Awake My Soul - Practical Spirituality for Busy People

Book by Jones Timothy

You Don't Have to Be a Saint

You turn us toward yourself through wondrous means. AUGUSTINE

One day, years ago, something simple and quiet nudged me awake.

I was hitting my teens, coping with the normal energies and  anxieties of adolescence. Momentous events unfolded around me--assassinations,  campus sit-ins, a draft that threatened to send my brother to Vietnam. But like  nearly everyone else in my Southern California suburb in 1968, I lived an  ordinary life. I thought mostly about everyday matters--friends, parents, life  at Columbus Junior High.

But late one October afternoon as I walked home from school, the God  of all things made his presence vividly felt. It was simple, really. I had been  noticing how clearly I could see the craggy hills in the distance after an  autumn wind swept the valley clean of smog. A yellowing sun cast long shadows  on the sidewalk. The breezy coolness felt good on my cheeks. And I sensed with  sudden elation that God was there. As I say, this was no  complicated encounter; the clouds did not form themselves into a sky-written

message from the Great Beyond. I don't think I told anyone. But the childhood  God I had lobbed prayers to, the being I had vaguely reverenced on Sundays,  somehow became a compelling Presence. I knew deep in my soul, perhaps for the  first time, that God was.

I couldn't foresee it then, but that encounter began to effect a  change that would take years to fathom. Life went on in normal ways. I grew  into an adult, moved East to attend grad school, met my future wife, fell out  and reconciled with my parents, fathered children, changed careers more than

once. But I found myself wondering about staying aware. How could I not lose

track of the goodness that touched me that afternoon? Through the years,  through the joys and things I cannot understand, I have tried to keep my eyes  wide open. I have tried to listen to my soul's stirrings, those impulses I may  brush past on a busy day.

For while I believe that there is no place where God is not, I  sometimes overlook the Presence. Distractions and drowsy eyes keep me from  seeing. It's right there, "under our noses," I once heard someone say. We live in a "God-bathed world," philosopher and writer Dallas Willard  suggests.1  But then I forget how spiritually rich even ordinary moments are, how precious the people with whom I rub shoulders. Only every now and then do most of us really see and hear with our souls. But at least some of the time we can stand before everyday wonders and not be preoccupied, not be so emotionally tired we forget to look. We can learn to heed our soul's best intuitions.

These daily awakenings arrive in great variety. "There are many kinds of awakening that God effects in the soul,"  wrote poet and priest John of the Cross centuries ago, "so many that we would  never finish explaining them all."2  They may  come with palpable intensity while others may overtake us gently. I remember insights that came with the weight of a conversion, others as a bare touch. Awareness of God can come suddenly or gradually. Something tries to catch  our attention, invites us to "look this way." And we want to respond. We want to stay awake.

Some years ago I saw the movie Awakenings  (based loosely on the book by that title). The main character, played by Robert  De Niro, suffers from a disorder that robs him of virtually all consciousness.  He is left catatonic, almost comatose. He walks, he opens his eyes, he sees,

but only in the vaguest way. Then a drug is found that helps De Niro awaken.

Once again he notices people, especially his mother and an attractive young  woman who frequents the hospital to visit her father. Now, when he opens his

eyes, his whole self sees. He and his fellow patients rediscover dancing,  talking, romancing. The ward rollicks with people given back their lives.

But the drug soon has intolerable side effects. The awakening  doesn't last. De Niro descends again into the world of half-living, what looks  to the outsider as being alive but asleep. It makes for a poignant ending.

When it comes to waking up spiritually, however, another way is  possible. Our quiet experiences and "Aha!" moments lead somewhere. They need

not be like a list of New Year's resolutions that sits in the bottom of a desk  drawer, forgotten. In my experience, encountering God is an ongoing, unfolding  way of life. What I describe in this book grows out of conversations with  dozens of friends and even strangers, seeing up close how they tried, or failed  and tried again. I write having ransacked the writings and stories of great  souls through the centuries. I found that nothing less than a picture of a yawning soul shaking off sleep--again and again--captures the power of what can happen.

This is the promise of that October afternoon years ago in  California when I felt overtaken by the sudden awareness of a Presence. This is  the promise of your own life's ordinary and not-so-ordinary moments. In a  kitchen, on the subway, sharing coffee with a neighbor, reading the paper on

the backyard deck, it's possible not to miss God. Possible not to sleep through  his appearing. Possible to live, because of that, with a God-graced awareness  of others.

But how?

Let Waking Up Happen Naturally, Gently

I remember one predawn Christmas morning when I was eleven.  I had spent months fashioning homemade drums out of kitchen pans, stretching

brown paper over the rims, holding the paper fast with rubber bands. My cymbals  were pan lids. My drumsticks, chopsticks. I made primitive rhythm and my  "drums" were inadequate. But this Christmas I expected my first real  instrument--a snare drum. At dawn I sneaked out to our living room, long before  anyone else was awake, and there it was. I touched its taut, sandpapery drum

head, admired its chrome, felt the smooth hickory drumsticks, but only briefly,  so as not to be caught snooping. I went back to bed, happy. Later, when the  family called me out, shielding the drum with a blanket, then dropping it with  a flourish to reveal the longed-for gift, I feigned surprise. But I had been

long awake, watching. Natural curiosity and anticipation would not let me stay  sleeping.

Something similar happens to our souls, our spirits--whatever you  name that part of us that senses and responds to the Divine. "The simple  desire for God is already the beginning of faith," I once read. Even in our  souls' longing and wanting we are already beginning to wake up. No equipment is  required save a seeking heart. "There is that near you," wrote an old Quaker

seeker, "that will guide you. Wait for it, and be sure to keep to it." No  matter if you feel out of practice.