What are you awake to?

Let me begin with a bit of a riddle.
We are most used to them in hotels. But they happen in hospitals. On roadsides after a minor or major accident. In New York and the Pentagon and a field in Philadelphia. In churches or in your car or in just about any place you can imagine. Sometimes you ask for them. Often they come unbidden. You can even set them yourselves. Most of us do it every night. Any ideas?

They are WAKE UP CALLS.

The strident clanging/buzzing of an alarm lets you know it is time to wake up. And whether it is the news that there are only 22 shopping days left till Christmas, or 6 class days left before exams, or the ticking of a biological clock, or the news that one you love has cancer or the discovery of a passion that runs so deep within you can hardly stand it - we are different because of that call.

Wake up calls. Though they come in different forms, there is a sameness to them, isn't there? Their clanging moves us from the land of slumber to a new reality. The bid us leave behind the world we were in - be that sleep, unhealthy habits, unhealthy relationships or boredom) and enter AWAKE into a new reality, ready to make the choices necessary to live in that new place. Wake up calls invite us to see the world and our place in it in different ways, with new decisions and new directions.

Wake up calls. The first Sunday of Advent is filled with them. Isaiah invites us to wake up to a world without war, without violence. Paul tells us: "It is now the hour for you to wake from your sleep." And we can be asleep in a hundred ways. Asleep to the pain in our own families, asleep to the needs of those who will go to sleep hungry tonight, asleep to the demands of justice. Asleep even to God himself. Jesus says: Stay awake, therefore. You cannot know the day that your Lord is coming. The people in the gospel are not bad folks, just asleep. Unaware. Not living in the moment. Two are working in the fields. One is taken, one is left. Two women doing ordinary tasks of the day. Yet one is ready, the other is not. Why? The conclusion Matthew leaves for us is simple - one was awake to the moment completely, the other was not.

In my own life, I may have shared with some of you the story of an NPR interview. It was the woman who wrote the book: Cookbook for a small planet. She is very involved in work for global hunger and poverty issues. The interviewer asked her if her work was affected by September 11. She said, in many ways, it has made my work easier. When people ask the question what kind of beliefs and political structure and support system allows people in good conscience to plan to fly planes, fully loaded and fully fueled into the twin towers and the pentagon? I ask, what kind of belief system and political structures and support systems allow 2/3 of the world to go to bed hungry tonight while I sleep undisturbed in my own bedroom? And the wake up call went off in my life again. So I find myself pledging to put some of my precious commodity - time - at the service of the poor at St. Jane center this advent....

Wake up calls. Things which call us to be aware, awake to the NEWNESS of this advent season. I invite you at the beginning of this advent season to two disciplines this first week of advent.

1. Where are you asleep? Look for things you avoid, times when you look the other way, where you make a choice not to face something in your life. Where you expend energy NOT to see. And then ask God for the grace and energy to know what to do differently.
   
2. What are you awake to? Besides the awareness of the issue of hunger in our world, I have been so awake to how short and precious life is. As if I had been half asleep in my living this past month - and WU's Growth retreat and MACCS this weekend allowed me some space and the grace to see...

Wake up calls. They come in all forms. May we heed their calls this evening and this advent season.