Keep Your Eyes Open

A few words on today’s readings, which speak of vigilance:

We hear of the lover of Wisdom who keeps vigil and watches for her at dawn, finding nothing of more value to ponder day and night than the thoughts and the words of God.  And God does not keep the contents of his heart secret but makes himself available: “She hastens to make herself known in anticipation of their desire … she graciously appears to them in the ways and meets them with all solicitude” (Wis 6:13, 16).

Paul’s words to the Christians of Thessalonica, in the face of grief and loss at the death of loved ones, call them and us to wait in faith for the day of resurrection, when “we shall always be with the Lord” (1 Thes 4:17) – this God for whom we seek with the Psalmist, “for [whom] my flesh pines and my soul thirsts like the earth, parched, lifeless and without water” (Ps 63:2).  This longing for the Lord and his justice is a form of vigilance most proper to times such as ours.

And those sleepy virgins with their lamps waiting for the doors to the wedding feast to open – though we may be weighed down with sorrow at his long delay in coming, will he find us ready and responsive to the call that comes at midnight: “Behold, the bridegroom! Come out to meet him!” (Mt 25:6)?  Will our flasks of faith, hope and love sustain us to the end?  He will know us, as we have known him, if we have sought and found him, allowed ourselves to be sought and found by him, night and day.

St Benedict has strong words for us on remembering God and fleeing oblivion, not allowing ourselves to fall asleep from grief as the apostles did in the garden.  It is all too easy to get into the habit of avoiding painful or challenging realities by sleeping or distracting ourselves.  We have been hearing excellent reflections from Pope Francis on discernment.  He describes the vigilance that is a precondition for discernment as “Keeping watch to safeguard our heart and to understand what is happening inside it.”  He goes on:
“If I were to ask each one of you today, and also myself, ‘What is happening in your heart?’, perhaps we would not know how to say everything; we would say one or two things, but not everything. Keep watch over the heart, because vigilance is a sign of wisdom, it is above all a sign of humility, because we are afraid to fall, and humility is the high road of Christian life.” (Catechesis on Discernment. 12. The Vigilance)

It takes courage to stay awake to ourselves, to other people, to life and to God. have been reading a fascinating book on the intersection between neuroscience and spirituality, Anatomy of the Soul, by Curt Thompson, M.D., in which the author really takes seriously our creation in the image and likeness of God.  We are called to love God with our whole self – our whole mind, our brain and all its functions.  He points out how essential it is to our mental and spiritual health to pay attention to the various dimensions of our experience so that our mind and our life is integrated and whole.  For example, he says: “What if emotion, or something similar that is even deeper, wilder, and more real, is an essential element of who God is?  What if emotion, as we understand it, is a reflection of what God experiences in his heart?  Wouldn’t we do well to attend to this aspect of our minds, since doing so would mean paying attention to part of us that reflects God’s being?”  In other words, contemporary science ratifies the intuition of the monastic tradition that vigilance over what is happening in our body, our mind, our emotions, our thoughts, our personal history, and our relationships is the way to know God, and ourselves in him.

May God grant us the courage and hope to keep our eyes open, and our hearts fixed on his kingdom.

Pope Francis, Catechesis on Discernment.
Curt Thompson, M.D., Anatomy of the Soul.