Rip Van Winkle

"You can't go back to how things were. How you thought they were.All you really have is...now.” ― Jay Asher, contemporary American author

Lately, I've felt like Rip Van Winkle, a character in a Washington Irving short story who went to sleep before the American Revolution and woke up twenty years later in what was literally a new world.

I 'woke up' sometime in November of 2016, looked around the world I inhabited and began clearing out cupboards and closets, replacing a chest of drawers I could no longer open, light fixtures that were unsatisfactory, installing a dishwasher, extra railings on both sets of stairs, an intercom & doorbell and security lighting .... In fact I 'woke up up' and saw the things that needed to be done if we were going to be able to continue to live here safely and comfortably for the foreseeable future.

Perhaps you have had something similar happen when you returned home after being away for a period of time. I think my awakening was brought about by the doctor saying [as I reported in an earlier blog] that my tiredness was mainly due to the my trying to do too much, and not ‘acting my age’. And so that ‘woke me up’ to the reality of my life, that I am aging and the time has arrived to start living into the reality.

I have been reflecting on how we can believe we are living in the present moment, and then something happens the shows us, we really haven’t been aware of what is really going on at all. This can be what some people call getting a dose of reality.

I think we see that same thing in the New Testament stories of what happened to the disciples after the death of Jesus. As they accompanied Jesus through the last days of his ministry and into Jerusalem, they implored him to reconsider and avoid Jerusalem induing Passover. Reality dawned upon the disciples as Jesus was arrested in the garden, and they fled the scene. “But let the scriptures be fulfilled.’ All of them deserted him and fled.” Mark 14:48

The disciples sent the next days getting used to their new reality and the weeks, months, and years following living into it as they dealt with their feelings, learned how to live in this new reality, and then went out to carry what they had learned into the wider society. Their world has quite literally become a different reality, a different way of going for them.

As we listen to the stories of first Paul, and then the gospel writers, do we really appreciate that what they are trying to put into words is this new reality, telling us how it is playing out in real time for them and for their communities.

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