Keep Watch and Stay Awake!

Talking about sleeping, being alert, or being awake make me remember a very fun story when I was living in the Aspirant House in Saigon. As students, we were going to the university for our primary task every day. We were getting up early for the Morning Prayer and Mass as an obligation. After breakfast, some were going to school; some were doing their chores. At home, we had to be present in the study room to do our homework. It was likely that our Formator watched us 24 hours! No one could get back to sleep for a moment even though the night before we burnt the midnight oil for our homework. One day, the Formator went away; we thought that he would come back later in the noon time; we all went back to sleep; suddenly, he came back in about 20 minutes later, finding us sleeping; he was so mad, shouting, “Get up”, “Study”, “This house is not a hospital.” We all were so frightened, getting off the bed, running back and forth like crazy! Afterwards, he began to give us a long lecture about our future, about what we would get in the future. For next times, we were so alert and watchful for his coming back even though sometimes we could not resist drowsiness.

 

Being alert or being ready becomes a very powerfully spiritual message for all of us, not only in the time of Advent, but also in any time and any stage of our lives. After being born, we were taken to church for Baptism because our parents worried that we might be dead with the original sin. When we grew up, we were often reminded to go to confession because our parents concerned that we might die without confessing our sins. Then during our lifetime, we have made many retreats to renew our spiritual life and prepare for our soul.

 

We need to prepare all the time because we do not know when Jesus will come again. According to St. Augustine, this uncertainty is a great mercy of God because it is good for us to be always ready for the second coming. When we are prepared all the time, we will treasure every moment of our lives; we are very attentive to and careful for what we are doing regarding the consequences of our action. We will try to do good things as many as we can and avoid mistakes and bad things for God and for our own sake. 

 

Therefore, it is important that we need to take the lead in our lives, being responsible for what we decide to do. Being attentive to our jobs or our ministry brings great results that are not only awards for our own benefits, but for people that we are serving. If we do not pay attention to our responsibility, we leave our jobs unfinished, and that could be burdensome to others as well.  Like the servants in the Bible, they were asked to take care of some businesses when their master was away. The master did not tell them when he would come back. He left this uncertainty to keep his servants always prepared.  With this uncertainty, the servants could have two options. They had to take the role of the master in managing the work and deciding what to do to make the best profit out of their effort. The results of their work would show the master that they were well prepared to perform their jobs and capable for their responsibility. This could make their master happy and create trust in him. It could be possibly that the servants did not pay attention to their job. The master came back unhappy finding them sleeping or leaving works unfinished. In this case, these servants would be in trouble.

I find myself familiarizing with the situation of the servants in the gospel. I grew up in a big family with six brothers and one sister. When my parents went away, they also asked us to take care of our house business. They never mentioned the certain time when they would come back. As you know, six boys getting together, we had so much fun; and that was the reason we forgot our jobs. Then you could guess what happened when my parents came back finding us leaving works unfinished. We were in trouble! Even though we knew that we had to be well prepared and ready for this job, we always were tempted to waste our time for other fun things. We knew that our parents would not be happy seeing our incomplete job, but we still did not care much about our responsibility. In a similar manner, at the Aspirant House, we knew that our Formator would be very angry when he got back finding us sleeping in the morning. We still took the risk to get some sleep. Therefore, we may come up with some philosophical questions: does the fragile nature of human beings allow us to delay or not be attentive to what we are asked to do? Does our shallow or ambiguous vision about our future allow us to be careless to our present responsibilities? Do our doubts about the coming of Jesus allow us to be unprepared for our spiritual life?

 

We are reminded to look into our lives again in recognition of our own weaknesses and in awareness of the time when we are falling into temptations and distractions of this world, or not being ready and attentive to responsibilities that God has given to us in this life. We know that each of us has been calling to live authentically our lives as parents, children, students, formators, friends, or relatives to our family.  However, sometimes because of many false reasons, we cannot fulfill our own duties. We sometimes leave the mess for others to clean because we cannot perform our jobs very well. One of the main reasons is that we are not prepared well or do not invest enough time for our task. Other than that, we may spend too much time for this, but less time for that. God is especially calling us to balance out our lives, not just caring too much for our physical body and the material life, but be preparing for our soul and the spiritual life. We may have experienced that we sometimes spend more time for material needs, but less time for spiritual preparations. Up to today, do we really spend more time to make an enriching relationship with God in our prayer life? Do we really belittle all worldly concerns to surrender to God? Do we really renew our vocations for whoever we are to live fully our lives?

Possibly, these questions help remind us "keep watch and stay awake".  May the coming of Jesus always bring us the spirit of preparation and readiness in every moment of our daily life!