When everybody is asleep.
Few years ago, Pope John Paul II discribed contemporary culture as the culture of death. He was a charismatic figure and an authoritative personality respected by all of humanity, independent of race, nationality and believe. Yet, do you expect everybody to agree with him? That might be the wish of some. A realistic person would rather expect the contrary. For the moment people start agreeing with the Pope, a new culture will start emerging, namely the culture of life, new life; a culture of the resurrection, of revival, of awakening.
When someone is dead, he is not conscious of his state. When you are alive and awake, you know it, but when you are dead or asleep, you do not know it. When you are alive and awake, you can choose death or sleep. But when you are dead or asleep, you cannot choose to rise or to wake up.
When someone is dead, he is at the mercy of God – if you believe in God -; or at the mercy of The Force or The Energy – if you belong to the New Age -; or at the “mercy” of hell, in utter dispair.
The same is with someone who falls asleep. Although one might not be in a deep sleep and can easily be waken up by the least sound, still one is not conscious and in control of oneself and is at the mercy of others. One may have dreams, because the mind never rests. However, unless one wakes up, one never recalls one’s own dreams and chooses to act upon them.
At least, let us agrre on this point: if what Pope John Paul II declared is true, and we are truely living in a culture of death, and we are truely asleep, unconscious of the self distructing phase of human history we are living in, then our only hope is God. And we cannot speak of hope, because hope implies that one is aware of his needs and already aspires towards some remedy. Only God can lead us out of this culture. Only God can waken us up.
God cannot lead us out of the culture of death into a vacuum. That would be taking us from the pan into the fire. He needs to lead us into a new culture of life, or new life. God needs to waken us up with some new dreams to inspire us, to exite us into implementing and bring about a new era of human history and culture. Such dreams cannot come from our pre-set minds. They need to be dreams we never thought of or dreams we could have never imagined.
