Wide Awake

Jesus said to his disciples:

"Stay awake!

Notice the exclamation mark and the word 'stay'. He is not saying “Wake up!” but he is shaking them and imploring them to stay awake. There’s urgency in Jesus’s  voice because there's a real danger in getting drowsy and nodding off. Sleep has always been a metaphor for death. When Jesus raised the daughter of Jarius, he insisted “She is only sleeping”. He then took her by the hand and said to her, “Talitha, koum,” which means, “Little girl, I tell you to get up!”

In the true story of British polar explorer Ernest Shackleton’s great rescue effort, He and two of his companions almost died because they fell asleep. After a harrowing journey sailng over 800 miles of open sea in a lifeboat, they arrived at their destination, an island. The problem was the whaling station which they needed to get to was on the other side of the island.

That whaling station meant contact with people and the only chance Shackleton had of saving his stranded crew. They had to hike over several glaciers and mountain ranges in the middle of the night. As they arrived at yet another snowy mountain peak Shackleton, the preeminent leader, told his exhausted men that they may take a brief nap. He himself fought the urge to close his eyes. For if he had, he knew they would all die of hypothermia and exhaustion. He let them sleep for 5 minutes and then woke them, saying to them that they had slept for a half hour. In this case, sleep really did equate to death. How many times must Shackleton have told himself, ‘Stay awake!” as he watched his friends slumped over each breath becoming heavier, eventually into full blown snoring?

We are in some way in the predicament of Shackleton and his men. We’ve been through a harrowing past few years. We've trekked over perilous terrain with a pandemic, a contested election, civil unrest, an economic collapse, inflation, the suspension of our constitutional liberties, people labeled as ‘non-essential’, our churches and the Eucharist we were told were non-essential, the forced masking, vaccine mandates, closing the schools and small businesses as Walmart remained open, many young otherwise healthy people dying suddenly as doctors claimed to be ‘baffled’, the scapegoating and vilification of the unvaccinated, a sharp rise in mental illness and the now we find ourselves on the precipice of yet another spell of covid hysteria.

Many of us became wide awake to the folly of blindly trusting mainstream news, politicians, pharmacists, doctors, ‘experts’ and bureaucrats. Sadly, we even became awake to the fact that our church leaders mostly caved and ceded their ecclesial authority to governors such as Gavin Newsome.

That’s right, Gavin Newsome was the boss of my spiritual life, allowing me to attend church outside, six feet apart, with a mask, so long as I didn't sing. If that didn’t wake me up I don't know what would have. 

"Stay awake!

For you do not know on which day your Lord will come.

Be sure of this: if the master of the house

had known the hour of night when the thief was coming,

he would have stayed awake

and not let his house be broken into.

So too, you also must be prepared,

for at an hour you do not expect, the Son of Man will come.

We must clear the sand from our eyes and read the signs of the times. Being awake primarily means being alive in Christ. Having sanctifying grace and keeping that divine life alive. Having both the light of reason and the light of faith to see where we are going in the night, we must stay awake and keep watch for others who are too exhausted, scared and weak. Above all. being awake means being ready to meet the Savior face to face with gratitude and love in our hearts.

Now we can see the King and have hope. Like Shackleton, I see the whaling station in the distance, “Wake up! Get up! We have to keep moving! Our rescue is at hand”.

We must not go back to sleep lest we die.