Various helps: Awakening

  • sunrisewoman.jpg

    As I said last time, Greg and I are try­ing and make it through our own lit­tle per­fect storm. And so I con­tinue to try to cap­ture the things that have helped. The sec­ond one is some­thing I read in a book in high school, about what an ethno­g­ra­pher learned from African pyg­mies. I can’t say exactly  why it keeps com­ing back to me, other than that it has to do with how you call out to God (or, in their case, the gods.)

    It comes from a pas­sage in a book called “The For­est Peo­ple (**)” The book details Colin Turnbull’s study of the Mbuti pyg­mies of Africa in the late ’50s, and the sec­tion I’m think­ing of goes some­thing like this: There was a sea­son of bad weather and other dis­as­ters, and the whole vil­lage was affected. The food was in short sup­ply, and other things had gone wrong. And the peo­ple came together and did a dif­fer­ent rit­ual than Turn­bull had seen before. He assumed that they would call on their gods with grief and loud wail­ing, but their rit­ual didn’t seem like that at all, and he couldn’t under­stand. One of the pyg­mies explained to him, “We know our gods are always good to the for­est peo­ple, so we know that if things are wrong, it’s because they have fallen asleep. We call now to wake them up. That’s all we need to do.”

    There is some­thing of real faith in that, some­thing that I have never for­got­ten. But we don’t believe that God sleeps. So what is it that sleeps and needs wak­ing? Me. I need wak­ing. And not all of me, but part of me.

    It’s the part alluded to in the book “Out of the Depths Have I Cried.(**)” Speak­ing of these dark peri­ods in our lives, the authors said:

    Through increased con­scious­ness, we are attempt­ing to develop a rela­tion­ship with our depths as a way of touch­ing what is shin­ing through them as a trans­parency of Divin­ity, that is, the light of another being and life. „, Thus, what we seek is not an ‘expe­ri­ence,’ but God Him­self. What is impor­tant is not an emo­tional, psy­cho­log­i­cal, phys­i­cal or oth­er­wise expe­ri­ence, but that our recep­tiv­ity may be increased.

    But I’ll have more from this book the next time around. It has more to offer.


    Related posts:

    1. Var­i­ous helps: Being Chris­t­ian and a scientist
    2. Pres­i­den­tial can­di­dates for A Great Awakening
    3. “The Mind of the Maker” and the prob­lem of evil
    4. On curios­ity
    5. Why is faith so difficult?

    December 10th, 2009 | Grace | 3 Comments |

3 Responses and Counting...

  • Grace 12.10.2009

    That’s it. As I get older, I put more and more value in being com­pletely hon­est in faith-related issues. It’s so easy, espe­cially when you’re a young Chris­t­ian, to put on a show of piety. And you can think to your­self that you’re doing just what the great saints did. But what escapes you for a long time is that you’re just play­ing dress-up. You’re imi­tat­ing what you’ve read and heard about, and you make your extra pros­tra­tions or say long prayers with­out hav­ing gone through the long, painful process that they went through. The “good” thing about going through dif­fi­cult times is that it strips away a lot of illu­sions about who you are. That can be kind of a shock, but I sup­pose I’d rather find out now than (cap­i­tal L) Later.

  • s-p

    Good stuff. If we wake up from our dream, real­ity is some­times a harsh con­fronta­tion. And God only deals in reality.

  • Mimi

    wow, I par­tic­uarly love the line “it is me that needs wak­ing up” thank you.

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