Waking The Dead 9

Waking up is hard to do. It isn't something that comes naturally. We are used to dealing only with matters of immediate need, urgency and consequence. Long-term, not so much. It appears that that is how we are wired after some two hundred thousand years of our species' existence. despite all the evidence already in, that we are heading for some really rough times, very few seem prepared to change their habits or lifestyles accordingly. This is depressing. For me, it is relatively easy, but I have always been more or less awake, which I imagine sets me apart from others. there are reasons for this. Many are circumstantial. My childhood and adolescence were full of disruptions, and perhaps, eruptions, as well. When you are consistently abused, in all conceivable ways, by every member of your family, and for a good number of years, it creates in you a sense of awareness that is sad, frightening and profound. When you live at the mercy of psychopathic idiots, as in the case of my father and brother, and a mother with major anger management problems and a taste for violence, then you live in a state of heightened awareness and heightened alertness. Jesus was my ticket out. There was also a work of preparation. Thanks to the Fabulous Sixties, by the time that auspicious decade was concluding and I was thirteen, I was already questioning a lot of the values and customs that my family expected me to absorb an carry on with. I became a fourteen year old hippy, smoked pot and wandered around Vancouver, meeting people and talking to them. I began hitchhiking, which brought me in further contact with all kinds of interesting strangers, something that wouldn`t be done today, but that was a different era and we cared less about risk and danger. I find it appalling what a brood of coddled, selfish, weak and spineless little cowards today`s young people are, thanks to their neurotic helicopter parents, over-protective and over nurturing Boomers, natch. I also became an avid and regular reader of Vancouver's most prominent weekly journal, the Georgia Straight, in those days still considered a subversive, radical and controversial little rag. This helped give me a crash course in gay rights, feminism, abortion rights, environmental degradation, alternatives to the death culture I was living in, radical and revolutionary politics, progressive values, vegetarian and organic food, art, all sorts of interesting and wonderful things. Despite what the pot might have been doing to my developing young brain, I was really becoming aware of an awful lot of interesting shit in very short order. I didn`t really have any friends at that time. When you are a child of family abuse, and if you are also a particularly sensitive, intelligent and gifted child, you are not going to make friends easily in school, nor elsewhere. You are going to be suspicious, needy and volatile and a real pain in the ass to be around. And I did mention that Jesus was my ticket out. Elsewhere, Gentle Reader, you will have already read my spiritual autobiography, so a lot of this doesn`t really bear repeating, but I will say this much: I was not brainwashed by a cult. Rather, I had a living encounter with the Living God himself, and the Jesus People just happened to be the most convenient vectors for this to happen. Even when I knelt with those young men on the floor of that attic bedroom in that creaking old house on Fairview Slopes to accept Jesus into my heart, I knew I was not becoming a member of a secret cult or society, but that I had just become part of the Body of Christ, his church, visible and invisible in heaven and earth, and this realization and experience has kept me free from having to rely on others for my spiritual wellbeing, rather than Christ present with and within me. Christ awoke in me a consuming love for others, and without this love I would never have been able to have constructively put into action the many things I had learned and that had woken me out of the slumber that consumes us all. Ever since that day, even when I backslid for a while, I have remained awake and alive in a way that often leaves me feeling like an outsider to others. Instead of getting caught up in the consumer death march, I remained living simply. God and circumstances made this easy, since for some reason, I have never bee able to find decently remunerative employment, but have always had to live in such a way that I am constantly and completely dependent upon the hand of God for my provision and even to this very day. But God has always provided and provides for me still. I do not have things or stuff, no car, I don`t own my home, I only have a few clothes, lots of books in Spanish and English and lots of my own art. I have no family. I do have some friends, but I do have a strange and strong sense of connection to others, even strangers. I work in a field that requires me to serve and support others in distress and that also keeps me on a permanent learning curve towards humility. All of these and other things have kept me awake and alert and aware at a depth and consistency that I think is quite rare for people. It can also make me a difficult pain in the ass to be around as I have to constantly steward and curb my frustration with the obtuse, comatose and stupid and selfish behaviour and attitudes of those around me. And really, who wants to listen to a low income Jeremiah or a white trash Cassandra, especially when we just can't seem to be able to shut up. And I won't shut up, because, Gentle Reader, we are living in very difficult and challenging times and so much depends on each one of us rising to the challenge, changing our way of life and moving in a constructive life of repentance and renewal into the new life that we can all be born into if we will simply be equal to the challenge and if we will all have the courage to change and become fully human and fully alive and effective and powerful vectors of change.