A Sunday to Wake Up

I wonder what drives people into the streets in great mourning for someone like a Michael Jackson? Something, sometime touched them about the person. I wonder if for that moment we are more sensitive to the uncertainties of life. If someone of the money and skill and stature of the rich and famous still didn't get out alive, what is our hope?

As I was reviewing some quotes I had saved from Inward/Outward over the past year or so I came across one by Eugene Peterson. It struck me as something perhaps at a time like this we need to hear. When many feel the loss and shock and even fear of the death of a superstar, maybe that can be a time also to refocus where we look and how we live. Perhaps we can discover life....

We wake up each morning to a world we did not make. How did it get here? How did we get here? We open our eyes and see that ‘old bowling ball the sun’ careen over the horizon. We wiggle our toes. A mockingbird takes off and improvises on themes set down by robins, vireos, and wrens, and we marvel at the intricacies…. There is so much here–around, above, below, inside, outside. Even with the help of poets and scientists we can account for very little of it. We notice this, then that…. Before long we are looking out through telescopes and down into microscopes, curious, fascinated by this endless proliferation of sheer Is-ness–color and shape and texture and sound.

After awhile we get used to it and quit noticing. We get narrowed down into something small and constricting. Somewhere along the way this exponential expansion of awareness, this wide-eyed looking around, this sheer untaught delight in what is here, reverses itself: the world contracts; we are reduced to a life of routine through which we sleepwalk. But not for long. Something always shows up to jar us awake.

Source: Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places