Love Quote by Jessamyn West

West’s line is a quiet rebuke disguised as a benediction. “Awakening” sounds like trumpets and conversion narratives, but she immediately tests the claim with a hard metric: love. Not belief. Not doctrine. Not the thrill of being “saved.” If the sleeper rises without a widened capacity for care, the alarm was just noise.

The sentence works because it treats spirituality as an outcome, not an identity. “Religious awakening” is framed less as private illumination and more as a public, measurable shift in behavior. West chooses “sleeper,” not “sinner,” flattening moral hierarchy: we’re not monsters, we’re numb. That’s a distinctly modern diagnosis, aimed at the comfortable and self-satisfied as much as the lost. “Roused him in vain” lands with almost Puritan severity, but the target is performative piety rather than pleasure. She’s warning against the kind of religion that wakes you up only to hand you a mirror.

The subtext is also literary. As a novelist and a Quaker-adjacent moral thinker in mid-century America, West wrote in a culture where religious language could easily become civic decoration: church as respectability, revival as spectacle, faith as social sorting. Her criterion cuts through that. Love, here, isn’t sentimentality; it’s attention, humility, the willingness to be changed by other people’s reality. If your awakening doesn’t make you gentler, braver, more porous to suffering, it’s just consciousness-raising without conscience.