Psalms 44:23 Meaning Wake Up

When life feels abandoned by any higher presence, it can seem that the divine has fallen asleep and left you to your suffering. You cry out for it to awaken, to arise, to notice you again. But the sleep is not in the source of life. The sleep is in us.

We doze in the endless noise of thought, lost in past and future, and in that trance we feel cut off and forsaken. Presence has not withdrawn. It is here, closer than your own breath, waiting to be noticed. The awakening you are begging for is your own. The moment you become still and truly present, you find you were never cast off at all.

The cry does not scold a distant deity for napping. The awakened part of a person is calling the sleeping God who lies buried inside him. God fell asleep as this image, as this very man, and dreams the whole of a life while believing himself to be the dreamer's small self. Waking existence is that dream, dreamed within the skull. So the son who has begun to stir shakes the Father and says, remember who you are. The Lord being roused is no stranger in the sky. He is the dreaming God who took the form of a man and forgot, and the waking is his coming to know that he and the man are one. That knowledge is the whole aim. God asleep as you awakens to find he is you.