakening.  Something in us hungers for this, yet something in us also resists.

     Genuine awakening is the awareness of a door being opened to a whole new dynamic of being.  We realize we have come to a threshold of some sort, and there is need of a response.  Our response may be immediate, or it may come after much wrestling and recurrence.  Some people are aroused into early stages of wakefulness and then quickly subside into sleep.  They don’t like what is out there.  It is not time to get up yet.  They will be roused up again and lie back down again, and that pattern can continue until finally they come to the point of awakening: they step across the threshold of the open door into a new relationship with God.

     Awakening is seen in the classical Christian tradition as the beginning of the process: the first step of our journey, our pilgrimage, toward wholeness. (Invitation to a Journey by M. Robert Mulholland Jr.)

Reflection and Listening: silent and written

Prayer: for the church, for others, for myself

Song for the Week: Crown Him With Many Crowns

Crown him with many crowns, the Lamb upon his throne.
Hark! How the heavenly anthem drowns all music but its own.
Awake, my soul, and sing of him who died for thee,
and hail him as thy matchless King through all eternity.

Crown him the Lord of love, behold his hands and side,
those wounds, yet visible above, in beauty glorified.
No angel in the sky can fully bear that sight,
but downward bends his burning eye at mysteries so bright.

Closing Prayer:
O God and Father, I repent of my sinful preoccupation with visible things. The world has been too much with me. You have been here and I knew it not. I have been blind to Your presence. Open my eyes that I may behold You in and around me. For Christ’s sake, Amen. (The Pursuit of God by A. W. Tozer)