As a kid, I used to dread August and September. Now that i think about it, most kids have strong feelings about August and September—it's hot, it's the end of summer, and you have to go back to school.

But for me, there was another little bonus—I had Hay Fever. My nose didn't stop running nor my eyes watering until a couple weeks after Labor Day. And if I let it get too bad, I'd have asthma attacks.

Now, the obvious question would be, "Well, so why did you let it get bad?"

Because of the medicine. The antihistamines I took often felt worse than the itching eyes and snotty nose—which is saying something, because those things—as a constant state of being—were torturous.

Staying inside in the air-conditioning helped. But the problem was … we didn't have air-conditioning.

So, if I wanted any relief, I had to take my medicine—which, as I say, was pretty awful. Taking it made me feel as though I were swimming in corn syrup—a feeling I still despise to this day. Kind of like trying to play Rachmaninov on the piano while wearing snowmobile mittens. But if I wanted to avoid asthma attacks, I had to take it.

So, for about 6 weeks every year—until I was 27 or 28—I either couldn't breathe or couldn't stay awake. So, most of the time, I chose the ever present loopiness of an antihistamine hangover. Just, sort of stumbling about like a zombie, clueless about the world going on around me. (If you ask my wife, all the antihistamines I took have had a residual affect; she's convinced I still have regular bouts of cluelessness, from which I emerge only occasionally, punctuated by intermittent periods of lucidity while watching baseball.)

In the words of that great twentieth-century sage, Rodney Dangerfield, “It ain’t easy being me.”

Do you know that feeling? That sleepwalking through life feeling?

That's how the Buddha described the way most people experience the world. In fact, the word "Buddha" means "awakened." The achievement of enlightenment is like waking up while everyone else around you is still in a pre-conscious stupor.

Part of why I think the Buddha would say so many people experience life as stuporous is because our world can be so overwhelming. And rather than attending to life as it is, we find newer and more immersive ways to distract ourselves. Unable to break through the haze, we look for diversions that will allow us to remain asleep.

I went to the monastery at Gethsemani years ago. The Guest Master, Father Damien, did an orientation talk, in which he said that the monks could offer us a gift that we'd be hard pressed to find in the "real" world: silence.

He said that most people are afraid of the silence—which is why we reflexively turn on the radio when we get into the car, or turn on the TV when we get home. We secretly fear the silence, he said, because it's in the silence that the voice of God is most easily heard.

"And, as difficult as it may be for us to wrap our minds around," he said, "most people are afraid of the voice of God. So, we turn up the volume to remain oblivious, numb."

Living in our world at this particular moment—what with the sturm und drang of our politics, the chaos of a world where parents fear their children won't return home from school because some knucklehead with a gun thinks shooting kids is a great way to make a point, the ugliness of the reality in which people of color can no longer take for granted that the system that's supposed to dispense justice is hopelessly rigged against them, the dawning awareness that we're capable of locking up immigrant children in cages, the realization that there exists among us a resurgent White supremacy, a creeping fascism—living in this world, trying to pay attention is exhausting on an epic scale.

If you're even a little aware, it's almost impossible not to become inured to the fear and violence, to become numb to a world awash in pain, dipped to the elbows in the blood of innocents.

William Lamar writes: “I wonder about the numbness in our own day. It’s as if some diabolical cosmic dentist injects us with Novocain on the regular. Can we even feel the pain anymore? There is so much violence around us that we seem to ignore it as a coping mechanism. There is so much hateful speech that we have come to expect it. There are so many vile geopolitical shenanigans sponsored by the American empire and those nations trying to replace it that we wonder about the future of humanity and the good earth.”

The sleepwalking of the Buddha or the numbness, as Lamar calls it, is difficult to avoid. It creeps up on us, standing between us and the reality God desires for us.

But if God is most easily heard in the stillness and the silence, how is it that God can break through the storm and stress of our world, the numbness that feels like the safest place to be—nestling into the somnambulant stupor of the perpetually distracted?

I think that’s what Luke’s getting at in our Gospel this morning. The Gospel of Luke was written sometime after the sacking of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Temple by the Romans in 70 C.E.