Sleepers Awake!

It was Thoreau who said, “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” While Thomas Merton wrote, ““Most of the world is either asleep or dead. The religious people are, for the most part, asleep. The irreligious are dead. Those who are asleep are divided into two classes: those who are asleep and know it, and those who are asleep and do not know it.

Most people drift through their days on autopilot: scrolling, consuming, chasing the next distraction, repeating the same scripts they’ve been handed. They sleepwalk through life, eyes half-open to the deeper realities—truth, beauty, goodness, and the instinctive pull of the transcendent. It’s an old observation.

The spiritual life is precisely about waking up—shaking off the slumber of sin, comfort, ideology, or mere routine. The saints were the ones who were amazingly alert, awake and clear eyed about themselves, the world, others and the empowering grace of God active in the world—constantly re-creating the world.

“Awake, O sleeper, and arise from the dead, and Christ will give you light” (Ephesians 5:14)