Keeping Awake

Alertness is the open eye and the listening ear of spiritual capacity. It unites with experience to raise ability to the righer level of availability, and thus opens the door to success.

In the seeming struggle with a false material sense, error’s aim is to manacle, but it asks simply if it may hypnotize; needing no other concession it covets no other privilege, and this marks the seductive nature of those temptations to lethargy which are wont to appeal to us under some guise of comfort. They promise relaxation, relief, or increase of strength, and falsely estimating their value we are led into the very penumbra of death.

These temptations of mortal sense declare that escape from suffering is to be found in torpor, that break-downs are to be repaired while mortals are in a state of stupefaction, and some of these means of benumbing sense have been named providential. But Truth ever cries, “Awake, thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give thee light.”

This awakening call came to Peter on one occasion, when he was bound, imprisoned, and asleep, and it is manifest that his marvelous escape would not have been effected had he not been responsive to Love’s mandate “Arise up quickly.”

Jesus, when tempted to find exemption from pain in the asserted power of a deadening drug, refused the proffered opiate, and turned for relief to the consciousness of good alone. For us as for him the divinely appointed avenue to freedom is not a mesmeric coma, but spiritual alertness, right thought. This may be gained and expressed upon the human plane not only in an ever-wakeful looking to good, but in that continuous guarding against the approach and entertainment of evil which is inculcated by the words of the Master, “What I say unto you, I say unto all. watch.”

While the wakeful shepherds were faithfully protecting themselves and their flocks from every prowling danger, they were greeted by angelic visitants, and Love’s frequent footstep has ever marked the threshold of that heart from which hatred, with its noisome brood, is prayerfully and persistently excluded.

This gives special significance to “the habitual struggle to be always good” to which our Leader commends us both by precept and example (Science and Health, p. 4); and when we have acquired the habit of making every suggestion of error, every expression of hatred or variance, a cue to loving and corrective spiritual thought, we shall have reached that stage of experience in which all things do “work together for good.”

Alert and patient endeavor will surely and speedily bring us all to this place, and the schooling on the way will prove of a value that is above rubies.