Beloved, once again I hear you speak from the depths of your heart. I hear you say:
“Beloved God, where would You like to take me today? From what discouragement will You lift me and to what heights?
“It seems I have been sleeping all my life. I didn’t know. I was hardly awake. I didn’t know where I was. It’s like I was in some kind of in-between land, yet I was also suffering anguish and doing my best to ignore it.
“I also went through what I thought was joy, yet, it seems to me now, wasn’t that much joy, perhaps a little loosening of the ropes. The joy was made up. All of my life was made up in that I wasn’t really alive. I was passive and impassive. I was off somewhere, and I also wasn’t anywhere at all. I must have slept through life. Occasionally I opened my eyes and then closed them again. What I thought was enjoyment wasn’t really. It was louder noise or, perhaps, a break in the noise. I was locked in a cell of my choosing or that I had settled for. I want to know life as it is meant to be lived and meant to be loved. Help me, O God.”
Beloveds, how often you repeated this approach and reproach to life. You felt that life had passed you by.
Had all your dreams come true, you would be singing the same refrain, for you discovered that you had been a watcher. You were a watchbird watching a watchbird watch. You were an observer with, perhaps, one eye open.
Life did not pass you by. You, beloved, were dozing, neither totally awake nor totally asleep yet forgetful, shall We say, unobservant should We say, unawake, yes, yet not totally unaware. You were certainly aware of what was not your heart’s desire, and so you overlooked yourself. It’s true – you didn’t know who you were. We can say you were in a daze.
How many days did you sit in school, lined up, not grasping what you were doing, not belonging there, not knowing what school was, yet you were sitting there. You kept waiting to be alive. In many cases, you preferred to sleep through what you saw as a bare existence. You sat there, an automaton of yourself, a wind-up toy that did as it was bid. You bought other people’s thoughts and passed them off as your own. In some kind of thoughtless race, you hardly dared feel.
You are right. You didn’t know what you were doing or what you were doing there in the supposed place you found yourself in. You saw your life, in fact, as a deserted island. You saw your life as the turning of a kaleidoscope that you peeked in on. You were lost to meaning. You got by. You passed yourself off as alive. You didn’t know yourself to speak of. You hesitated to be seen. You did not want to be seen. You didn’t want to see.
You plucked moments here and there to pin up on the bulletin board of your mind.
You lived more in imagination and in the pages of books than you did in the life before you. You looked outside for justification for your appearance on Earth, and you did not find it. You were a cipher to yourself.
Now you are stirring from your sleep. You want to wake up. You want to be free of hesitation. You are like Pinocchio. Now you want to be a real boy, a dressed-up doll who wants to come to life. You want to be real.
Once, you overlooked your life. Now you want to turn life on and have some idea of what life is and what being alive can be.
Are you willing to let the seeming past go and enter this minute right now here? Yes, it is ripe for you now to walk into this moment of life and immerse yourself in it and to see what it is like to be a participant in your life, to watch, not so much your life in passing, but rather watch you, yourself. You come out of hiding, and you say:
“I am here. I am not on the fringe of life. I am Life, and God is here with me.”