Imagining a New World for the People Who Always Come in Last – The Good Men Project

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Buddha described the way most people experience the world as something akin to sleepwalking. In fact, the word “Buddha” means “awakened.” The achievement of enlightenment is like waking up while everyone else around you is still in a pre-conscious stupor.




Part of why I think the Buddha would say so many people experience life as stuporous is because our world can be so overwhelming. Rather than attending to life as it is, we find newer and more immersive ways to distract ourselves. Unable to break through the haze, we look for diversions that will allow us to remain asleep.

I went to the monastery at Gethsemani years ago. The Guest Master, Father Damien, did an orientation talk, in which he said that the monks could offer us a gift that we’d be hard pressed to find in the “real” world: silence.

He said that most people are afraid of the silence—which is why we reflexively turn on the radio when we get into the car, or turn on the TV when we get home. We secretly fear the silence, he said, because it’s in the silence that the voice of God is most easily heard.

“As difficult as it may be for us to wrap our minds around,” he said, “most people are afraid of the voice of God. So, we turn up the volume so that we can remain oblivious, numb.”

Living in our world at this particular moment—what with the sturm und drang of our politics, the chaos of a world where parents fear their children won’t return home from school because some knucklehead with a gun thinks shooting kids is a great way to make a point, the ugliness of the reality in which people of color can no longer take for granted that the system that’s supposed to dispense justice is hopelessly rigged against them, the dawning awareness that we’re capable of locking up immigrant children in cages (or short of that, teargassing them as they approach us for help)—living in this world, trying to pay attention is exhausting on an epic scale.

If you’re even a little aware, it’s almost impossible not to become inured to the fear and violence, to check out from the pressures of realities of this moment, to become numb to a world awash in pain, dipped to the elbows in the blood of innocents.

Iif God is most easily heard in the stillness and the silence, how is it that God can break through the storm and stress, the numbness that feels like the safest place to be—nestling into the somnambulant stupor of the perpetually distracted?

How does God break through that?

In the Gospel of Luke (Luke 21:25-28), Jesus says:

There will be signs in the sun, the moon, and the stars, and on the earth distress among nations confused by the roaring of the sea and the waves. People will faint from fear and foreboding of what is coming upon the world, for the powers of the heavens will be shaken. Then they will see “the Son of Man coming in a cloud” with power and great glory. Now when these things begin to take place, stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.
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What Jesus is dipping his toe into here is Apocalyptic. Apocalypse. You know, the end of the world. Signs in the sun, moon, and stars. Distress among the nations. People fainting from fear and foreboding of what is coming upon the world. The powers of the heavens shaking.

This is the kind of stuff you expect to have an R-rating attached to it. According to Jesus, in the new world God imagines, everything about what makes our current world operate with such brutal efficiency in the service of the powerful is going to be dismantled. There will be great dislocation. The things we take for granted as stable will be destabilized. The current order will be subverted, and a new reality will begin to take shape.

Apocalyptic is dismissed with a patronizing wave by the well-situated as fine for rubes and dullards. Sophisticated people, however, don’t pay much attention to the end-of-the-world talk.

The tendency to shrug off apocalypticism is a sign that we’ve grown too used to the way things are—which is to say, too used to a world that seems designed with people like us in mind. A world where one group enjoys a life of relative ease while others do not, is not the world God has in mind.

Apocalyptic is God’s way of piercing the numbness and reminding the world that if it’s going to satisfy God’s desires, the world is going to have to be reordered, turned on its head.

This is always a difficult word for those used to a world that serves them. People at the top of the food chain, people satisfied just fine with the way things are, don’t want to hear that things are about to be shaken up.

There are other people for whom such news is a long-awaited word of redemption, a bit of hope in a dark place. Those on the bottom, the small and the forgotten, those who have little to gain from the preservation of the present arrangements, the people who always come in last—they get all kinds of hopeful upon hearing talk of a new world designed with them first in mind.

It’d be difficult to sleep through that.

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Thank you
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