There is a famous story in the Old Testament about Jacob, one of the great Jewish patriarchs.  He has been on a journey, mostly to escape the wrath of his brother Esau, from whom Jacob has stolen his birthright. At a spot Genesis calls “a certain place,” Jacob stops for the night and has a powerful dream.  It’s important to note that this happens not in a temple or church or other special holy site; it happens along the side of the road in an everyday, ordinary place. He could have had this experience standing in the produce aisle of the grocery store or parking in the hardware store lot or sitting in a living room chair or standing at the kitchen sink or walking along a well-worn path in the woods.

The dream is of a stairway to heaven upon which angels are ascending and descending and God standing above the ladder blessing him.  Jacob learns that night that the distance between heaven and earth is much closer than he had ever thought. He exclaims, “How awesome is this place!  This is none other than the house of God!”  And then he admits, “Surely the presence of the Lord is in this place, but I was unaware of it.”

I was unaware.  Those words are frightening, because truth be told, many of us, perhaps most of us, spend much of our days remaining unaware.  As a result, human relationships suffer and environmental degradation of the world ensues. Friends take each other for granted; parents tend to the physical needs of their child but somehow remain oblivious to the child themself; soil and trees and birds and insects and water are forever spoiled by otherwise good hearted people who just don’t seem to consider the ramifications of their actions. 

Like Jacob, many of us spend most of our lives, unaware. We’re so busy.  We’re so easily distracted by our cell phones or televisions or computers. Our brains are becoming retrained, and those of us who engage in such inattentive behavior are losing our capacity to use our senses. Citing the prophet Isaiah, Jesus says, “You people will listen and listen, but you will not understand. You will look and look, but you will not really see. Yes, the minds of these people are now closed. They have ears, but they don’t listen. They have eyes, but they refuse to see.” (Matthew 13:14f.)

Jacob’s story, like so many others in the Bible, is a cautionary tale, bidding us to pay attention.  It reminds us that if we just slow down and open our eyes, we might very well see the presence of God in the world about us. And mostly, the writers of the Bible tells us, God becomes recognizable in the absolutely ordinary. Barbara Brown Taylor, Episcopal priest and writer puts it this way, “[the] earth is so thick with divine possibility that it is a wonder we can walk anywhere without cracking our shins on altars.”  In becoming aware, we discover God at the kitchen table and at the coffee shop, under tall birch trees and beside mossy riverbanks, on the top of mountains and in downtown White Bear Lake.

So, today, I don’t know about you, but I want to slow my life down.  I want to really hear the voices of my friends and family.  I want to see the power of God’s work in the intricate design of a snowflake.  I want to experience the presence and love of God in the ordinary stuff of my funny little life.  And at the end of the day, I want to be able to say, I was aware.

~Father Art