Alive

Psalm 57

Many of us seem to go through our days in a daze. I’ve noticed people walking across parking lots without paying any attention to the traffic around them. Others walk backwards in malls or downtown on the sidewalk, talking to someone, and if you’re coming the other way you just have to stop and wait to see where they’re going! And that’s without any electronics plugged into them. I contribute my own share of inattentiveness and doziness to the course of any given day.

“Awake, my soul!” the Psalmist cries. What does it mean to call to your soul to become awake? ‘Soul’ in the Bible is not some hidden part of you, a part that floats away when you die. I understand ‘soul’ in the Bible to be something like what we would call our “being” – it’s the totality of what we are. Awakening the soul would be about being truly and fully alive, being attentive to the things of the day and then some, and then some indeed.

For the Psalmist, a whole sequence of things went with this. Musical instruments are called to life; the one who is fully alive, it seems, can call to the dawn to wake up – a sense of being in tune with all God’s creation, I take it. There is praise to all peoples, a sense of soaring in the heavens. Who needs drugs?

And all of this came out of resolve to remain ‘steadfast’ in the midst of the now-familiar onslaught of enemies.

What one thing keeps most of us from being truly alive? Fear. We’re afraid to be joyful because something will take it away. We’re afraid to trust because someone will hurt us. We’re afraid because we’re afraid we’ll be afraid and look stupid. So we cling to a lot of stuff that gives no security; and find comfort, excitement - and release from boredom, worry, rejection and hopelessness in addictive behaviours.

“Soul” rather than, say, “being” or “personhood” or something suggests to me a Lord; there is a greater spiritual connotation with the word, especially in the context in which we find it here. There is one who makes us truly alive. There is one who leads us, as Steven Curtis Chapman sings, to The Great Adventure. He breathed life into dirt and made the dirt a ‘living being’ (Genesis 2:7). A living being from dirt; what can he do with my day, my life, if truly I release it to him?

Then there is a whole mission that awaits, to the dazed.

Prayer:
Awake, my soul, Lord. Through Christ. Amen.