When God Wakes Us from Our Dreams

Psalm 73 and the Shattering of Spiritual Illusion

Like a dream one wakes from O Lord when you wake you dismiss them as phantoms.

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There is a quiet violence in the way God saves us. He does not always tear our idols from our hands. Often he simply wakes us. And what we had clung to with such intensity dissolves in the light like mist. What felt necessary what felt meaningful what felt holy is suddenly revealed as something far more fragile than we knew.

The psalmist speaks of phantoms. Not obvious sins but subtle constructions of the heart. The ways we organize suffering into something that flatters us. The ways we shape affliction into a story that preserves our sense of being special chosen or misunderstood. Even the ways we use the language of faith to make ourselves feel less small. These are not lies we tell consciously. They are dreams we live inside.

When God wakes us those dreams fall away. And it hurts. It feels like losing a limb because we had wrapped our identity around them. We had come to depend on them to tell us who we were. Without them we feel exposed poor and without narrative. That is why the psalmist says his heart grew embittered and he was cut to the quick. It is not only the loss of false hope that wounds us. It is the loss of the self that false hope had created.

He calls himself stupid like a beast before God. Not in shame but in sudden clarity. When the illusion falls away we see how much of our inner life was driven by fear and self protection. How much of our spirituality was about managing God rather than being held by him. How much of our prayer was an effort to stay in control.

And yet in that very moment of collapse something deeper is revealed. Yet I was always in your presence. You were holding me by my right hand. Even when he was lost in fantasy God was faithful. Even when he was constructing identities God was quietly sustaining him. The true story of our lives is not the one we narrate to ourselves. It is the one God has been living with us all along.

This is the mercy that undoes us. We discover that the One we feared losing was the only One who never let go. All our illusions all our spiritual posing all our anxious hopes were never what kept us alive. God was. And God is.

So the psalmist lets go of every other claim. What else have I in heaven but you. Apart from you I want nothing on earth. This is not the voice of someone who has mastered detachment. It is the voice of someone who has finally been found. The heart that has been stripped of its fantasies is free to cling to what is real.

Even the body feels it. My body and my heart faint for joy. Not because suffering has ended but because the long struggle to be someone has. When we no longer have to maintain an image or make meaning out of pain we are light enough to rest in God.

God is my possession forever. Or more truthfully God has taken possession of me.

This is what it means to wake from the dream. Not to lose everything but to discover at last that we were never held by anything else.