SLEEPING IN CHURCH | RESISTING REST JUNGIAN DREAM ANALYSIS | WAKING UP AS RESURRECTION
Sometimes I lie awake at night, and I ask, “Where have I gone wrong?” Then a voice says to me, “This is going to take more than one night.”
— Charlie Brown (Charles M. Schulz)
EDITOR
CJ Green
MANAGING EDITOR
Meaghan Ritchey
PUBLISHER
David Zahl
ASSISTANT EDITORS
Cali Yee Ben Self
COPY EDITOR
Ken Wilson
POETRY EDITOR
Andy Eaton
ART DIRECTOR
Tom Martin
ART RESEARCHER
Alyssa Coppelman
ADMINISTRATIVE DIRECTOR
Deanna Roche
EDITOR EMERITUS
Ethan Richardson
BOARD OF DIRECTORS
BOARD PRESIDENT
Jonathan Adams
EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR David Zahl
TREASURER Willis Logan SECRETARY Sarah Condon Ginger Mayfield Michael Sansbury Scott Johnson James Munroe
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The Mockingbird is a nonprofit magazine that seeks to connect the message of God’s grace with the concerns of everyday life. Our staff believes that grace, by its nature, is dynamic, unmerited, and expansive; we hope the range of voices in this issue reflects that nature. In surprising and down-to-earth ways, we aim to demonstrate how the Christian understanding of reality—what people are like, what God is like, and how the two intersect—is born out all around us.
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Sleeping in Church GREG PAUL
Now I Lay Me… MISSY ANDREWS
Sleep Stories KATHLEEN NORRIS
More Rip Van Winkle Than Dr. King BEN SELF
Dreams LAURA HUFF HILEMAN
When Self-Care Won’t Save You CALI YEE
Sleepers Awake! TODD BREWER
The Misty Bridge LAURA BONDARCHUK
Finding You Again SUSAN COWGER
Sleep Is a Country ANNE LE DRESSAY
Dark Matter
STEPHEN SEXTON
The Lamp of Sleep JOSHUA EDWARDS
Poem Drafted While Very Tired CHRIS DAVIDSON
Praying in the Night TISH HARRISON WARREN
The Nighttime Hermit PAUL QUENON
No Rest for the Working CAROLYN CHEN
Dear Gracie…
The Confessional
40 Winks
Sleep Through the Ages, Pt. 1
On Our Bookshelf
Cuddly Carnivores
Sleep Through the Ages, Pt. 2 From the Soapbox 98
DAVID ZAHL
I’d never sign up for it, but I can’t say I’m not tempted to. In the ad, famed neuroscien tist Matthew Walker vows to “reclaim our right to a full night of sleep.” I’m referring to the Sleep Masterclass. You know Masterclass: the online program where authors, actors, and entrepreneurs give talks about how to succeed in their field? I guess sleep is now so complicated we need an expert to teach us how. If I seem sarcastic, it’s not because I find sleeping easy; I just don’t see it as something to master. It seems more like something that masters. No matter how hard we fight to stave it off (or bring it on), eventually our eyelids droop, and our minds wander off into that dreamy limbo.
Of course, it’s not a systematic process, and rarely complies with our expectations for it. Some nights we may lie awake for hours, anxiously cycling over the most ran dom thoughts. The comedian Samantha Irby described it like this: “Hello, 911? I’ve been lying awake for an hour each night for the past eight months, reliving a two-second awkward experience I had in front of a casual acquaintance three years ago.”
In the Masterclass preview, Walker sug gests you can tame the sleep beast with a few simple tricks, like turning down your bedroom temperature to 68 degrees Fahren heit; if you were to pay for the full course, I figure he’d probably also tell you to have less screen time. But “the secret weapon” of a good night’s rest? Sleep tracking! Now, I don’t know if you’ve ever fastidiously mon itored your behavior in any way, but it’s kind of the opposite of relaxing. Still, the obsessive pursuit of a perfect night’s sleep has become so common there’s now a term for it: “orthosomnia.” This is a condition experienced by those who rely so heavily on sleep tracking that they actually psych themselves out of being able to sleep—they get performance anxiety.
Historically, this is pretty weird. Accord ing to some scholars, the goal itself, of get ting a straight-through eight hours, is re cent; they call it “compressed sleep,” which became common over the 19th century due to the changing demands of the industri al era. Prior to that, “bisphasic” sleep was common. In medieval texts, you’ll read of “two sleeps,” segments of slumber three to four hours each; between them was a period of wakefulness during which people might have read by candlelight, made love,
or just stared idly into the darkness until they drifted off again.
For me, the idea is endlessly fascinating— and an instant relief. It means that sleep is, and always has been, messy. It means that “from the cosmic perch of history,” disjoint ed slumber “appears quite natural,” in the words of researcher A. Roger Ekirch. Sleep is something we need, and something we fight; it’s chaotic and it’s easy; it’s natural and it’s not.
And although we can set certain conditions to help us get there, ultimately, sleep comes over us. It happens to us. As Benjamin Self writes in these pages, “When we sleep, we have no choice but to relax, to re lease those thoughts and feelings we’ve been grasping so tightly throughout the day and let them be sifted like wheat.” We lay ut terly passive while our minds work with no effort of our own. In Walker’s terms, “Sleep provides overnight therapy… sleep will take difficult, painful experiences [and] it will act almost like a nocturnal soothing balm.”
For this same reason, there may be no profounder image of faith than the pas sivity of a good night’s rest. I’m reminded of what Moses told the Israelites in Exodus: “The Lord will fight for you. You need only keep still.” In other words, while we
lay immobile, God acts. While we sleep, God works. While we appear to be dead, God provides and restores life. Sleep itself is a reenactment of death, as Todd Brewer writes in his essay for this issue, and wak ing up is resurrection; it’s a daily necessity that evokes our foundational hope.
From its conception I envisioned this is sue as a companion to my own insomnia: something I wouldn’t mind staying up with in the wee hours. Maybe you’ll do the same: On some restless night, roll out of bed and click on a lamp. Stay up with us. Maybe you’ll even find parts of this issue boring (soothing?) enough to put you to sleep! Hey, that wouldn’t be the worst thing. Sleep is a gift, and as John says on The Brothers Zahl podcast, Jesus himself can be “a kind of lul laby… sung to us in the dark of night, for comfort and peace… [He is] a place to go, a place to rest.”
This is the understanding of God that we’re expressing in this magazine—not a sleep tracker who measures and surveils you but a gentle love song, a warm accompany ing presence in the long, cold night. More than anything, we pray that these pages would offer you rest even when you’re restless and, when the windows are dark, the hope of dawn. — CJG
As a preacher, I can proud ly say that I’ve never bored an audience so thoroughly that someone fell asleep and fell out a window. (“Fell asleep,” okay, yes. But never “fell out a window.” I know, it’s a low bar.) I plan to give the apostle Paul a little dig about that if, as I hope, I get to meet him someday.
By Greg PaulHowever, having preached in many church and conference settings, on four continents, in a slew of countries, and over the course of several decades, I can also say with confidence that the gently bobbing head is a common sight—each dip a little lower than the last, until suddenly it jerks upright with a stunned and slightly embarrassed look. Often there’s an attempt at camouflage—the deliberate closing of
Digital photograph, 2014, by Joshua White, joshuawhitephotography.com.the eyes, for instance, with the head raised and the mouth pursed, in the hope that the previous attitude might be taken for one of deep and prayerful contemplation of the sermon’s matter.
I preach far more often than I sit and listen to others—a situation that I admit is not ideal—but I do clearly remember what it was like, as a young carpenter and father to a burgeoning, very active brood, to fall asleep in church. The slightly stuffy air; the rare complete passivity; the rising tide of a general weariness; the comforting sound of the preacher’s voice as it became more distant and less distinct, until it was at last reduced to a soporific drone.
And crucially, it seems to me now, it was a circumstance in which I felt very safe and secure. Notably, it’s far less common to see that bobbing head in a conference setting, where attendees are surrounded by people they probably don’t know, and in a building or room that is unfamiliar. It’s most often folks comfortable in the pews of their own church who nod off.
knob on the end with which he could rap the noggin of a dozing parishioner. The rigor of that expression of Christian faith reflected a view of a God who would not be amused by gentle snores in the midst of worship—a God who, perhaps, was not much inclined to be amused at any time for any reason.
While beadles have, thankfully, gone the way of frock coats and buckled shoes, the now more common mode of church services as performance/production—that is, a kind of spiritually oriented show presented to a largely passive audience—seem more orient ed to sensory, emotional and (sometimes) intellectual stimulation than to restfulness or a deep sense of safety. We’re still being kept awake, but by other means. Would it be too bold to suggest that we seem now to serve a God who regards amusement, or at least entertainment of a sort, as a key func tion of the church?
“In peace I will both lie down and sleep,” the psalmist writes, “for you alone, O Lord, make me dwell in safety” (Ps 4:8). While it seems unlikely that he had worship gath erings in view, perhaps it’s a strange sort of compliment to the church and preacher if someone falls asleep during the service now and then.
Many churches and monasteries of for mer times had an officer called a beadle, among whose functions was the respon sibility of keeping congregants awake. In Puritan churches, the beadle would patrol the aisles carrying a long pole with a brass
While we can certainly benefit spiritually from those sorts of stimulation, I do wonder if we’re missing something. Today more and more voices are declaring that churches are too frequently not safe places; often the people crying out have already left because of exclusion or abuse. The tragic and un speakably sordid list of popular Christian leaders, organizations, and megachurches re vealed as purveyors of spiritual, emotional, financial, gender and especially sexual be trayal and oppression grows by the day. The personalities and situations that are extreme enough to make the news must surely be only the tip of the iceberg: they are as like ly to thrive in a small rural congregation as anywhere else.
Any congregation, including its leadership, that believes the church’s primary purpose is providing a product to be consumed by congregants—even if it is regarded as a spiritu-
al one—has surely fallen asleep. And not in the sense that the psalmist describes. I mean more in the character of the disciples catch ing forty winks at Gethsemane while Jesus sweats blood and the betrayer approaches.
Jesus, our putative Master, repeatedly made it clear that his followers would be defined by their sacrificial love of and service to others, especially to those who be cause of their hunger, thirst, foreignness, degradation, sickness, or imprisonment are unsafe in the world. They are also identi fied as the ones who will find safety in the kingdom of God, and among whom we ourselves will find Jesus (Mt 25:34-40). It would be hard, in a great many churches, to describe ourselves as Jesus describes those who actually follow him.
How often do we church folk fret about relevance? Perhaps we should be more con cerned about why those who are viewed by the world as irrelevant are not clamoring to find their safety in our midst.
of cardboard in an alleyway or stairwell or under a bridge. It’s because of these tragic realities, not in spite of them, that Jesus calls them “blessed,” which seems to mean that they are at the very heart of his kingdom (Mt 5:1-6; Lk 6:20-23).
I remember a man named James, curled up around his backpack in a doorway in one corner of Sanctuary’s auditorium, snor ing raggedly and loudly enough for all to hear him as we shared Communion, sang songs, prayed, and preached. It wasn’t an isolated occurrence by any means, but it almost always raised smiles and chuckles, depending how loud he got. And I remem ber him starting awake one night, frightened and disoriented, and crying out, “What I want to know is, can I be forgiven?” I re member the sigh that rippled through the congregation as we recognized this ques tion echoing secretly in the chambers of our own hearts—even those of us who had the “right” theological answers. We knew, too, that for James it was no abstract query but a wrenching uncertainty rooted in crippling shame.
For the past thirty years, it’s been my great privilege and joy to be embraced by a communion and community called Sanc tuary, where people who are poor, crushed by loss, constantly excluded, and starving for justice—simply desiring to be treat ed right—are the focus, the center, and in many ways the animating spiritual power of almost all our activities. Most of my broth ers and sisters are poor; many are homeless or marginally housed. Past and continuing traumatic experiences, and the dark fruit they bear, are the norm. These are people who have precious little experience of shalom (peace), nowhere to dwell in safety—who may “both lie down and sleep” on a piece
No doubt we’ve had visitors who were discomfited to find two or three people stretched out and sleeping soundly right in the midst of a worship gathering, not to mention a few more who might be passed out in the entrance vestibule or on the stairs. Perhaps it even seemed disrespectful of the sleepers, or lax on the part of those of us who facilitate worship or do the teaching. Those of us who knew James and his mates were merely grateful to know they were, for the moment, safe enough to slumber in a measure of peace.
For us as a communion, as a kingdom community, such safety is critical. Sanctuary is not a hostel. We don’t usually provide beds
or a place to sleep overnight.1 Despite this, members of our community routinely sleep on couches, in a few chairs pulled togeth er, on the floor, in the staff meeting room, or wherever they can find space. The thirdfloor landing at the top of the entrance stairs and the platform are popular spots. We leave our brothers and sisters sleeping as long as we can, aware that, until the next time they come to our run-down old building, they may find no other place to rest without fear of freezing or being ripped off or assaulted.
One bitter winter night some years ago, a couple of our people discovered Marcel
1. In certain circumstances, we’ll rent a hotel room for a day or two for one of our people. During the pandemic, many facilities serving homeless people closed; those that remained open were usually medically unsafe. For a season, our auditorium was converted into a dorm, where a handful of people could rest in an environment that was carefully arranged for maximum safety in medical as well as emotional and physical terms. During this time, we also supported an encampment that sprang up in the neighboring park and around our building. We did have two long-term residences (we now have only one), but it’s never been enough to even scratch the depth of need.
in a vestibule of the parking garage across the road. He was unconscious and close to hypothermia. They knew him well enough to know that he’d refuse to be taken in an ambulance, even if he was dying. For a lot of unhoused folks, hospitals (and officialdom of any kind) can be demeaning and frightening. So instead, they carried him back to Sanctuary, where we made a bed between two heating registers and covered him with blankets. I stayed with Marcel that night—his bed was right outside my office—working until late and then trying to sleep in my desk chair. We had laid him on his back; his mouth was wide open and propagating thunderous but wildly errat ic snores. After a while, the sound didn’t bother me. It was the periodic lengthy silences that were frightening. Marcel’s health was precarious. He had barely re gained consciousness while being hauled across the road and up the stairs. For the first several hours, each time the snoring stopped for a bit, I’d get out of my chair and crouch beside him in the dark, my ear
near his mouth, listening. Holding my own breath until I heard his.
He slept through much of the next morn ing. When other people arrived, I went home and lay down in peace and slept in safety.
James and Marcel were both Indigenous men—Cree and Blackfoot, respectively. The Church has been famously unsafe for Indigenous peoples, actively and deliberately destroying families and cultures. As I write this, more than 10,000 unmarked graves of Indigenous children have been identified so far on the grounds of government-mandat ed, church-operated residential schools in my home country of Canada. Because I’m white and Christian, I should have looked like the enemy to men like James and Mar cel. Their lives were blighted and oppressed, and ended far too early because of my racial and spiritual forebears.
And yet, both spent a great deal of time in their final years hanging out at and around Sanctuary. They ate there, slept there, made jokes, hung out with friends, showered, got medical care, showed up for worship (James, anyway; Marcel not so much), had the odd scrap and made the occasional pro phetic pronouncement. They also, in a va riety of ways, comforted and cared for me and a wide array of wealthier community members. They, and hundreds of others in
similar situations, made Sanctuary a safer place. What grace.
Several years ago, a few of Marcel’s street brothers—also Indigenous men—found him sprawled in the little park next door, uncovered, unconscious again. A gentle rain was coming down. It was clear he was desperately sick. They carried him into the little alleyway between Sanctuary and the apartment building next door and, since Sanctuary wasn’t open yet, laid him ten derly on some cardboard and made a kind of lean-to to protect him from the rain. A little later they returned and, finding he wasn’t responsive, summoned Lyf, a Sanc tuary staff member. Hearing the commo tion, I followed.
Marcel lay on his back with his mouth wide open, almost exactly as he had out side my office that winter night years earli er. He wasn’t snoring, and I didn’t need to kneel beside him to know that he was gone.
We must not forget the systemic injustices that afflicted him and generations of his forebears, delivering him to homelessness and death in an alleyway. But we must also remember this: that his brothers had carried him home, to the one place in this world where he had been able to dwell in some small measure of safety. In peace, he lay there and slept.
My Beloved slept downstairs last night Eventide to dawn gray and mute and colder Restless waking lifts my head hourly all night long straining to hear any draft a current the slightest murmurish sigh that means you live You’re alive rolling toward me again breathing in my face cleaving to my side even in sleep
Istruggle with sleep from time to time. I’m told it’s common in mid-life. I’d like to believe this problem is age specific, but after raising six kids, I doubt it. Any parent of young children will confirm the bedtime struggle. Can I have another story? Can I have a glass of water? Will you sing to me? Will you stay with me? I’m scared. Will you leave the light on? The litany of childhood stalling tactics can tax the patience of a saint. I’d lay odds that when the American poet and philos opher Henry David Thoreau wrote “to be awake is to be alive,” he had some child in mind. Of course, Thoreau is not alone among authors who recognize a relationship between wakefulness and life, and when they do, they imply a darker corollary: If wakefulness is life, then sleep is death — which goes a long way towards explaining our trouble with sleep.
The poet Dylan Thomas exhorts, “Do not go gentle into that good night. / Rage, rage
against the dying of the light.” But it doesn’t really take a poet to make this connection. Even children know. I see this “rage” in my ten-month-old grandson as I rock him to sleep. He holds his eyes wide, writhes, push es, arches, refuses to succumb to the sleep his body demands. To be awake is to be alive How does he know?
As I rock him, I remember my own childhood. I am four years old and lying in my grandmother’s bed upon a white coverlet in a room bathed in soft light. I can still see my stockinged toes wiggling as I wait for enough time to pass to venture downstairs and try for liberty. When my grandmother looks in to see if I’m sleeping, I pretend, peeking through my lashes as if she won’t see me peering back at her. Go to sleep, Mis sy, she warns, resolve in her voice, and I sigh and toss and plot my escape.
I am 53 now, and I’ve learned to value sleep. Now in the night watches, ironically, wakefulness is death. I crave sleep, but lie
frustrated, awake in a prison of self-evaluation. In my house, we call this the 2:00 am scaries. It’s when I lie in bed, the previous day’s conversations on a loop in my head— that thing I said or failed to say, that thing I did or failed to do. It’s when I’m most vulnerable to the age-old self-justification project that always ends in failure.
Southern Gothic author Flannery O’Con nor knew about the scaries. She depicts her protagonist Ruby Turpin under their sway in the short story “Revelation” (1964). Ruby spends her mid-night scaries puzzling over her place in the world. Who is she, she wonders, and what makes her so? The social pecking order in her mid-century, Southern town further complicates these questions, distracting Ruby with its complex hierarchy of race, financial success, and manners.
It may, in fact, be tempting for modern
readers to become distracted by this too, dismissing Ruby for her middle-class racism and tossing O’Connor’s book with a similar sense of superiority. This, however, would only prove O’Connor’s point. Ruby’s racism is a disgusting symptom, symbolic of a deeper and more universal problem of identity. Is she good enough, she wonders? What secures her value? Facing these ques tions in the echo chamber of her own mind, Ruby discriminates. She imagines she’s better than some and worse than others.
Pondering identity at midnight is a bit like gazing into a funhouse mirror, and Ruby finds her vision grotesquely transmuted in the darkness, until all the various castes of people she contemplates in her vain imag ination are “moiling and roiling around in her head, and she would dream they were all crammed together in a box car, being
ridden off to be put in a gas oven.” Ouch. When I teach this story to my high school literature students, I always pause here to ask, Why a box car? Why a gas oven? What is O’Connor on about? For this is no random allusion she gives us. This, she suggests, is the end of Ruby’s thought pattern, the logical fruition of her self-created identity system: the Holocaust and its murderous horrors. This, O’Connor suggests, is the destination of all self-justification projects, and not just Ruby’s racist one.
To justify the self, someone has to die, and just like the ancient Hebrews, who sac rificed an innocent lamb to atone for their annual sins, the whole world is looking for a scapegoat, a substitute to stand between them and judgment. Funny that even those with no background in Mosaic Law quickly resort to scapegoating to justify themselves. Whether it’s the literal deaths of Hitler’s genocide or the figurative ones of Ruby’s midnight musings, O’Connor portrays the urge to obtain personal standing by sacrificing some “other” as a universal that underscores the depth of humanity’s ubiquitous, felt need for atonement.
Ruby needs a word from outside because she cannot see herself apart from these despi cable and fruitless comparisons, and O’Con nor depicts Ruby in the middle of a prayer, mid-hallelujah, when this necessary revelation arrives. It comes in the form of a violent interruption: a book (ironically entitled Human Development) hurled from across a crowded room in Ruby’s general direction by a pimply-faced college girl with an atti tude. Smack! It hits her right over her left eye, and it leaves a great mark, not only on her face, but also in her psyche.
I relate. I can’t count the number of books that have struck me, figuratively speaking, in just such a way, and O’Connor’s collect ed stories is certainly one of them. Though I am tempted to term the timing of Ruby’s incident an accident of O’Connor’s narra tion, the story’s careful craftsmanship sug gests otherwise. With signature, cheeky wit, O’Connor, like her antagonist (conspicuously named Mary Grace), hurls, as it were, her book in the eye of her readers, violently provoking them to gaze with Ruby into the face of a sacred mystery, and to receive with her a profound and reorienting revelation.
Ruby interests me. And though I’m quick to distance myself from her class-conscious ness and racism, I know I share her funda mental blindness. Poor Ruby. The question of identity makes her assume airs and par ticipate in the comparison game—an ugly, contemptible contest. In the initial pages of the story, readers watch Ruby judge everyone around her, making herself superior, which of course only begs the question of why she still lies awake nights, contemplating the order of things.
Never mind that Mary Grace bears an incredible likeness to Ruby in her vicious judgment. Readers hardly notice this be cause Ruby’s issues make her so universally contemptible. After only minutes in a room with Ruby, readers are also looking for some thing to throw; so when Mary Grace, pro voked by Ruby’s condescension, flings her book and catapults herself across the room to lunge at Ruby’s throat, we fly with her.
Mary Grace gives Ruby a good throttling, strangling her until “her vision narrowed and she saw everything as if it were happening in a small room far away, or as if she were looking at it through the wrong end
of a telescope.” Only after the medics pull the angry girl away does the world reverse itself for Ruby so that she sees “everything large instead of small.” It’s an understate ment to say that Ruby’s sight is violently affected by the incident. True to the name of her assailant, this change proves to be a bitter grace for Ruby.
With Ruby’s attention secured, a mes sage proceeds. As Ruby peers into the eyes of her antagonist, the girl speaks: “Go back to hell where you came from, you old wart hog.” Curiously, Ruby receives this word as a divine revelation, and she spends the remainder of the story in a Job-like argu ment with God, hopping mad: “‘What do you send me a message like that for?... How am I a hog and me both? How am I saved and from hell too?’” Though Ruby cannot see the irony in the moment, she recognizes this message as a clear, if galling answer to her midnight identity questions.
It’s not until she’s hosing down her old sow in the concrete pig parlor of her family farm that this issue between Ruby and her Maker comes to a head. Preoccupied with her bruised ego, Ruby sprays the pig in the eye, ironically evoking a squeal of displea sure akin to the blind rage she herself vents. As she raises her fist into the air, Ruby yells out over the dimming field, “Who do you think you are?”
“Who do you think you are?” The words bounce back as an echo, turning the ques tion on Ruby. Until they come, as if from beyond the hedging pale of trees, Ruby has never looked beyond herself for an answer to her troubling question of identity. Now however, she perceives the impertinence of her wrathful question and waits expectantly for the answer she deserves, the just, devouring fire—a lightning bolt from heaven.
In the pregnant pause that follows, gaz ing down into the pig parlor, Ruby sees the sow, “suffused,” O’Connor writes, with a “red glow” and panting with a “secret life.” Observing the creature, Ruby intuits, more than understands, the divine answer. No lightning bolt from heaven strikes her. No warranted disaster checks her. Instead, the image of that sow—washed clean despite her squeals of protest and settled contentedly in the corner, back lit by the red glow—provides for Ruby what O’Connor calls, “some abysmal, life-giving knowledge.” Gazing at that grunting, oblivious warthog, Ruby begins to understand her revelation. With clear eyes, she sees.
At 2:00 a.m., I am Ruby Turpin, tormented by my need for justification, rapt like her in nightmarish fever dreams that lead to death. And make no mistake, it’s a death that I need. Like Ruby, I lie in bed and consider where I stand. Who am I? Am I good enough? How am I doing? I jot up my day’s entries, consider my deficit, turn over and refigure. I reach for grace like a lamp,
but sometimes it’s as if the bulb is burned out; the switch won’t work. My stubborn self strives to work out its own salvation with fear and trembling. I need the accusing voices to die, the self to fall silent. But in the night watches, my mind racing circles, I’m chased from my bed and into whatever weak pool of light I can find.
My petty prevarications do little to justify me, little to prevent the death I evade. What relief it would be to acknowledge my deficit, cease striving, and turn to the Great Bene factor, tap the account He’s prepared for me and enjoy the richness of His gift. What rest it would be to relax into the truth: Though I am guilty, I am not guilty. Though I am impoverished, I am rich. Instead, I proffer evidence in the courtroom and insist on my innocence; like Ruby, I object.
Truth is bitter grace. Though it yields good health, it goes down hard, and I strain at the pill, arch my back, hold my eyes shut, writhe, shake my fist in the air, scream. Maybe middle-aged sleep-troubles aren’t so different from the infant’s after all. To be awake is to be alive, I insist. I will not go gentle into that good night! I parry the damning voices and counter-attack.
If the likeness between sleep and death is real, maybe this tenacious resistance is my central problem. Maybe I can’t sleep because I won’t die—won’t lay down my self-justifi cation project. I won’t accept my plain fail ure to “be perfect as my Father in heaven is perfect” (Mt 5:48). I won’t acknowledge my frail and fallen creaturehood.
In Psalm 127:2, wise Solomon joins the authorial chorus, explaining, “It is in vain that you rise up early and go late to rest, eat ing the bread of anxious toil; for He gives to His beloved sleep” (ESV). On sleepless nights I’ve wondered at this—wondered
if I was outside the purvey of the beloved. Yet all the while the gift was before me, the blessed promise of a rest that exists apart from my striving to justify myself.
Maybe that’s why God created sleep—to teach us about death. Though we rail and resist, it envelops us at last, reminding us of our smallness. The voices that keep me on the self-justification wheel, subject to “the scaries,” fall silent when my soul hears the Voice from beyond the paling trees. It washes over me, readjusting my vision and causing me, despite my protestations, to gaze upon a work divine: a bronze serpent on a stick; a Son of Man on a tree; the di vine scapegoat, Jesus, nailed to the cross for me. Transfixed by His vicarious work, I cease striving. I rest. “Now I lay me down to sleep…” It’s like God has built a daily demonstration into our lives of that one, necessary thing, that climactic event that sleep foreshadows: the great exchange. Each night, we are confronted by our need for a rest that we cannot achieve. Each morning marks a mock-resurrection, anticipating the final reveal.
With all this poetry worked into the world—so many images and mentors light ing the way, why do I still anxiously keep my watch by flickering candlelight, joust ing with grotesque shadows cast upon the darkened walls about me? Why cling to a life I cannot keep when a life I cannot lose is already mine? Why not yield to my ac cusers and cast my lot with Christ who, mute before His accusers, knew that God would not suffer His soul to lie in death? Why not take the dramatic, metaphorical Trust Fall into the arms of the One who trusted for me?
For I am discovering that the tormenting shadows of self-justification inevitably
drive me headlong into Jesus’ outspread arms. Held there, the inevitable drowsi ness begins, bringing in its wake blessed self-forgetfulness and a fresh new morning. If this image holds, maybe the shadow-rest I find is cast by that Light eternal, hidden in heaven for me.
Maybe Thoreau is right. To be awake is to be alive. But true wakefulness feels like death. It comes as O’Connor depicts it—as cold water in the face, or a book in the eye, or a severe mercy. It interrupts the self-jus tification project and adjusts our vision so that what we saw large, we suddenly know
to be negligible. Stripped of our sufficien cy and awake to our smallness, we’re final ly prepared for the big reveal. Though we look for the bolt of lightning, just measure for our megalomania, it never comes. Instead, we find our warthog selves suffused in a red glow and animated with a secret, vicarious life.
Life follows death as wakefulness, sleep. And joy, I’m told, comes in the morning.
So, I embrace this shadow here. Now. I lay it down. I lay Me down. Like the child I was, like the child I remain, I pray: Now, I lay me…
Dear God,
Let’s see. A bedtime prayer. Usually I would never. Because although it’s beginning to seem like maybe prayer doesn’t really work, after the instances where I prayed for admission to that prep school and didn’t get in, and for Dad to stop smoking, and he didn’t, and for my team to win districts, and we didn’t, I will admit that one thing prayer is pretty good at is putting me to sleep. Super necessary now! Because honest to God, I may never sleep again. It’s been a day. I’m jittery as hell, and after about thirty minutes of just lying here I’m as awake as ever, and God damn it—ah!, darn it—I think I might also have to pee right now, just a little bit. It’s one of these cases where if I don’t pee now, I’ll probably have to at, like, 3 a.m.? And which is worse, peeing now or peeing later? To pee or not to be—that is the question. Not to pee! That is my answer. To sleep! Sleeeep. But now my foot is doing this twitchy thing. I don’t know, God… I might just be stressed about tomorrow’s history final ’cause if I don’t sleep tonight, there’s a chance I’ll forget something as basic as the year of the Louisiana Purchase (1803!) or the Annexation of Texas (1845!), and then I’ll get—God forbid—not an A, and my GPA will drop, and I’ll never get into college, and I’ll never get a good job, and, and—
O Father God, I praise and adore thee, Good Lord, for my daily bread, for my friends, for my parents’ money, which is apparently not enough for the boots, but it’s not nothing, and thanks, as well, for the roof over my head, and for this basi cally comfortable mattress, and obviously for Lucas del Mar, who, as You know, asked me out today, and I’m just as pleased as hell. Lucas! Del! Mar! Boy’s hot as eff, and me? I was so awkward, the way I was kind of baring my teeth at him, too afraid to smile, but too afraid not to smile, and peering at him through these half-open lids. Allison calls it my Penny wise smile. What did I even say? I can’t even remember now. I think I blacked out, I think I died. I guess I’ll be meeting his parents Friday, and I guess I might be a little nervous
they’ll be like, “This girl?” and that after that, he’ll dump me, and there will be no second date, and if that happens I will just shave my head—oh, right: prayer. Hehe. I’m comin’ back—back to the heart of worship! It’s all about you, Jee-sus.
So yeah. Thank you, God, for my family, for my loving parents, for my good health, but I guess not really for the health of Uncle Martín? Who just had that foot surgery—bless him, Lord, and grant him a speedy recovery—and then of course there’s Corey who was taken out of school for cancer, at least that’s what everyone’s saying. I mean? Cancer, at this age? Jesus… And everyone without homes and food who I saw in that documentary on YouTube, and like, are you even there God? I mean, what the honest hell? How can You be real in a world that’s so despicable? Are You even listening? You must not be. You must be a big nothing in the empty universe which began how exactly? If You are real, You had better have a good ex planation for all this! I don’t know. Sometimes I get the sense that even though I’m at the top of my class, or almost at the top, right beneath that nerd Jeremy, this all might just be a little beyond my comprehension. 1803! 1845!
Christ, have mercy.
I feel like you have three options here. And I’ll leave it to you to discern which one the Lord puts on your heart.
First, you could just lie. Tell them your spouse needs the complete solitude of a Holiday Inn Express. Or perhaps go the passive aggressive route and say, “We really don’t want to bother you too much so we will be down the road enjoying the compli mentary dry muffins and cantaloupe. See you at 10 a.m. Not at your house.”
I’m a grown adult, married with a child, and I hate staying at my parents’ house. Their home decor is what I would call “redneck southern borderline hoarder junkyard chic.”
How can I tell my parents that I don’t like visiting, because my spouse and I don’t feel comfortable sleeping at their house?
The other option is abrupt honesty. Explain that you feel like their interior design is best described as “A Cry for Help.” If you really want to light a fire, bring up the fact that you will eventually inherit this monstrosity of country living chaos (this has got to be in the back of your brain, right?). People always respond well when you bring up their demise as a burden. If you choose this path, then just pull up a chair and grab a Bud Light because you, my friend, just gave yourself dinner and a show.
We will call the final option Holy Ghost Shopping Spree. Take your wife to your local Cracker Barrel, buy your parents the stuff that they love, and see if you cannot love them a little more. Something tells me that if you buy a few quilts and some stupid metal signs about fishing, then you might see first hand the ridiculous amount of joy their decor gives them, and you might feel more comfortable with it.
Ultimately, there is no kind way to tell anyone that their house is a miserable place to be, especially the people who raised you. They will absolutely take it personally and you will immediately regret having said anything. Don’t we always regret attempting to fix anyone? It just leaves them feeling unloved and us feeling like villains. This may be an opportunity to be a quilted-cape-wearing hero.
When I was in college, I had a friend who died in his sleep at the age of 21. I was away on a semester abroad, and I never really got to process it. Ever since then, I’ve had occasional bouts of sleep anxiety: WHAT IF I DIE IN MY SLEEP?! I hate my brain late at night. And it’s got ten worse now that I have dependents. I keep think ing about what might happen to them if I died. What can I do to overcome my weird sleep anxiety? These days, I need every ounce of sleep I can get.
Signed, Anxious DadEmail magazine@mbird.com.
All queries will be kept anonymous.
One morning on the way to carpool last year, my youngest child asked what would happen if we were attacked by a nuclear bomb. My hus band answered, “Oh, that would never happen.”
As soon as said child got out of the car, I laid into him. “How do you know we won’t get hit by a nuclear bomb?!” And he said, “Well, if we did, then we would all be dead. So what’s the point in making her more anxious?”
This is one of the great things about dy ing by surprise. We generally do not know it’s happening until it’s already happened. I take a tremendous amount of comfort in that fact.
I wish I could tell you that you would nev er die in your sleep, but you totally could. My parents double-died in a car accident. I am one of those people that says “anything is pos sible,” and I do not mean that I could be presi dent. I mean all of the bad stuff could happen. I have seen it. You have, too. And that is why you are afraid.
But here’s what personal experience has taught me: Everyone will be fine when you die. Will they be sad? Of course. Will it dramatically change the course of their lives? Ab solutely. But also, they will get through it. Be cause loss is love by another name. And so is fear, really. Which just goes to show that you truly love your kids.
Also, you have no idea the people and re sources that God will put into their lives when they do lose you. It will be completely aston ishing. But of course, you sound healthy, ex cept for this whole waking up anxious thing. So maybe get some cognitive behavioral ther apy techniques. Take some melatonin.
Not one day is promised. It is all so precious. Rest up, and enjoy it.
The book begins in darkness—under the fluorescent lights of a hospital room. Enduring a brutal miscarriage, Tish Harrison Warren enters what she refers to as her “dark night of the soul,” a term coined by the sixteenth-cen tury Spanish mystic Saint John of the Cross, to describe a time of spiritual crisis when God seems absent. Prayer in the Night details Warren’s journey through that night, and serves as a guide for others in the midst of it. Writ ten in direct, accessible prose, Warren’s honesty about suffering is matched only by her enduring faithfulness through it all.
Of the weeks following her miscarriage, Warren writes, “Unlit hours brought a vacant space where there was nothing before me but my own fears and whispering doubts.” At such a time, especially if you’ve been raised to believe you have to come up with it on your own, prayer can seem taxing and absurd—a kind of one-sided conversation in which the person pray ing does all the work. In such a case, following a script written by someone else might be helpful. Warren explains: “When my strength waned and my words ran dry, I needed to fall into a way of belief that carried me. I needed other people’s prayers.” Specifically, she means Compline, an age-old service of evening prayers, a portion of which goes like this:
Keep watch, dear Lord, with those who work, or watch, or weep this night, and give your angels charge over those who sleep. Tend the sick, Lord Christ; give rest to the weary, bless the dying, soothe the suffering, pity the afflicted, shield the joyous; and all for your love’s sake. Amen.
In Prayer in the Night Warren meditates on each line of this remarkable invocation. “Reaching for this old prayer,” she writes, “was an act of hope that
would put me under the knife, work in me like surgery, set things right in my own heart.” While nighttime prayer may not solve the mystery of suffering, it can be a tool to help us endure it. More than anything, prayer reminds us of the God who watches, weeps, and works for his beloved children, no matter what time it is. Warren puts it this way, early in her book:
When we’re drowning we need a lifeline, and our lifeline in grief cannot be mere optimism that maybe our circumstances will improve, because we know that may not be true. We need practices that don’t simply palliate our fears or pain, but that teach us to walk with God in the crucible of our own fragility. During that difficult year, I didn’t know how to hold to both God and the awful reality of human vulnerability. What I found was that it was the prayers and practices of the church that allowed me to hold to—or rather to be held by—God when little else seemed sturdy, to hold to the Christian story even when I found no satisfying answers.
Prayer in the Night is Warren’s second book, following her best-selling Liturgy of the Ordinary, in which she identifies sleep as one of the key “liturgies” in which we participate daily. Sleep, she says, is an inevitable ritual whereby we acknowledge our limitations before a limitless God: “In recalling our frailty we get to practice, in the gentlest of ways, relying on God’s mercy and care for us.” Warren is also an Anglican priest who writes a weekly newsletter for the New York Times; her writing appears as well in Christianity Today, Comment, The Point, and many other publications. This summer we were lucky to catch her between her work and a much-deserved vacation. What follows is an emailed exchange about sleep, prayer routines, and Prayer in the Night.
It really depends on the night. In general, I sleep pretty well. But if any one of my three kids has a cough or a nightmare, the night is long and hard and I’m awake a lot.
Two nights ago, I couldn’t go to sleep. My brain was buzzing, and I was thinking over my life, which honestly is never very generative after midnight.
Anything I say here will just sound like normal, boring CDC recommendations. Go to bed at the same time every night, no screens or work in the bedroom, blah blah blah.
That said, sleep is a gift and a holy activity, and a lack of sleep is an epidemic in the United States, especially among teens, so we should actually fight for it. A lot of times when I just feel sad and depressed, I can over-spiritualize those feelings. Life can just seem too difficult. I’m bare ly holding on here. Where are you, God? And then I have a good nap or a good night’s sleep and am like, “Oh wait, I’m okay. God is good.” What I mean is that, at times what I take as a spiritual crisis is actually a need for sleep. The body and the soul are so wrapped up together that taking care of one helps the other.
Sleep is so important that the lack of it can look like this emotional and spiritual crisis. In reality, we just need rest. So to the extent that you’re able, follow the boring old doctor’s recommendations.
In Prayer in the Night, you write powerfully about “theodicy”—the question of God’s goodness in a world where suffering is common place. Beyond getting a good night’s rest, how do you handle that? Haha, well, that’s a big question and the answer is: It took me around 50,000 words to answer it in my book. But in general, I would say that I don’t think theodicy is primarily a philosophical or theological question (though it is that). It is a longing for God to take action. It is a deep, almost primordial ache for a world that is whole and good. So theodicy can’t be answered or solved like a math problem. It is a mystery to be endured. I talk a lot more about how to endure it in the book.
How has your understanding of prayer evolved over time, and how does your definition of prayer differ from what many people might have in mind?
Until well into my adult life, I primarily thought of prayer as “talking to God.” It was extemporaneous and wordy. I still think that this is a valid way to pray, but I’ve discovered many other ways of prayer. Silent prayer, imag inative prayer, contemplation, written or received prayer, and others. So I understand prayer much more as communion with God. Prayer seems to be a way of opening ourselves up to the always-there presence of God. Prayer in this sense feels less like something I do and more of an invitation into a reality much larger than me.
In your Liturgy of the Ordinary, you write, “The holiness of rest and the blessedness of unproductivity is a foreign idea to many of us.” How did you discover the association between sleep and God’s grace? Like many evangelicals, I grew up a tad gnostic without ever knowing what that is or what that meant. My spiritual formation never really addressed how we treat our bodies (beyond not having sex before marriage). I never thought about bodily needs theologically. A huge shift happened when I started attending an Anglican church. All of a sudden, we did a lot with our bodies. We sat, kneeled, stood; we waved branches on Palm Sunday, we crossed ourselves, we ate bread and drank wine, we shared in the Eucharist— the body of Christ. Bodies mattered in worship in a way I hadn’t known be fore. It was one of the chief things that drew me to more traditional liturgy.
As I came to see bodies as places of formation and worship, that came to affect how I saw all that the body does: eating, sleeping, even going to the bathroom. I began to kind of imaginatively expand how I understood worship and formation to include all that we do, not just what we cogni tively believe or proclaim. And then, once my imagination was expanded to think of the body as a holy instrument, then all of a sudden I started to notice that sleep and rest are all over the Bible. Psalm 127: “He grants sleep to those he loves.” How kind that God doesn’t just give us ‘spiritual things’ like prayer and faith, but sleep.
I also am just someone who loves sleep. I love naps. I love my bed. I love sleeping in. So it’s one of those places where I feel like, “Oooohhhh, this is so lovely.” And as C. S. Lewis says, my mind “runs back up the sunbeam to the sun.”
I also just want to say that I’ve come to see Jesus napping in the boat in Mark 4 really differently. I never thought much about this moment, his nap, but now I see his sleep, in the middle of the storm, as so very human and vulnerable—he really was tired and needed to rest—but also as an act of faith. Everyone is freaking out, and Jesus is asleep. I can’t sleep on planes, be cause I’m irrationally afraid, and obviously the second I fall asleep the plane will drop thousands of feet. I sleep when I feel safe, when I relinquish con trol. I love that this story is about how Jesus calms the winds and waves, yet in the same story, he relinquishes control and shows this utter faith in God by sleeping. So sleep is this way of connecting to the faith of Jesus, his deep trust in the Father. And also let it be known that it is biblical to nap—haha. So that is a biblical vision I can really embrace. WWJD? Nap!
Looking at our cultural landscape broadly, you write with character istic grace that we “cannot condemn outrage in favor of some pure form of enlightened logic that denies emotion… There is, truly, plenty to be upset about.” This is an increasingly pressing topic, especially
as we seem to encounter more bad news than ever online. Can you say more about this?
I think in the context of the quote I was writing on the need for mourning and lament. Part of the reason we have an “outrage culture” in the church and in broader society is that rage tends to be a “strong” emotion that comes from the more vulnerable emotions of sadness or fear. We have to descend into these deeper places of grief and truly lament, or the only option is outrage or apathy. Sometimes in the face of justified outrage, people—maybe especially male intellectual types—can say “Oh, simmer down, don’t be so dramatic,” as if the answer to outrage is for everyone to deny that things are all that bad. But a place of denial or outrage is not a particularly good or true place to live. The truer way to respond to the brokenness of the world is lament, which can of course involve expressing anger, but doesn’t stop there. Grief can be healed. It can be generative.
In your work, you also detail some of your experiences as a female priest. What are some words of wisdom you would share with women in or pursuing a life in ministry?
Have a crew of people who really love you, who you trust, and who will tell you when you are wrong or being foolish. And listen to those people, deeply and vulnerably. Then, don’t listen to people who don’t love you.
Also, don’t try to prove yourself to people. You’ll feel like you need to in order to “prove” that women should be in ministry or something. But that ends in madness.
Lastly, trust that the callings of God are sturdy. You don’t have to make them happen or treat them as fragile. What God calls us to, God will make happen. We don’t have to handle our life with kid gloves, like we will screw it up. We will screw it up, to be clear! But God’s call is really durable.
How do you teach your kids about prayer without it coming across as boring or forceful?
My kids probably think it is boring and forceful, which isn’t all bad. But most ly we just pray a lot about everything, and they see us grown-ups praying. We have used imaginative prayer with our kids often—a way of reading passages of scripture and imagining yourself in the story or a way of imagining your self before Jesus—and they seem to genuinely love that. If you want to learn more about this way of prayer or contemplation, I’d recommend Jared Boyd’s Imaginative Prayer. We walked through it with our kids, and they really liked it and want to do it again. It’s made for children but is also great for adults.
Also, we do all the cheesy kid-friendly stuff. We sing prayers at meals. They get into that. We do Advent calendars and wreaths and prayers, and bedtime prayers, and we pray over them at their birthday parties.
Sleep is a country whose border guards are fickle.
Some people slip in and out without effort, unquestioned.
For them, sleep is routine and therefore blank.
For others, it is an excursion from which they bring back exotic souvenirs and memories of archetypal visitations.
I am not of those.
I am on some black list to which the guards are inconsistently sensitive.
Sometimes only the bribery of drugs slips me past them.
Sometimes they pretend they will let me in, then call me back for yet another interrogation.
Every now and then, they seem to believe my pretense of citizenship and they barely notice me, so that I almost convince myself.
By Anne Le DressayAlways I come at an angle, nervous and with too much baggage. I walk furtive, never looking directly at gates or guards.
Always, I must drop piece by piece the baggage
till I am light enough to float.
Sometimes in that country
I am surprised by grace: the country is a jewel whose dust I am permitted to gather and sift, enchanted.
Sometimes in that country
I am accompanied by angels.
When the pandemic struck in 2020, up ending life as I knew it, I was startled to read so many accounts of people being unable to sleep, and suffering dreadful nightmares when they finally man aged to drift off. Physicians and psychologists reported that they felt overwhelmed by the number of people pleading for medication to help them get a good night’s sleep.
Meanwhile I had been sleeping soundly, with few dreams of note. I wasn’t feeling guilty about that, but did recall the comment a Benedictine monk once made when I said, after finishing a book tour that took me to 17 cities in 21 days, that I didn’t mind it that much. He said, “Maybe you were just too dense to notice what was really going on.” I’d been affiliated with Benedictine men and women since 1983, and his astute ob servation didn’t surprise me—he was right. I sometimes feel that not paying attention is how I get through life, and one day my tombstone will read: “She just didn’t notice.”
My attention span seems basically OK, but I do confess to a deep-seated disinterest in analyzing myself and the events in my life. This can manifest as callous indifference, but in its more positive aspect it is “detachment.”
Considered a monastic virtue, detachment
means that we refuse to be distracted by un important things, so that we can focus on what really matters. On my book tour, this meant being able to discount the consider able discomforts of daily air travel so that I could better enjoy the people I was meet ing—readers, booksellers, and the journalists who had been tasked with interviewing me.
But I do sometimes wonder if my habitu al attitude towards life equates to sleepwalk ing much of the time. When some Benedic tine women asked me to prepare a talk on a medieval nun for an academic conference, I was thrilled to do it, as it enabled me to write about a fierce woman and magnificent writer who should be better-known, Mechtild of Magdeburg. But when conference organizers asked about my methodology, I was stymied. I had no idea how I had done what I’d done. The piece did contain some good stories, so I finally wrote something fancy about narrative as methodology, and that sufficed.
I know that sleep changes over the course of our lives, and remember being stunned, when my oldest nieces became teenagers, that they needed much more sleep than just a few years before: ten to twelve hours a night. It seems that they needed all that sleep to help them make the transition from childhood to adolescence.
When I was in my early twenties, still naïve and rather slow to embrace adulthood, I had a sequence of nightmares—many details of
which I still recall 50 years later—that led me to seek help from a Jungian therapist. She helped me get my life in better order, and I learned enough from her that years later I could recognize that what might have seemed a nightmare was not. Riding in the boxcar of a speeding freight train with an other woman, someone my age, I suddenly rose up and threw her out the open door. They were parts of myself I was discarding, and I needed to let them go.
Writers often have an intense and diffi cult relationship with sleep. Coleridge and Keats had plenty to say about how the writ ing process invades both the conscious and unconscious parts of the mind. I gained a new perspective on this many years ago when I was making a retreat at a Benedictine abbey and I complained to an older monk that I had hoped to get a lot of writing done,
but mostly I was just sleeping. He replied, “Sometimes sleep is the most spiritual thing you can do.”
Like many writers, I’ve often dreamt I was writing something great, enjoying specific words and images that I felt sure I’d remem ber, only to have it all vanish on waking. If a poem or piece of prose I’m working on has truly penetrated my mind, I sometimes find it nudging me out of sleep, with a specific suggestion about how to improve a line, or delete one, or add something new. When I was finishing The Cloister Walk, my memoir of time spent among Benedictine monks, the book would not leave me or my sleep alone. I settled into a schedule of rising ev ery 15 minutes or so to work on the book, and then going back to sleep for another 15 minutes. The next night I would sleep for seven or eight hours. This went on for
over two weeks: one night on, one night off. I knew that the bizarre schedule was unsustainable, and that if I hadn’t had that every-other-night of blessed, uninterrupted sleep, I would have been in trouble. But it worked; I survived, and was able to improve the book considerably.
I was in my 40s then. I’m in my mid-70s now, and suspect that such an aberrant sleep schedule would no longer serve me or my writing. I was in my mid-50s when, not long after my husband and I had celebrated our 25th wedding anniversary, he died from the cancer that had plagued him for years. A phy sician warned me that I’d probably not be able to sleep through the night for a while after his death, and advised me to be careful. If I be gan suffering from severe sleep deprivation, he wanted me to seek help. I was grateful for his advice, as it helped me understand my many nights of interrupted sleep as a normal part of grieving. And on many occasions, after I woke in the middle of the night, I would sit up in bed and use that sleepless time to savor memories of my husband.
People over 70 appear to need much less sleep than adolescents. I know people in
their 80s and 90s who do just fine with five hours a night. I usually manage six or sev en hours, but I also find myself napping more, drifting off over a book or crossword puzzle in the middle of the afternoon. It’s a new experience. My mother once said that when I was a child, one way she could tell I was sick was if I was able to sleep during the day. I’m sure I was a terror: I now know that nap time means that Mom gets some time to herself. But when I was young I didn’t want to miss anything. I guess I don’t mind that so much anymore.
Maybe being able to accept sleep as a God-given grace and a blessing is a sign of maturity, an indication that I’m more ready for what will be the last years of my life. Sleep is a healer that we apparently need on a regular basis in order to maintain good mental and physical health. Sleep—even interrupted sleep—brings with it powerful, mysterious gifts that I may never conscious ly recognize. One thing I do know: that the dropping off of consciousness, which seems to come out of nowhere, allows me what I need in order to face what the next day will bring.
To convey sleeping people on the weird of track through the ancient dark of coastal rock, matrix of limestone, basalt, wind, the driver punctures always further into his cone of headlights.
What it will be like, when it happens one day, is sleep’s seductive rhetoric; the giving into its ellipsis.
But the driver is not the train, the train not the engine. Against velocity the inspector walks
between the sleepers (of which I am one) whose doubles in the windows travel unticketable and free,
to the last carriage where the long-lost verb of my name in my mother’s voice transcends time and space.
And I’m not the astronomer who says the dark matter holding things just together— bodies and planets, the arms of galaxies— is the same black fabric dream throws its mysteries on; who by not knowing knows it.
If you’ve ever taken a retreat at the Abbey of Gethsemani, you may not remember exactly what you did, but you’ll remember how it made you feel. Its atmosphere of lush silence is unforgettable, and delicious to the soul. As described on its website, Gethsemani offers “a place apart” where one can “entertain silence [...] and listen for the voice of God.” At the very least, that always makes it a much-needed respite from the frenetic bustle of modern life.
Nestled deep in the hills of central Kentucky, the Abbey is a monastery of the Order of the Cistercians of the Strict Ob servance (OCSO), known commonly as the Trappists. It was founded in 1848 and is the oldest Cistercian monastery oper ating in the U.S. Like all Trappists around the world, the 40 or so monks at Gethsemani strictly observe the Rule of Saint Benedict—a guidebook for communal monasticism composed in 516 A.D.—and are famous for their commitment to quiet contemplation, sometimes even resorting to sign language in order to minimize the need for spoken words as they fulfill their basic duties of prayer and work (“ora et labora”) in service to Christ. With over 2,000 acres of rich woods and farmland, the Abbey runs a 30-room guest house for retreatants and funds it self primarily through its store, Gethsemani Farms, which sells bourbon-infused fruitcakes and fudges made by the monks.
Of course, Gethsemani is best known as the longtime home of Thomas Merton, who lived there as a monk from 1941 until his death in 1968. Merton gained widespread and un likely fame with the publication of The Seven Storey Mountain (1948), one of the best-selling religious autobiographies of the 20th century, which describes his conversion and wind ing path to the monastery. The book helped fuel a mid-cen tury surge of interest in monastic life, but is only the most famous of dozens of works of religious literature, poetry, and social criticism that Merton authored, including No Man Is
an Island (1955), New Seeds of Contemplation (1962), and Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (1966).
One of Merton’s many novices as novice master at Gethsemani was Brother Paul Quenon, a West Virginia native who entered Gethsemani at just 17 years old in 1958. Over the decades, Que non has held various jobs in the Abbey community, including operating the mimeograph machine, polishing the floors, and cooking in the Abbey kitchen. But he has also followed in Mer ton’s footsteps as an author of numerous books relating to his life as a monk, including his book of poems Unquiet Vigil (2014) and his recent memoir In Praise of the Useless Life (2018), referenced heavily below. In July, he graciously agreed to speak with us by phone about his life as a “nighttime hermit.”
The photographer Ralph Eugene Meatyeard was a regular retreatant at the Cistercian Abbey of Gethsemani, where he befriended Thomas Merton in 1967. The two men shared a deep friendship and creative dialogue that would last two years, cut short only by Merton’s untimely death.
Br. Paul, you’ve been at the monastery for over 60 years now. What promptings first led you into this unusual way of life?
Well, I went to a Catholic school through high school, although that didn’t particularly inspire me. But then I read The Imita tion of Christ, which is a devotional classic of the 15th century—Thomas à Kempis is the reputed author. And I read The Seven Storey Mountain by Thomas Merton. It was the combination of those two books that led me here.
I’m sure you weren’t the only person that ended up in the monastery after reading The Seven Storey Mountain.
Oh yeah, there’s been plenty. I also read The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoyevsky. I was inspired by the third brother Alyosha, who entered a monastery.
So it was a very literary journey for you?
I guess you could say that.
One of the things that distinguishes mo nastic life is the Liturgy of the Hours—or Divine Office—which is a series of com munal prayer services that occur at specif ic times every day. The first one, I believe, is Vigils at 3:15 a.m., followed by Lauds at 5:45 a.m. I know you also wake up at 2:40 a.m. for your first private meditation of the
day. Perhaps I’m just clueless, but with that schedule, how do you ever get good sleep?
Well, I do take a half-hour siesta after lunch and that brings me close to seven hours of sleep a day. Now that I’m close to 81 years old, I’ve also started taking a 15-minute nap before Lauds.
How strict are you with your schedule? Do you ever skip a service, or maybe sleep through your alarm?
I have slept through my alarm a few times, but usually I’m pretty regular about attend ing the Offices.
In your book In Praise of the Useless Life, you actually say at one point that if you miss a service, something feels off for you.
Yeah, but that’s just a personal response. If there’s a good reason for missing it—if I have to go to the eye doctor or something like that—it’s not something I worry about. It just happens, you know. If I’m away from the Abbey, I often say the Psalms as I’m driving. I know all the Psalms in the Little Hours.1
1. The Liturgy of the Hours, or Divine Office, is composed of seven communal prayer services grounded in the Psalms, as well as other readings and hymns. Vigils, Lauds, and Vespers are known as the “major” hours, while the other four—Terce, Sext, None, and Compline—are shorter services known as the “minor” or “little” hours.
That’s remarkable. Memorization is so for eign to my generation, unless you’re an ac tor or something. Everything is available to just look up really quickly, so there’s so little impetus to memorize things.
Yeah. Lately, I’ve actually been working on memorizing part of a poem by Wordsworth: “Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting: / The soul that rises with us, our life’s Star, / Hath had elsewhere its setting.” Do you know that one? I thought that might be rel evant to your research on sleep.
That’s beautiful.
It’s one of his more famous passages, but it’s in an almost endless poem.
I’m interested in the spiritual significance of the name Gethsemani. In the Bible, of course, it’s a place associated with night— the night before Good Friday—when the disciples kept falling asleep while Jesus stayed up praying and agonizing over his impending death. Where do you find your self in that story?
Well, that’s the phase of Jesus’s life that, in a way, defines what we are as monks and as members of this community. The crucifix ion was the physical anguish of Jesus, but then there was the mental anguish that he felt in the Garden of Gethsemane, and so I think that’s part of our participation in the sufferings of Christ—when the mind
participates in that. Part of the prayer life is simply to share the anguish of people, people like the Ukrainians, who are getting everything taken from them. You know, I can’t do anything directly, but I can remember them. I’ve found that people appreciate it if they know that someone is remembering them.
Another thing that really distinguishes life at Gethsemani is of course how quiet it is. There are signs all over the place that say things like “Silence is spoken here.” Why is silence so meaningful to the Trappists?
It fosters meditation. Silence is the atmo sphere of the monastery, and it helps to enable interior communion with the Lord.
In your book, you say that monastic life is essentially “a vacating… a personal emptying out of clutter within the mind and heart… to make room for God.” Is that also what sleep can do?
I think sleep is a way of disconnecting. You’re not driven by the pressures of the day while you’re asleep. In dreams, one of the things that happens is that you replay the day, but your mind is free to break all the rules while it replays scenarios. A lot of times you dream basically some version of what happened the day before. But there is also an emptying in sleep, especially if you go down to Delta; you know the different levels of sleep, no doubt.
Delta is the kind of sleep I talk about in my poem “Sleep Deficit,” where I wake up
and don’t know where I am or what time it is: “I wake to briefly knowing not / place or time [...] / knowing pure, refreshing kind ness / of knowing not.” That’s an indication that I have been in Delta, and you know, the Hindus say that that’s the closest thing to Enlightenment in the natural order of things. That dreamless sleep is very close to Enlightenment.
I guess, in that sense, sleep could even be a form of prayer—or a kind of poor man’s meditation?
Well, I think it empties the mind, and to that extent it can be. But of course when you have dreams, then there’s more stuff that goes into your consciousness, although we forget most of our dreams.
Are there spiritual insights that come from sleep?
Oh yeah, definitely. I have an archetypal dream where I’m going up a mountain, and I know I’ve been on this mountain before— it’s a familiar mountain, although it looks different every time. The first time I had this dream, it felt really good going up it. I felt close to the Absolute. In the dream, the mountain wasn’t far from the monastery, but nobody knew about it, so I thought, Oh, this will be wonderful, I can lead people up to this mountain now. And that dream has really had a controlling effect in my life, because I often find myself leading people through the woods, up the knobs or ridges. It’s one of my favorite habits.
In one of your poems you ask this profound question: “Is death [...] depth of freedom / unconfined by place and time— / a bound less treasure of all for all / wherein nothing is mine?” I was wondering, could the same be asked of sleep? Is sleep a “depth of freedom”?
Partially it is. I think that’s what dream ac tivity is. Your mind is free to recreate re ality. You know, reality imposes itself on us, it’s always coming at us and it’s got its definite form and has rules of its own. Well, the mind gets tired of that, and so in dreams it breaks all the rules and makes its own reality.
I suppose drugs do the same thing too. I’ve never been into drugs, though.
I know you meditate outdoors for 30 minutes or so twice a day. In your book you talk about how you also love to sleep outside— you call yourself a “nighttime hermit who sleeps like a yard dog outside all year long.” I liked that line. Why do you like to medi tate and sleep outside?
Well, nature is very congenial with medita tion; I think, in a way, it softens the effort. Of course, there’s always something going on, but there’s a kind of kinship or connat urality between meditation and being out doors. And then as far as sleeping goes, I think it’s just a way of getting more solitude. There’s something about waking up in the middle of the night when there’s nobody nearby, you’re just totally alone, that gives you a deep experience of solitude.
You’ve also written about a period in your life when you were constantly being harassed in the night by a very stubborn mockingbird. Do you still have disruptions to your sleep from birds or other animals?
For the most part, no. And it’s not too ob noxious when I do. I mean, the other night, while I was trying to sleep, I heard this chomp, chomp, chomp sound. Instead of getting up, I just clapped my hands and yelled, and it stopped for a minute or two. But then I heard it again: chomp, chomp, chomp. So I stood up and there was a groundhog chewing on a piece of lumber. When he saw me and I yelled at
him—I said, you keep quiet over there, and pointed right at him—he and his wife turned around and left.
I think groundhogs are probably like bea vers—they need to grind their teeth down a bit because their teeth will get too long if they don’t chew on something. Or maybe he just enjoys chewing things.
What do you do when you can’t sleep at night?
For me, it’s usually just that I wake up early. I’ll say Psalms, ones that I know by memory, and I’ll just lay there and wait until my
alarm goes off. Last week I woke up one morning at 1:15 a.m., and after a while I knew I wasn’t going to get back to sleep, so I just sat up and started praying, you know, going through the Jesus Prayer on my beads.2 And then of course I had to catch up on sleep later in the day.
You knew Thomas Merton pretty well, or as you called him, Fr. Louis. I’ve always had this dual impression of Merton as someone who was restless and almost overserious at times, but also had a gregarious, fun-loving side. Is that true?
Yeah, that’s true. He wrote a lot about his contradictions, and you defined just some of them. But for the most part he was up beat and witty, and serious. He was always busy, you see. He had a lot of work to do, and he also wanted to get some writing done. And he also suffered from insomnia—he had such an active mind. I don’t know how he handled it, but I guess he just didn’t get much sleep. Some people are like that, you know. We’ve had some guys here, brilliant guys, and they’ll get by with five hours of sleep. Some people get by with even less.
Is there a saint you know of that’s associated with sleep disorders or insomnia?
Not that I’ve heard of—we’ll have to make up one.
2. “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.”
I don’t know if they’ll ever canonize Thomas Merton, but maybe he’ll be the one.
Oh, no, that would ruin him. Why ruin him by canonizing him? He’s sort of a mentor for the marginal, and if you put him up on a pedestal then that kind of spoils him.
I suppose that’s true. Merton, as well as other spiritual masters like St. John of the Cross, often spoke about the spiritual life as a kind of journey into holy darkness. Is there any of that imagery that resonates with you?
Oh yeah, a lot of it. Maybe that’s one reason why I like sleeping outside. I’ve developed a kinship with the darkness. You know, the nights can be very beautiful, and I think I was well-conditioned by Merton because early on I learned what to expect. If you’re not always “in the light” as a monk, that’s part of the procedure. I mean, you don’t get worried about if God has abandoned you or something.
There’s a wonderful passage in your book where you talk about your struggle with narcissism as a young man, and some of the interactions you had with Merton around that subject. Merton said that “most young men are narcissistic,” and his general rem edy for you was to embrace life as a monk and stop navel-gazing. How could peo ple who are not in the monastery become a little less narcissistic and a little more self-forgetful?
First of all, you have to recognize it. Because our culture actually encourages narcissism. People think that’s the way they ought to be. They’ll gravitate towards narcissistic superstars, politicians, and so on, and they think that’s the norm. Of course, narcissism takes different forms. It’s not a one-face syndrome; it’s got many faces. I guess you could try to get a wise mentor who can see what your prob lem is and maybe help steer you away from it.
One of the phrases you’ve used to describe the monastic way of life—and you were quoting St. Benedict—is a “labor of obedi ence.” Obedience is a word I struggle with. What does obedience look and feel like for you on a daily basis?
Well, I follow the monastic schedule. I’m there in choir when it’s time. I do what’s been assigned to me to do—working in the kitchen, cleaning the jakes [a.k.a. latrines] when my time comes around, all that. But that’s kind of routine. There are lots of other ways that I kind of give myself slack. You know, there’s always house rules
about things, and they’re mostly based on the Rule of St. Benedict, but to what ex tent do I take seriously all the house rules? For instance, I’ve got some friends visiting this week. Do I have to ask the Abbot permission to go visit them? Well, my practice is no. I just kind of go along with what the opportunity offers. So I’m not a model monk. But I think that’s probably the way it is with most of the guys.
It really has to be a moment-to-moment thing, because God offers opportunities. I mean, what the heck, here I am talking to you on the phone, and I’m supposed to be a sequestered monk! Although the fact is, I’m also in charge of the Abbey’s media con tact, so in a way it’s my job. But the Abbot also says he doesn’t like interviews. I forgot to even take that into consideration when I agreed that we could have this interview.
Haha. Well, I certainly appreciate it. I mean, to me, it sounds like you’re talking about grace.
Yeah, definitely. I wouldn’t even be living if it wasn’t for grace. I mean, the only miracle I know is that I’m still here.
By Ben SelfTestimonyBetween 1959 and 1968—the year he was assassinated— Martin Luther King, Jr., gave at least five speeches in which he referenced the classic 19th-century short story by Washington Irving, Rip Van Winkle. As the story goes, Rip is a hopelessly lazy but amiable character in colonial-era New York who wanders into the Catskills one day seeking temporary escape from all his social and familial responsibilities—and a nagging wife. Deep in the woods, Rip happens upon a mysterious group of oldworld characters sporting giant beards and playing nine-pins. He eagerly drinks their magical liquor, falls fast asleep, and doesn’t wake up again for 20 years.
Often directing it at students, King used this cautionary tale to teach the importance of vigilance and engagement amid the great social challenges of his day. It shows up in his commencement addresses at Morehouse College and Oberlin College, an address at the Methodist Student Leadership Confer-
ence, a lecture at the Unitarian Universalist Association General Assembly, and in his very last Sunday sermon, preached from the pulpit of the National Cathedral. It’s also in King’s last book, aptly titled, Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?
In his retellings, King always zeroed in on one detail: the sign on the inn in Rip’s town. As he explained, when Rip first went up the mountain, “the sign had a picture of King George III… When he came down, 20 years later, the sign in the inn had a picture of George Washington.” Upon seeing this, Rip was “completely lost.” Thus, King says, “the most striking thing about the story … is not merely that he slept 20 years, but that he slept through a revolution.” And there lies the lesson for the rest of us: “All too many people fail to remain awake through great pe riods of social change… But today our very survival depends on our ability to stay awake, to adjust to new ideas, to remain vigilant.”
Like most of King’s themes, this one has biblical roots. It calls to mind Jesus’s apoca lyptic parable of the ten virgins/bridesmaids, as well as his repeated requests to his disciples in Gethsemane that they “stay awake
and pray” as he awaited his arrest (though they still nodded off). It’s a natural theme for tumultuous times.
In a way, King’s sermons on the Rip Van Winkle story served as a parting wish and warning to the next generation. As King historian Taylor Branch explains, “King pleaded for his audience not to sleep through the world’s continuing cries for freedom”—not to make the same mistake that the rich man made with Lazarus in
another of Jesus’s parables. Instead, we’re urged to “act toward all creation in the spirit of equal souls and equal votes,” and “to find [our own] Lazarus somewhere, from our teeming prisons to the bleeding earth.” A stirring call, indeed.
Today, this call is surely as relevant as ever. For the better part of the last decade, we’ve been laboring through our own period of intense social unrest over matters of race, gender, the environment, public health, gun
violence, immigration, and more. It’s hard to say where all this unrest will take us, but there’s certainly no shortage of important things to be concerned about, and we can only hope and pray that enough people will make enough of the right choices to put us on a path towards a better world for all of God’s creatures.
Yet such choices are not easily made. Before costing him his life, for example, the Civil Rights Movement took a massive toll on King’s health. As Branch explains, “When they did the autopsy, they said he had the heart of a 60-year-old.” King was just 39 when he died. Almost certainly he would have worked and stressed himself to an early death had he not first been cut down by an assassin. In fact, in the tough years preceding his death King “was con stantly fantasizing about getting out of the Movement.” Branch is of course quick to add that King’s commitment to the cause never wavered, but who can blame King for wanting a little respite? In just over a decade, this modern-day apostle traveled over six million miles, gave more than 2,500 speeches and wrote five books.
As human as he was, King poured him self out for the movement, and he was only one of countless others—known and un known to history—who sacrificed their time and money, health and happiness, security, peace of mind, and very lives in the strug gle for justice.1 Like Jesus, King demon
1. As a history teacher, I sometimes get frustrated with the singular emphasis put on King as the face of the Civil Rights Movement. Some of my other favorite figures to highlight in the long and illustrious history of the African-American fight for basic rights include Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells, W.E.B. DuBois, A. Philip Randolph, Ella Baker, Thurgood Marshall, Bayard Rustin, Fannie Lou Hamer, Malcolm X, Diane Nash, and John Lewis.
strated what you might call the “Giving Tree” model of service: he gave everything he had to help others. That self-sacrificial love is the moral standard we see upheld in the Gospels. As Jesus himself said, “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” And just like Jesus, King and his fellow prophets knew full well the immense sacrifices involved, and somehow faced them anyway. That’s what makes them so inspiring to celebrate—and so terrifying to emulate.
The Church has often and perhaps rightly put Christ-figures like King on a pedes tal, making saints of its martyrs. Yet such heights of love are not only unspeakably beautiful to behold, they are also, for most people, utterly unreachable. Self-sacrificial love presents a moral mirror to each of us so shocking in its implications that we dare not look too long. Perhaps that’s why, to be honest, when I came across one of King’s great Rip Van Winkle-inspired speeches, I felt myself recoil. He rightly exhorts his au diences to “stay awake” and heed the world’s “cries for freedom,” yet I shudder over the cost implied by such commitment. I don’t have the faith in myself that I used to.
A few weeks ago, I was struck with a sim ilar wariness when I attended July 4th cel ebrations at Thomas Jefferson’s Monticel lo. Every year, Monticello holds a moving naturalization ceremony to commemorate the adoption of the Declaration of Indepen dence. This year 47 immigrants were natu ralized. Amid an otherwise warm-hearted speech, the keynote speaker did something that, to me, felt jarring. He turned to the new citizens and said: “With opportunity
comes obligation, the obligations of citi zenship.” Referencing Saving Private Ryan, he added: “Earn this. [...] You deserve [cit izenship] because of what you’ve done to reach today, but you earn it by what you do going forward.”
To me, that sounds a lot like how Christians often speak about the Gospel—about our “citizenship” in the Kingdom of God. Yes, we churchgoers like to say, God loves us unconditionally and has saved us from sin and death through Jesus Christ. But now, having been adopted into the family of God, it’s up to us to earn back what we have been given, to bear good fruit, to be God’s hands and feet, to build the Kingdom that Christ inaugurated.
Though stripped of religious imagery, you often hear the language of moral debt in activist and political circles as well. Nu merous times, for instance, I’ve heard ref erence in speeches to some version of the saying—variously attributed to Muhammad Ali, Shirley Chisholm, and Alice Walker— that “Service to others is the rent you pay for your room here on earth.” It’s a powerful idea, and for a long time it made perfect sense to me. Do we not owe something, or everything, to the god, or planet, or society that has given it to us? Of course we do. The question is, can we pay it?
In my teens and early twenties, I thought we could. I was chock full of idealism. At some point, I became conscious of how much privilege I had relative to the rest of the world and began to feel that I had to give back. At 18, I entered a progressive, Quaker-affiliated college as a Peace and Global Studies major and started taking classes with inspiring titles like “The His tory of Nonviolent Social Movements,” “Criminal Justice and a Moral Vision,” and “Religion For and Against the Common
Good.” As an undergrad, I participated in numerous service projects and protests. I helped teach little kids to read. I raised pocket change for political campaigns and registered people to vote. Once, I attended the annual conference of the Democratic Socialists of America.
In my second year, when I had a classic collegiate “crisis of faith,” it was the exam ple of those Christians who had something to say (and do) about the real problems of the world that most resonated with me. People like Dr. King, Dorothy Day, How ard Thurman, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Oscar Romero, and Cesar Chavez became the models of Christian service that buoyed my young faith. I wanted to be like them, or so I thought. My faith became wholly intertwined with social activism. I made it my mission to take on the injustices of this world, on God’s behalf.
Then I got out of college, and I began to learn about my own limitations. I graduated in 2008, the year of the Great Recession, and went to live in D.C., hoping to be part of the action. I found work at a hostel for a year, and then at a headhunting office for a second year. Both jobs involved mostly low-level grunt work. Midway through that second year I had my first major episode of burnout and despair. I was lonely, poor, working a job I hated, and self-medicating in destructive ways. I was just getting by. Flailing about for some sense of direction and forward movement, I decided to go to grad school to study international develop ment, and again I felt a surge of idealism.
After three years at school in Canada, I received my MA and hoped to find work in some eminent NGO tackling issues of global poverty. But without connections or relevant job experience, I came up
empty-handed. After months being un employed, AmeriCorps placed me in two jobs with local nonprofits. Each role had its highs, but I was unable to parlay either into better-paying and more stable employment.
In that basic pattern, I survived my twenties. I found a job teaching English at a local public middle school and once again felt a surge of optimism and idealism. That lasted about two weeks. The harsh realities of being a first-year teacher in a high-poverty school soon crushed not just my idealism but my entire sense of self-worth. I was hopelessly unprepared. I had no clue how to manage or connect with my students, and most of them were years behind academically, hin dered by major behavioral challenges. Be fore I knew it, I was depressed, breaking out in rashes, yelling constantly at my stu dents, and seeing a counselor. That period was perhaps the lowest of my life. As a new teacher, I sucked. I wasn’t helping anyone. Eventually, life mysteriously improved. I got a little better at teaching, met my wife, paid off my literal debts. I even found the energy to get back into a little activism— starting an “Environmental Action Team” at my church. Long concerned about climate change, I wanted to do something about it. We organized events to raise awareness, brought in solar installers to give us quotes on putting panels on the roof, and devel oped a proposal for an affordable HVAC system that would be 20-40% more efficient than the aging one the church was looking to replace. But everything our little com mittee proposed was ultimately shot down by church leadership, and after two years we disbanded, with basically nothing to show for our effort. I sometimes think that maybe I’ll try it all again someday. Maybe not.
In any case, it’s gradually dawned on me
since college that I’ll never be like my so cial justice heroes, let alone like Jesus— though not entirely for lack of trying. Most days, I struggle just to take care of myself and my loved ones. Yes, I’m still a public-school teacher, and I try to make a difference through my work. But I also do it for a paycheck. And I hate it sometimes. I complain and fantasize about doing some thing else. It’s a tough job and I’m weak—a bruised reed, a smoldering wick. I’m no so cial activist. I’m certainly no Dr. King. I’m more of a Rip.
These days, when the weight of world events grows heavy, I’m more likely to “stroll away into the woods” for a good sleep than join marchers in the streets. In the face of moral obligation, I too often tend to de mur—to my shame. Despite my sincere desires to help and my occasional efforts, I continually fail to “stay awake.” As Jesus said of his drowsy disciples at Gethsemane, “The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.” I have done precious little to earn my citizenship in the Kingdom of God, even when I have desperately wanted to. Thankfully, I don’t have to.
Bidden or unbidden, God is not done with us. I’ve recently been reflecting on the concept of “liminal space”—the thin spaces or sensory thresholds between the familiar and unknown. As Richard Rohr explains, liminal space is “where God can best get at us because our false certitudes are finally out of the way . . . The threshold is God’s waiting room. Here we are taught openness and patience as we come to expect an appointment with the divine Doctor.”
For years, sleep has been my “liminal
space”—the threshold at which I do my best, and perhaps my only, real waiting. Sleep is the space where, amid my constant distractedness and pathological angst, I am “taught openness and patience,” and “come to expect an appointment with the divine Doctor.” I experience God most in sleep.
It seems obvious for me to say that now, but I grew up believing that “experiences” of God came only through some effort on our part. Sleep seems so passive. Yet if I look back on the past decade or two of my life and try to pinpoint the one thing that has consistently helped me recover from the pain of each day, it is sleep. And it’s pre cisely during those periods when the waves of emotional distress have just kept coming that I’ve grown most intimately acquaint ed with its soothing, strengthening pow er. What is that if not an encounter with God’s grace?
Broadly speaking, it’s no stretch to say that the myriad stressors of modern life have literally been making us ill, and these have only been exacerbated by the pandemic. Rates of anxiety, depression, substance abuse, loneliness, political polarization, ex tremism, and violent crime are all up. Not surprisingly, so is sleep deprivation.
In such a context, it’s not enough to sim ply remind people what they lack, the ways they’re falling short. It’s not going to en gender a better response to harangue them with the language of moral debt. Because most of us are more like that deadbeat Rip than we care to admit. When I have felt most buried by my responsibilities, and most despairing of my capacity to meet them, what I have needed most is not more calls to engage with the world, but ways to meaningfully disengage, in part so I might be equipped to reengage later. In my dark-
est days, I have craved and loved the “small death” of sleep, a most thorough disengage ment which falls nightly over my worried mind like dew from heaven.
To paraphrase a line from Rohr, we need something every day that can transform our pain so we don’t transfer it onto ourselves and others. We need to be able to close our eyes and float awhile on a sea of grace. We need a time when, as Wendell Berry once put it, the body “is still; Instead of will, it lives by drift.” That’s what sleep is. And it doesn’t matter whether we have earned it—whether we have put in hours work ing or volunteering or protesting. It’s a gift, and one which even the most frustrated insomniacs eventually have no choice but to accept.
Philosophers from Heraclitus to Aquinas to Descartes have all waxed eloquent about sleep’s sweet power, but what is it exactly that sleep does to us? In a 2017 New York Times piece, Carl Zimmer explained that “scientists have come up with a lot of ideas about why we sleep. Some have argued that it’s a way to save energy. Others have suggested it provides an opportunity to clear away the brain’s cellular waste.” However, recent stud ies indicate that sleep has an important edit ing role in our lives. As Zimmer continues:
We sleep to forget some of the things we learn each day. In order to learn, we have to grow connections, or syn apses, between the neurons in our brains. These connections enable neu rons to send signals to one another quickly and efficiently. We store new memories in these networks.
In 2003 … biologists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, proposed that synapses grew so exuber-
antly during the day that our brain circuits got “noisy.” When we sleep, the scientists argued, our brains pare back the connections to lift the signal over the noise.
When I read that, I thought, that’s it. Our thoughts and feelings are “noise” we respond to obsessively throughout each day, noise that often overwhelms our best efforts to focus or to love others, or to remain calm about something we fear, resent, regret, or desire. When we sleep, we have no choice but to relax, to release those thoughts and feelings we’ve been grasping so tightly throughout the day and let them be sifted like wheat.
In this way, sleep is a kind of poor man’s meditation, or better yet, a poor man’s Eu charist. It allows us to detach ourselves from the exhausting self without exerting con scious effort to do so. It’s a nightly vacation from the toils and terrors of this troubled world, and from our troubled souls. It’s a place where God transforms us and prepares us, wiping away so much of what we need to be freed from and letting us keep so much of what we need to learn. The great Freder ick Buechner captured this beautifully in a passage from his book The Alphabet of Grace:
Sleep is forgiveness. The night ab solves. Darkness wipes the slate clean, not spotless to be sure, but clean enough for another day’s chalking. While he sleeps and dreams, [a man]
is allowed to forget for a little, to un live, his unfaithfulness to his wife— his dreaming innocence is no less part of who he is, no less transfiguring and gracious, than his waking adultery—and thus he is cleansed for a little while of his sin, emptied of his guilt. And so are we all.
So are we all. Sleep is that one time a day when I relinquish my beloved delusion of control and float like driftwood. And in that sense, falling asleep is an act of trust. We really don’t know what will happen to us. I suppose that is in part the terror of nightmares—we are caught in stories that we do not control. But of course, we are already in a story that we do not control. I can’t fix this world. I can’t fix my students. I can’t even fix myself. But at least in sleep, I can rest awhile in Christ’s promise that tomorrow will take care of itself.
Even for Rips like us, there is much good work to be done, and for whatever part we are given to play in God’s Kingdom, we give thanks. But if the Law convicts us all, “the night absolves.” Much work is done while we sleep. Rest is its own revolution, a space where we each die a little that we might live again. That, for me, is where hope lies. De spite our most stubborn attempts at despair, sleep will always have its way. It will do its monumental work of stitching us back to gether, and tomorrow the sun will rise, and we will, God willing, begin anew.
Come Sleep! O Sleep, the certain knot of peace, The baiting-place of wit, the balm of woe, The poor man’s wealth, the prisoner’s release, Th’ indifferent judge between the high and low.
– Sir Philip Sidney, “Astrophil and Stella 39: Come Sleep! O Sleep” (1582)
Methought I heard a voice cry, “Sleep no more! Macbeth does murder sleep”—the innocent sleep, Sleep that knits up the raveled sleave of care, The death of each day’s life, sore labor’s bath, Balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course, Chief nourisher in life’s feast.
– William Shakespeare, Macbeth (1623)
An ancient poem goes, “After a long, sound sleep in bamboo-shaded quiet, I feel so far removed from the day’s turmoil. If the hermit of Huashan comes to visit me, I shall not ask for the secret of becoming an immortal, but of sleeping well.”
– Li Yu, Casual Notes in a Leisurely Mood (1671)
We know that God is everywhere; but certainly we feel his presence most when his works are on the grandest scale spread before us; and it is in the unclouded night sky, where his worlds wheel their silent course, that we read clearest his infinitude, his omnipotence, his omnipresence. I had risen to my knees to pray for Mr. Rochester. Looking up, I, with tear-dimmed eyes, saw the mighty Milky Way. Remembering what it was—what countless systems there swept space like a soft trace of light—I felt the might and strength of God. Sure was I of his efficiency to save what he had made: convinced I grew that neither earth should perish, nor one of the souls it treasured. I turned my prayer to thanksgiving: the Source of Life was also the Savior of spirits. Mr. Rochester was safe; he was God’s, and by God would he be guarded. I again nestled to the breast of the hill, and ere long in sleep forgot sorrow.
– Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (1847)
Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian.
– Herman Melville, Moby Dick (1851)
The laugher and weeper, the dancer, the midnight widow [...] The consumptive, the erysipalite, the idiot, he that is wrong’d, The antipodes, and every one between this and them in the dark, I swear they are averaged now—one is no better than the other, The night and sleep have liken’d them and restored them.
I swear they are all beautiful, Every one that sleeps is beautiful, every thing in the dim light is beautiful, The wildest and bloodiest is over, and all is peace.
– Walt Whitman, “The Sleepers” (1856)
Oh! long, long nights, crowded with the fearful acceleration of trivial thoughts crushed one upon another, crowding so fast. ‘My God,’ I pray, ‘Let me sleep, only sleep,’ and con quered by this abject need, this weariness unutterable, I am fain to believe that this gift, common to the brute and slave, is better than anything my mind can gain for me.
– Anne Reeve Aldrich, A Village Ophelia and Other Stories (1899)
The nighttime of the body is the daytime of the soul.
– Amelia E. Barr, The Maid of Maiden Lane (1900)
Blessed sleep, kindest minister to man, Sure and silent distiller of the balm of rest, Having alone the power, when naught else can, To soothe the torn and sorrow-ridden breast.
– James Weldon Johnson, “Blessed Sleep” (1917)
In every human body there is a great well of silent thinking always going on. Outwardly certain words are said, but there are other words being said at the same time down in the deep, hidden places. There is a deposit of thoughts, of unexpressed emotions. How many things are hidden away in the deep well! There is a heavy iron lid clamped over the mouth of the well. When the lid is safely in place one gets on all right. One goes about saying words, eating food, meeting people, conducting affairs, accumulating money, wearing clothes, one lives an ordinary life.
Sometimes at night, in dreams, the lid trembles…
– Sherwood Anderson, Many Marriages (1923)
Come, mild and magnificent Sleep, and let your tides flow through the na tion… come to us through the fields of night, over the plains and rivers of the everlasting earth, bringing to the huge vexed substance of this world and to all the fury, pain, and madness of our lives the merciful anodyne of your redemp tion. Seal up the porches of our memory, tenderly, gently, steal our lives away from us, blot out the vision of lost love, lost days, and all our ancient hungers, great Transformer, heal us!
– Thomas Wolfe, “Death the Proud Brother” (1933)
It appears that every man’s insomnia is as different from his neighbor’s as are their daytime hopes and aspirations. […] If in somnia is going to be one of your naturals, it begins to appear in the late thirties. Those seven precious hours of sleep sudden ly break in two. There is, if one is lucky, the “first sweet sleep of night” and the last deep sleep of morning, but between the two appears a sinister, ever widening interval. This is the time of which it is written in the Psalms: Scuto circumdabit te veritas eius: non timebis a timore nocturno, a sagitta volante in die, a negotio per ambulante in tenebris. [His truth shall compass thee with a shield: thou shalt not be afraid of the terror of the night. Of the arrow that flieth in the day, of the business that walketh about in the dark…] – F. Scott Fitzgerald, “Sleeping and Waking,” 1934
People who dream when they sleep at night know of a special kind of happiness which the world of the day holds not, a placid ecstasy, and ease of heart, that are like honey on the tongue. … The pleasure of the true dreamer does not lie in the substance of the dream, but in this: that there things happen without any interference from his side, and altogether outside his control. Great landscapes create themselves, long splendid views, rich and delicate colors, roads, houses, which he has never seen or heard of.
– Karen Blixen (Isak Dinesen), Out of Africa (1937)
[T]ruth, like love and sleep, resents
Approaches that are too intense.
– W. H. Auden, “New Year Letter” (1940)
Did you ever notice how people hate to go to bed? They’ll hang around and hang around, drink coffee and smoke cigarettes and talk, hating to go home and go to sleep. … It’s kind of like dying, I guess, sleeping is. They just naturally hold back from it. They hang around the street or a place like this, doing nothing, just hanging around talking.
– Roaldus Richmond, from the Federal Writers’ Project’s Folklore Project (1940)
1. God. “… and he rested on the seventh day.” And well deserved.
2. Adam. Didn’t need that rib anyway.
3. 71st-century-BC rich Mesopotamians. Proud owners of the first recorded pillows.
4. 30th-century-BC Chinese. Proud owners of the first recorded duvet.
5. Koalas. They can spend up to 22 hours a day asleep. Metabolizing eucalyptus is just, like, really hard, apparently.
6. Ruth. Pick up a lil barley. Uncover a lil feet. Get yourself a husband.
7. Epimenides of Knossos. He went looking for a sheep and accidentally conked out for 57 years. These things will happen.
8. Girl in Mark 5 and parallels. “Why make ye this ado, and weep? The damsel is not dead, but sleepeth.”
9. Jesus (on the boat). The ability to sleep on a sailboat in a thunderstorm is proof of his superhuman status.
10. Peter, James, and John (at the Transfiguration). Matthew, Mark, and Luke all tell the story, but only Luke tattles on the three for dozing.
11. Peter, James, and John (at Gethsemene). Round three: Jesus 2, disciples 1.
12. Eutychus. Patron saint of everybody who gets bored to death (literally) in church (Acts 20).
13. Zhuangzi. Well, he said we’re all dreaming, all the time. Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily.
14. The Seven Sleepers of Ephesus. If you don’t wanna get martyred but you still wanna get famous, taking a 300-year-long nap is a good option.
15. Charlemagne. His biographer
Einhard records that he woke several times throughout the night but also enjoyed a siesta during the summer.
16. Anonymous 14th-century French person. First composer of the “Sleeping Beauty” story (in Le Roman de Perceforest).
17. Amlóði. Also known as Amleth, or Amblothæ, or Hamlet. “Ay, there’s the rub.”
18. Juliet, of Romeo and Juliet. That was one killer nap.
19. Mars. You know that Botticelli painting? There’s a bunch of baby satyrs trying to wake him up with a conch?
20. Rip van Winkle. Not as impressive as the Seven Snoozers, but still, I can’t say I slept through the American Revolution.
21. Eleotridae. Taxonomic family of fish commonly known as “sleeper gobies,” because they often rest on the beds of their bodies of water. First categorized by Napoleon’s nephew!
22. Dr. William Kitchiner. He coined the phrase “40 winks,” in 1821, in a self-help book. I’m still a little confused about it.
23. Friedrich August Kekule von Stradonitz. Take a nap. Dream of a mythical creature. Solve your chemistry homework. Sometimes things are this simple.
24. Emil Fischer and Joseph von Mering. Scientists who synthesized the first commercial sleeping pill. Surely they napped hard.
25. Salvador Dalí. Nap like a surrealist: Sit up straight, hold a key over a metal plate, doze off, jolt when the key clatters.
26. Engineers at General ElectricTelechron in 1956. Inventors of the snooze button.
27. Anyone who’s gone to psychoanalysis. Who knew your recurring dream about the Hamburglar actually conveyed such primal meaning? (Well, your mother, that’s who.)
28. John Giorno. The star of Warhol’s avante-garde film Sleep. Guess the plot…
29. James Beryl Maas. This guy invented the power nap!
30. Lindsay Lohan. You know the meme? Where she looks like Bernini’s Teresa in Ecstasy?
31. Peter Sleep, cricket player. Prolly not a remarkable sleeper. He’s on here for his name.
32. The Dutch. Nobody gets more sleep than the Dutch! They outrank their nearest competitor by at least a whole minute.
33. The Japanese. Sleeping on the job (inemuri) is a sign not of laziness but of having worked hard. Sounds ideal, honestly.
34. “Truth Hurts.” Lizzo’s sleeper hit didn’t top charts until almost two years after its release. Some things aren’t great till they gotta be great.
35. Gabe Barham. The narcoleptic drummer of the aptly named Sleeping with Sirens.
36. You, when you’re dead.
37. Me, last Tuesday. I was sooo sleepy.
38. My niece. Famous for not sleeping, really.
39. President Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr. Awake, O sleepy!
40. Claudia Trenkwalder. She’s no. 1 on the Board of Directors of the World Sleep Foundation. So I’d guess she sleeps, probably.
Crary’s target is the 24/7 marketplace of “late capitalism.” Whether you agree with the source of his dispute, Crary's findings are unsettling if not horrify ing, not just in the statistics, but in the ways we’ve begun to conceive of sleep as “time lost.”
In this novel a young Holocaust sur vivor struggles with overpowering ex haustion. Only in sleep can he reck on with his past, particularly through vivid dreams of his parents. In this ex tremely personal account, Appelfeld, a Holocasut survivor himself, testifies to the link between the unconscious and the creative forces of life.
In her forties, happily married with children, Ada Calhoun found herself in the throes of a midlife crisis. Like many Gen X women, she was supposed to be able to have it all: career, family, romance, health, and zero credit card debt, but she was drowning under the weight of these expectations. Thinking others might feel the same, Why We Can’t Sleep is her exploration of the political and cultural forces that light the match of burnout, and how to keep them at bay.
A short, sharp polemic in defense of a good night’s rest. “Polemic,” because
Written in response to the “desperate and valid” question of “How can I rest when I have to pay the bills?” this book is for the exhausted and downtrodden— so, all of us. Tricia Hersey, aka the Nap Bishop, aka the Nap Minister, channels Afrofuturism and Black liberation theol ogy to forge a new path to activism: rest.
One critic called this “the finest existential novel not written by a French author.” About a wealthy, orphaned 24-year-old who believes that if she can find a way to sleep for a full year, she might then awaken totally re freshed and reborn. With trademark cynicism, Moshfegh wrestles with “the inner laws of spirit” (Joni Mitchell) in pursuit of something beautiful.
Long, comprehensive, and mostly ac cessible, this is a book about sleep writ ten by a neuroscientist who is friendly to Freud. That dreams are just random successions of meaningless images is not what you’ll get from Ribeiro; instead, he indicates, we have much to learn from “the oracle of night.”
At this point most of us know, in our gut, that there is something deeply incompatible about celebrity culture and the Gospel. Beaty has done Chris tians—whether we engage in pub lic/“platformed” ministry or not—a great service with this timely and in cisive guide to where exactly those lines fall.
As today’s world becomes more sleep-deprived, it also becomes more work-centric, our paradigm shifting from an idealistic “eat, pray, love,” to “work, pray, code.” So argues Carolyn Chen, sociologist of religion. Our interview with Dr. Chen appears in this issue.
The former Mockingbird conference speaker and renowned culture critic returns with a panoramic, passionate, and refreshingly non-doctrinaire set of essays about the way we live now. The collection doubles as a love letter to (and, at times, a eulogy for) the liberal arts. Highly recommended.
“Calvin and Hobbes meets Flannery
O’Connor” is how you could describe this inspired collection of comic strips.
So much heart and whimsy, so much depth, so many smiles—beautifully drawn, too. We could not be more excited to give this book as a Christ mas gift.
What happens when a Southern re ligious scholar enters psychoanalysis?
The answer is this book: a man’s ac count of his childhood in the deep American South, and his reckoning with the legalistic religious edifice shadowing his mind, body, and spirit.
A collection of outstanding essays from one of the leading New Testament scholars today, What Is a Gospel exam ines Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John in comparison with their noncanonical counterparts. This ridiculously wide-ranging study of writings peeks under the hood of the complex (and fascinating) process in which the texts of the New Testament were chosen— or excluded.
Crying in H Mart is a remarkable memoir about the love, loyalty, rebel lion, and resistance that comes with all mother-daughter relationships. Who knew that food could heal even the deepest parts of grief?
What is it about little kids and their bears? I mean, seriously. Didn’t anyone ever tell them that their favorite children’s storybook characters are actually vicious apex predators quite capable of tearing their faces off? Didn’t they ever see The Revenant? I guess not. Kids just seem to love bears, at least fictional ones.
Over the past century, bears have become nearly omnipresent in chil dren’s literature. Winnie-the-Pooh debuted in 1926, followed by Padding ton in 1958, the Berenstain Bears in 1962, and Corduroy in 1968. In the decades since, as the number of bear-related children’s books has only bal looned, ursine characters have also featured in a seemingly endless stream of animated children’s shows and movies (Kung Fu Panda, anyone?). All told, bears might just be the most common anthropomorphized animal in all of children’s entertainment.
Personally, I wonder if Teddy Roosevelt isn’t to blame for all of this. It was T. R., after all, who—on a 1902 hunting expedition in Mississip pi—supposedly deemed it “unsportsmanlike” to shoot an American black bear who’d been captured and tied to a willow tree, thus garnering him a nickname he hated, and inspiring inventor Morris Michtom to fashion the first “teddy bear” and put it up for sale in the window of his Brooklyn candy shop. Maybe our childhood obsession with these cuddly carnivores
(That Don’t Feature a Pooh, Paddington, or Berenstain)
can indeed be traced to teddies, which are of course the world’s best-known snuggle buddies. Who didn’t have a favorite teddy bear growing up? I certainly did—a soft, plump, pantsless Pooh Bear that I hugged closer than any other stuffed animal I ever owned.
Perhaps our pairing of bedtimes with bears does make some sense: What large mammals better connote deep sleep and general coziness? At the very least, bears are the species most associated with hibernation. Whatever the reason, lovable bear characters have come to play a special role in the bedtime routines of countless children, one that will surely continue for generations to come. Thus, in honor of this association, here are 12 wonderful, whimsical children’s books about bears, in chronological order, for you to add to your collection:
Written and illustrated by Robert McCloskey
With gorgeous blue-toned illustra tions, this McCloskey classic tells the story of a little girl named Sal and a bear cub who both get separated from their mothers while hunting wild blueberries on a Maine hillside. For a few hilarious moments, the two somehow swap places, each gleefully bounding along after the wrong mother. As the saying goes, “To the pure, all things are pure.” Of course, this peaceable kingdom scene doesn’t last long, and yet, after considerable ruckus, somehow everyone still man ages to get their fill of fructose.
Written and illustrated by Don Freeman
It would probably be impossible to top a beloved tale like Corduroy (1968). But did you know Don Freeman wrote a second Corduroy book? In this charming 1978 sequel, Lisa takes her favorite toy bear on
a trip to the laundromat, where Corduroy promptly gets lost and ends up being left behind for the night. Among other things, Corduroy soon befriends a bearded hippie man in a beret, and manages to turn a box of soap into a ski slope, before falling asleep in a laundry basket. Thankfully, faithful Lisa returns to find him first thing in the morning!
3.) The Little Mouse, the Red Ripe Strawberry, and the Big Hungry Bear (1984)
Written by Don and Audrey Wood and illustrated by Don Wood Okay, this story doesn’t technically feature a bear—just the rumor of one—but it’s a book for the ages! In delightfully interactive fashion, the wily narrator manages to convince a winsome, industrious little mouse that his prized strawberry will soon be gobbled up by a ravenous bear. After trying everything to protect it, mouse is finally arm-twisted into sharing the strawberry with the narrator, which of
course turns out to be the best way to enjoy it. With priceless illustrations, this fun, slightly ominous book is sure to get a giggle from both you and your little one.
Written and illustrated by Frank Asch
You really can’t go wrong with Frank Asch. His Moonbear series is full of beautifully illustrated, deceptive ly simple classics like Happy Birth day, Moon (1982), Milk and Cook ies (1982), and Moonbear’s Dream (1999). This charming 1985 tale stands out, however—perhaps be cause of the subtle lesson it holds about human nature. One day, after a frustrating fishing experience, Bear decides to get rid of his shadow. He tries all kinds of things to shake it, but in the end nothing works, and he falls asleep in despair. It’s only when Bear finally gives up and makes peace with his shadow that they’re both able to catch a fish.
Written by Michael Rosen and illustrat ed by Helen Oxenbury
It’s no wonder that this 1989 classic has sold more than 9 million cop ies. It boasts lively illustrations, fun wordplay, a delightful sing-a-long text set to an American folk tune, and an exciting family adventure. Indeed, in their bold quest to find one of nature’s most feared beasts, our intrepid pro tagonists must brave all manner of ob stacles—a deep river, a muddy swamp, a dark forest, a fierce snowstorm, and even a spooky (and possibly inhabit-
ed) cave. This unforgettable tale does a great job of teaching children to face their fears, but also to occasion ally pay attention to them—such as when being chased by an angry bear!
Written by Karma Wilson and illus trated by Jane Chapman
Not surprisingly, there are lots of chil dren’s books about sleepy or sleeping bears. Two of my favorites include Goodnight Already! (2014) by Jory John and Bear Is Not Tired (2016) by Ciara Gavin. But this simple lyrical bestseller from 2002 is the cream of the crop. It’s a brutal winter outside, but bear is safely snoring away in his den. One by one, his frigid friends— mouse, hare, badger, gopher, mole, raven, and wren—take shelter in the den, and soon are having a jolly time together, while bear snores on. But suddenly, when bear wakes up, all bets are off, and everyone will have to learn a thing or two about both the delights and responsibilities of friendship.
Written and illustrated by Ashley Wolff
One of the amazing things about bears is that many females actual ly give birth while in hibernation and then nurse their cubs for weeks before ever venturing outside. This story begins at the moment when a mother bear and her inquisitive cub first emerge from the den. Baby Bear marvels at each new sight he discovers—warm yellow sunshine, green oak leaves, blue birds, brown trout,
red strawberries. Playful and lushly illustrated, this book is a perfect way to teach toddlers their colors and in still a sense of wonder as well.
Written by Lindsay Mattick and illus trated by Sophie Blackall
Winner of the Caldecott Medal, this book recounts the heartwarming story of Harry Colebourn and the bear that inspired Winnie-the-Pooh. It’s 1914 and Colebourn is a Canadian soldier on his way to fight in World War I. In a chance encounter, he adopts a baby black bear and names her Win nie, after his hometown of Winnipeg. Amazingly, she becomes a mascot for Colebourn’s unit, even joining the soldiers in England before eventual ly ending up at the London Zoo. It’s there, a few years later, where she is visited by a young Christopher Robin…
Written and illustrated by Ryan T. Hig gins Bruce the bear is a delightful cur mudgeon. He hates sunshine, hates rain, and hates other animals. All he wants is to be left alone and to eat eggs, which he cooks into all kinds of “fancy recipes.” (He’s a bit of a food ie.) One day, while cooking up some goose eggs, he has a most unpleasant experience: the eggs hatch into four little goslings! Worst of all: they take Bruce for their mother. Day after day, Bruce tries to get rid of them, but to no avail. Finally, when his goslings have to go south for the winter, Bruce
begrudgingly accepts his new role, and opts to spend the rest of his win ters in Miami. It just goes to show: sometimes love makes its own plans!
Written and illustrated by Julia Sarcone-Roach
If bears are big sleepers first, they are big eaters second. Kathleen Doherty’s Don’t Feed the Bear (2018) and David Ezra Stein’s Honey (2018) are just a few of the great “hungry bear” books from recent years, but this comical, richly-colored story from 2015 is sure to be a child favorite. Somewhere in the California countryside a nosy black bear comes upon a pickup truck loaded with fresh berries. Naturally, he climbs aboard and gorges him self until he falls asleep. But when he wakes, he finds himself lost in a “new forest” called San Francisco, and must somehow find his way home—not to mention his next meal! Stay tuned for the surprise ending.
Written and illustrated by Rob Biddulph Fred isn’t just any average grizzly bear. He’s the best. Every year he wins the “Best Bear in the Wood Contest,” and he trains hard to earn that title—so hard that he doesn’t have time for friends. But one day, when a new bear shows up to challenge him, Fred loses his GRRRRR! In order to get it back, he’ll have to get help from all kinds of animals that he never paid attention to, and he’ll have to learn that there are more important things than being the best. This fun read is full of law-and-gospel themes for kids (and adults).
If this is any indication, I’d love more comics to write children’s lit. Hilarious and charmingly-illustrated, it offers great lessons for kids about dealing with anxiety and sacrificing for our friends. Although he may be big, the bear in this story is more of a scaredy-cat—petrified by almost ev erything, including his own reflec tion. But his friend, a rabbit, is the opposite. One day, after swearing off adventures, Bear learns that Rabbit is in real danger. To save him, Bear must discover the courage he never knew he had, and brave all kinds of dangers…
It is a common experience that a problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it.
– John Steinbeck, Sweet Thursday (1954)
“If we don’t ever sleep again, so much the better,” José Arcadio Buendía said in good humor. “That way we can get more out of life.” But the Indian woman explained that the most fearsome part of the sickness of insomnia was not the impossibility of sleeping, for the body did not feel any fatigue at all, but its inexorable evolution toward a more critical manifestation: a loss of memory. She meant that when the sick person became used to his state of vigil, the recollection of his childhood began to be erased from his memory, then the name and notion of things, and finally the identity of people and even the awareness of his own being, until he sank into a kind of idiocy that had no past.
– Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967)
To know the abyss of the darkness and not to fear it, to entrust oneself to it and whatever may arise from it—what greater gift?
– Ursula K. Le Guin, The New Atlantis and Other Novellas of Science Fiction (1975)
[Sleep is] a surrender, a laying down of arms. Whatever plans you’re making, whatever work you’re up to your ears in, whatever pleasures you’re enjoying, whatever sorrows or anxieties or problems you’re in the midst of, you set them aside, find a place to stretch out somewhere, close your eyes, and wait for sleep.
All the things that make you the particular person you are stop working—your thoughts and feelings, the changing expressions of your face, the constant moving around, the yammering will, the relentless or not so relentless purpose. But
all the other things keep on working with a will and purpose of their own. You go on breathing in and out. Your heart goes on beating. If some faint thought stirs somewhere in the depths of you, it’s converted into a dream so you can go on sleeping and not have to wake up to think it through before it’s time.
Whether you’re just or unjust, you have the innocence of a cat dozing under the stove. Whether you’re old or young, homely or fair, you take on the serenity of marble. You have given up being in charge of your life. You have put yourself into the hands of the night.
It is a rehearsal for the final laying down of arms, of course, when you trust yourself to the same unseen benevolence to see you through the dark and to wake you when the time comes— with new hope, new strength—into the return again of light.
– Frederick Buechner, Whistling in the Dark (1988)
Sleep is the best meditation.
– Dalai Lama (1989)
But we never arrive at a condition where we are beyond sleep, self-sufficient in twenty-four hour control. Daily we give up consciousness, submitting ourselves to that which is deeper than consciousness in order to grow and be healed, be created and saved. Going to sleep is a biological necessity; it can also be an act of faith. People who live by faith have always welcomed the evening hour for prayer, disengaging themselves from the discordant, arhythmic confusion of tongues, and sinking into the quiet rhythms of God’s creating and covenanting words. Even though it is decreed in our bodies that we return to this sleep, it is not easy. We want to stay in control. We want to oversee the operation. Evening prayer is a deliberate act of spirit that cultivates willingly what our bodies force on us finally.
— Eugene Peterson, Answering God (1989)
Sleep is the prayer the body prays, Breathing in unthought faith the Breath
That through our worry-wearied days
Preserves our rest, and is our truth.
– Wendell Berry, “V.” (1990)
When every inch of the world is known, sleep may be the only wilderness that we have left.
– Louise Erdrich, The Blue Jay’s Dance (1995)
There is nothing to be done at three a.m. except hold on.
– Sukhdev Sandhu, Night Haunts (2006)
It should be no surprise that there is an erosion of sleep now everywhere, given the immensity of what is at stake economically. Over the course of the twentieth century, there were steady inroads made against the time of sleep— the average North American adult now sleeps approximately six and a half hours a night, an erosion from eight hours a generation ago, and (hard as it is to believe) down from ten hours in the early twentieth century. … The scandal of sleep is the embeddedness in our lives of the rhythmic oscillations of solar light and darkness, activity and rest, of work and recuperation, that have been eradicated or neutralized elsewhere… [W]ithin the globalist neoliberal paradigm, sleeping is for losers.
– Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (2013)
In 1989 the Guinness Book of World Records deemed sleep deprivation too dangerous and deleted the category.
– Alice Robb, Why We Dream (2018)
Of all the things that keep us up at night (fear, family stress, a highlight reel of awkward social encounters), work surely has to rank pretty high on the list. Whether it’s because of deadlines, grating colleagues, or the prospect of earning a promotion, work has this knack for lingering in the mind long after you’ve left the office. Especially with the pandem ic-prompted uptick in remote jobs, many of us find our occupations now occupying a sphere of life that we once, ideally, kept separate. It seems to be the opposite of what Congress feared in 1965, when they held a lengthy meeting to discuss the imminent twenty-hour work week; certainly, they assumed, with the rise of automation, people would work less. “Talk about an astonishing lack of insight!” says David Zahl in Seculosity (a composite of “secular religiosity”). “Tech nological advances have not increased downtime. Instead of condensing work, they have squeezed out rest.”
The sociologist Carolyn Chen has noticed a similar trend. “Over the past forty years,” she writes in her new book Work Pray Code, “work has extracted ever more of the time and energy of highly skilled Americans, crowding out other commitments, especially religion.” A professor at the University of California, Berkeley, Chen conducted more than a hundred
Photograph by Michael Dziedzic / Unsplashin-depth interviews from 2013-2019 to evaluate how workers in Silicon Valley now relate to their professions. But don’t let the Silicon Valley part fool you: though most of us don’t work in offices that provide sleep pods and meditation rooms, wealthy companies never theless reflect a broader trend that we are all enthrall to. “Subtly but unmistakably,” Chen writes, “work is replacing religion.”
Today our careers are not only supposed to pay the bills but are also expected to give our lives meaning, dignity, and purpose, the way God was supposed to in ages past. In the most wealthy companies, services of convenience—you could say “ministries”—are on offer to give our lives the illusion of peace and tranquility. One human resources director suggests that her job is to “nurture the souls” of her employees; many firms hire chaplains to help their workers “deal with spiritual issues.” But as Chen notes in our interview, there is a “teleology” underlying this—an end goal: turning an ever-greater profit. And often, as we discuss below, this comes at the expense of other less wealthy, soulful institutions. Chen observes that we live in “an America whose hollowed-out communities, institutions, and traditions are quickly eroding—everywhere, that is, except work.” Below, we discuss the pros and cons of a more “spiritual” workplace, the importance of belonging, and the dif ference between rest for productivity’s sake and rest for rest’s sake.
Why did you become a sociologist who studies religion specifically?
I come from a very religious background. My parents are immigrants from Taiwan, and I grew up in a sort of Protestant, eth no-religious immigrant community, which is common among immigrants to the United States. That community sustained my fami ly, and the church sustained the larger com munity. In college, I became fascinated by the sociology of religion, because sociology gave me a lens to understand the dynamic systems and structures of power at play— and how they operate in religious spaces.
Is there a religious concern motiving your work with, for example, this book? Or is your interest purely academic?
My interest in religion has always been motivated by my own personal religious experience. But this book was very much an empirical puzzle for me, asking the question: where do we see religious tendencies manifested in secular spaces? With so many people identifying as non-religious, I felt I had to move into non-traditional spaces to make my research relevant. I think that as someone who is religious, it concerns me when I see the marketplace co-opting—col onizing—religious traditions and practices.
Religion has become different things in different times. If we’re looking in the Mid dle Ages, religion had this hegemonic power, and today, in secular society, the market has that power. But I think that there are cer tain practices, communities, and traditions that kind of create sanctuaries in our lives where we don’t have to abide by strict market logic, where we live by different ethics and
principles. These might be arts communi ties; these might be spiritual communities.
So initially my project was interested in how companies use spiritual practices to make their workers more productive, but I started to understand it as part of larger ecosystem, a larger structural system in which the dominant institution—the market—really subsumes these other institutions, and forms of logic and practice.
Did you encounter any resistance to your central claim? Did any emphatically non-re ligious readers feel insulted by your idea that the workplace actually was religious?
I’m kind of surprised that I haven’t gotten that criticism yet. One of my greatest points of pride about this book is that executive coaches and people in the mindfulness industry have reached out to me and thanked me for helping them to see these trends. This makes me hopeful, because I tried to write with a sense of empathy and compassion, so that I was critical of the system but not the people. Whether you are a Dharma teacher, or a tech worker, a CEO, you have to adapt to the system.
You do write with such an empathy for your subjects. I wonder what were the positives, if any, in the more religious workspaces you researched?
Entering the space as a working mother who has a demanding career and family, I went into these tech spaces wishing to be treated the way their employees were. Companies say,
“We know you have to walk your dog or clean your house, and you’re not going to have time for that anymore, so we’re going to give you $5,000 a year for ‘me time.’” Many of these companies bring famous spiritual leaders to give inspirational talks and that’s just part of the company culture. Or for example, Salesforce has a meditation room on every floor. These companies are so rich, and they have an army of human resource professionals that are dedicated to anticipating your every need. They want you to be happy so that you don’t leave. It’s about retaining talent.
Given the demands of work and time that most modern people face, wouldn’t it be great if we all had this? People feel they have spiritually fulfilled lives because of the company, not despite the company.
And when you ask if non-religious people criticized me because I call their workplaces religious, no; what happens instead is that religious people criticize me for not being harder on the tech companies. I wasn’t more critical of them because I see that we all live this modern American life where we take fifty-to-sixty-hour work weeks for granted. If we’re going to make that assumption, then something else has to give—our health, our relationships, our spirituality. The only way that you can consistently perform at that lev el is if you have a concierge service—what I call corporate maternalism—that helps make health, relationships, and spirituali ty convenient. And that’s what the folks in Silicon Valley have.
But then, also, unmistakably there is a dark side.
Well, if all your needs get fulfilled within one institution, you never have to leave. These
companies have become self-sustaining, sort of cult-like organizations that you never have to leave, yet they have a different teleology from many religious institutions. The tele ology of a business is to make a profit.
So tech workers begin to disengage from the public, because they don’t need the public anymore; they don’t need these other institutions. In the book I refer to it as “Techtopia.” Techtopias become these huge giant magnets that attract all the devotion, time, and ener gy of a community. And this is again a very different way of talking about work, because we are so used to talking about work as be ing extractive. It’s taking from us, right? But in Silicon Valley and other knowledge indus try hubs, they’re making themselves attractive spaces where you can find identity, belonging, and meaning. So by attracting all of the time and energy from the community, propor tionally other institutions—faith communi ties, families, neighborhood associations, even small businesses—grow weak in comparison.
This was really clear, for instance, when I interviewed a Zen priest. The members of his Zendō had no time to come to his temple anymore because they were all working—so he decided to bring meditation to the work place. Well, then he had to abide by workplace rules and alter his liturgy to the liturgy of the workplace. His meetings had to become sec ular, scientific, to increase productivity, etc.
I interviewed church groups that would offer workplace ministries. But the problem with that is that Christian workers often had to make a choice: either they were involved in their church or their workplace ministry. Community outside of work now has this either-or proposition.
And then there’s the fact that these tech company fellowships start to mirror the caste system—salaried employees have the time to
go to their groups, but your cafeteria work er, your janitor, and other hourly employees did not have that benefit. So there are lots of social costs that don’t really get factored in.
If you look at something like Harvard Business Review, you find this unexamined assumption that the holistic workplace is a good thing. But from my vantage point, there is a fine line between a holistic work place and a workplace that’s invasive, colo nizing, and monopolizing. With scarce time, all the things we celebrate came down to a sense of convenience.
Which brings us to our theme of rest.
Right, so here’s the thing about rest: rest isn’t convenient. I would ask HR people, “You’re giving your employees yoga. You’re giving them meditation. You’re providing meals so they can live meaningful, healthy, whole lives and do a lot of work at the same time—but have you thought about giving them time off?” And the HR people would look at me like I was so naïve. In this eco system, rest is the most precious and scarce resource, but people don’t understand it as that. Everything is about convenience and optimization of the self.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the Jewish practice of the Sabbath. One of the most rad ical interventions that faith traditions can of fer in this ecosystem is the practice of sacred rest. And the only way that you can make it sacred is not by making it an individual prac tice but by enshrining it in an institution.
Right now, there’s a lot of conversation about burnout, and how ordinary people—like not
Silicon Valley people—just feel exhausted all the time. People are weary. I wondered if you could comment on that.
With remote work, levels of burnout have increased, because now you can be working all the time. HR folks in Silicon Valley tell me that the hardest part of managing labor is managing burnout. They would try to address burnout by offering meals and nap pods, but that is a remedy, not a way of ad dressing the cause.
I’m not sure if things are going to change unless, as a buffer, we build up other insti tutions and spaces that are life-giving. Even if I turn my computer off at 5:00 p.m. to rest, the larger society is going to reward the person who decides to work until 8:00 p.m.
So we need counter-institutions, narra tives, and traditions that can give us meaning and belonging outside of work. We need to reimagine rest as being an end in itself, not as a means to more productivity. In this day and age—it might seem pathetic to say— rest is radical and revolutionary.
In the book, there are some striking mo ments with your interviewees. A couple people mention experiencing paralysis af ter months of work-related exhaustion. Is there an interview that is most memorable to you? Or that just really surprised you?
There was a guy from Georgia who used to be the president of a Christian fraternity, who then moved to Silicon Valley to join a tech start-up. In the process, he left religion. What I saw was that the tech startup replaced everything that the church used to provide,
and essentially all of the functions of his life: social, practical, and spiritual. Now, we of ten think that when people leave religion, it’s because they have a crisis of faith. And often, we think of religion as something very intellectual, that it’s about believing certain things. But for this guy, it had nothing to do with belief—he still believed. It was about belonging. He had joined another organization that laid claim to his time, energy, and devotion. And it was really the sense of belonging that pulled him in. That was super eye-opening for me, because it helped make sense of this larger pattern I had been observing. I was like, oh, I get it now. I see what’s happening.
Sleep itself is a profound spiritual practice, giv ing us rest, renewal, energy—and dreams. Whether or not we recall our dreams, they are working all night, in both REM and nonREM sleep. But why? What is all this weird, disturbing, elusive, gorgeous ephemera do ing? In response, a phrase came to me from the dream world itself: Dreams are parables in the gospel that God is writing through your life. That’s right: each of our lives is a gospel.
If we all embody the Divine spark, as Chris tian tradition has long suggested, then we all bear witness to the lifegiving power of the immanent Mystery. As a spiritual director with a Jungian-Christian-mystic orientation, I am convinced that dreams can help show us how. Not with pithy bullet points, but through experiences that open us, viscerally, into new perspectives that are necessary for
our ongoing individuation, or full becoming.
I’ve been a dreamworker since 1999. As a Presbyterian elder, I promised to serve the Church with “energy, intelligence, imagination, and love,” which I now do best through church groups and through my practice, Fire by Night Dreamwork. Whether in groups or one-to-one, I welcome all. I see many church-wounded people who are neverthe less thirsty for meaningful soulwork, as well as people on the far margins of Christianity, restless seekers who keep the Church alive by cracking it open, protesting whatever’s not just, truthful, loving, lifegiving. Dreamwork alone can be endlessly helpful in cultivating spiritual depth, compassion, creativity, com munity, and mindfulness.
This is because dreams disrupt our habit ual attitudes. They drag us into themselves, and our sleeping bodies, minds, and souls experience them as real. I’ve found that if we stay with the world of the dream, carrying its live unconscious weirdness into waking
The Actress, 2020, by Anya Kielar. © the artist and Rachel Uffner Gallery.
life, it can work on us with the same disori enting-reorienting Gospel power that Jesus’ parables offer. It seems to me that dreams are parables on steroids, crafted precisely for us by the Divine Storyteller Within who knows precisely what we need to hear; they show us the liberating otherness of the Kingdom of God. This is true even of nightmares, which are like emergency sirens going off—these are dreams about something that we cannot dismiss. They exist to bring to consciousness the unconscious material that cries out to be known.1
For example: here’s a dream shared with me by my friend Allen Proctor, who was at the time a minister discerning whether to take a new job. The following, rendered in his own words, came to him one New Year’s Eve several years ago:
I am at work, and a colleague implies that I should lead worship since nobody else is prepared: he knows I’ll be effective on short notice. This makes me feel respected. Later, I’m on the fifth floor of a parking deck, and I step into the elevator to go to my first-floor office. The elevator is glass, and it’s attached
1. Matthew Walker, in his book Why We Sleep, points to a similar idea, but from a strictly scientific standpoint. Although Walker is a skeptic about the “meaning” of dreams, he does see that PTSD-related nightmares are the brain’s attempt to do the natural, neurochemical work of restoring emotional equilibrium. The repetitive quality of PTSD-related nightmares is due to the high levels of noradrenaline that block regular REM sleep and its natural powers of “emotional convalescence.”
In any case, unconscious material is trying to become conscious. Integrating it leads to healing and wholeness and is, in my view, surely the work of the Holy Spirit. I have enormous respect for traumatized people who can wrestle with their nightmares the way Jacob wrestled with the angel, and in the same way, nightmares can eventually bless them—but having a good trauma therapist is usually necessary.
to a second glass elevator in which a beautiful young black woman stands wide-eyed and anxious. She presses a button and as the doors close, she grabs them and yanks them open. Panicking, she pushes more buttons, and the doors begin screeching and smoking. I try to help her, but the linked elevators descend, I in one and she in the other. Suddenly there’s a violent lurch and the elevators drop into free fall. There are only five floors, so I know I can survive this. I bend my knees and brace myself. But we keep dropping, and I realize there are 64 floors. I can’t survive this fall! I should call someone and say, “I love you.” But there’s no time. Fear runs through me like a lightning bolt. I wake up.
Actually, Allen does not wake up calmly evaluating his job offer. After all, the job is not the focus: he is. He wakes up after the ferocious blessing of a nightmare has plunged him through his subterranean “sto ries,” showing him where he really is, what matters, who’s with him and who’s not— and what is literally going down. With his world in freefall to the depth of his own soul, he’s alive with fear, and his impulse is to call out, I love you.
This is pretty much the way dreams and visions work for every dreamer in the scrip tures: Jacob, Moses, Daniel, Nebuchadnez zar, the Josephs, Peter. Parables work this way too, according to scholars like Sallie McFague and Amy-Jill Levine. Parables dis rupt and disorder us, interpret us, and re turn us to ourselves.
In her book, Speaking of Parables: A Study in Metaphor and Theology, McFague points
out that the original effect of the parables— shock—has become diminished by familiari ty; we need to be refreshed by new metaphors coming to us through stories and art. I’d add to her list dreams, as well as the apparently random convergence between inner reali ties and waking-life events, what we might call “synchronicities,” or “nods from God.”2
But what’s true about dreams, about par ables, about metaphor in general? We can start with a dream’s energy, the shock, the
2. For example, you have a powerful dream of a large white bird. Later that day you find a white feather or encounter a video of white egrets online. This event reinforces the significance of the inner situation and engenders a sense of wonder. In such a case, the best thing to do is notice, hold the event lightly, and stay prayerfully curious.
“Wake up!” Something that we already knew unconsciously is leaping into consciousness. It’s an aha! we feel but may not be able to fully articulate; this energetic tug, or frisson, helps us reorient our minds. Metaphor is our mother tongue, and dreams speak to us in that language, through emotion-drenched images. What disrupts us and disorders our lives? What interprets us? How are we re turned to ourselves, reoriented to a deeper wholeness—something that looks, in parable language, more like the kingdom of God?
Through his dream, Allen sees that the way forward is down. Two important ener gies are “boxed up” and doomed: the pros pect of himself as the “effective minister” and the beautiful black woman whom he identifies as a long-held image of God. But
in dream language, death is usually about a transformation into something beyond the ego’s imagination.3 It’s the experience, not just the concept of breakthrough. Working with the dream, Allen knew that regardless of what he decided about the job situation, his call was to go “down,” and release his old identities.
There’s a parable about a similar situation. Luke records a cringy little story about a guest debating where to sit at wedding feast (Lk 14:7-11). Unless you put yourself into it, there’s almost no energy in the parable. So, pretend you’re this person: You’re invit ed to the feast, and you walk into the ban quet hall. Where to sit? It’s not clear. So, you wonder, who are you in this setting? Why were you invited? Connections? Ac complishments? Wealth? Your warmth, wit, and charm? In this context, where you sit is who you are. You could assume you belong in a place of honor. But, the voice of Christ says, “Go low.”
This is how you show up as a significant person: You acknowledge that you have something to learn. That everyone else is at least as important as you are. Your humili ty, your openness to experience beyond your comfort zone, is how the Host knows that you are a person of stature.
If we’re really in the story, we might feel the relief of sitting in the lowly seats with
God only knows who else might be there. As I think about this parable, I encounter the outlier parts of myself whom I need to integrate into my self-understanding. The next parable even names them: the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind. Without my shadows, I’m not whole.
Allen’s dream ultimately offered him a new way of seeing himself as a leader. He realized he didn’t need to be “the effective minister,” and he saw that the “otherness” of this par ticular image of the divine feminine could actually become integrated into his own way of leading. Ultimately, he felt himself ready to take the job of Director of the Haden In stitute, where people of all stripes—includ ing myself—come to train as dreamworkers and spiritual directors.
The gospel God is writing with you throughout your life is your own wild and willful mix of grace, idiocy, fear, miracle, honesty, bewilderment, betrayal, nard-slathering love, heartrending grief, and the breathless can-it-be? of resurrection. Woven through it all are your dream parables, which help you live from the Christ within, which let you know you are known, loved, challenged, changed, and slowly moving into a wholeness that you can only know by falling beyond ordinary thinking, down through your layered “stories” about your self, into your soul’s deepest truth.
3. In Jungian parlance, “ego” is the ordinary, waking-life identity: everything we consciously know about ourselves. The “self” is Jung’s name for the Inner Christ or Divine Within or Essence—it’s that deep-down unfathomable life that we can never fully know, but which guides and organizes our conscious and unconscious development as we continually transform into our true selves. Jung calls this process “individuation.” I find this described in Jesus’ healings, especially of the paralytic on the roof (Mk 2).
The Lamp of Sleep Sleep holds itself. In ancient worlds, with greenish moons that cleaved the dark, sleepers poured their hard lives into the quiet vestibule of death.
Having spent the day cutting back some bitter shrubs that serve to block
jealous views of a grand estate, one goes to bed with the thought that night is not what it used to be, and when light has so sharp an edge the sunrise seems a mortal tide. Still the artless child rests their head
on hours each like a thousand years, and when they wake to puzzles that adults would place before them near the forest’s limitless appeal, they may find their way, to escape into those shady passages.
Against the vanity of work sleep installs its delicious pride, to be always overcoming, as the final repetition.
Repeatedly and by itself, sleep will soften all things on Earth.
On the crisp fall day of the 13th of October, 2011, NBC’s Parks and Recreation broad cast the most ground breaking words of the 21st century: “treat yo’self.” What ensued was an abundance of memes and merchandise celebrating the importance of doing things just for you. To treat yo’self, you could purchase the dress you’d been eyeing for weeks before it went on sale. It meant you could go out on a ran dom weekday to get brunch with friends and drink mimosas that were mostly champagne.
Today, “treat yo’self” is almost indistin guishable from “self-care,” a term that has consumed much of the dialogue on social media and the internet. The expression is materially defined by eucalyptus-scented lotions, sparkly bath bombs, and clay face masks—really anything that smells like the essential oils your mom buys from that one church friend, or that dips significantly into your end-of-the-month paycheck.
Globally, in 2021 health and wellness was reported by McKinsey & Company to be a $1.5 trillion industry. The market involved any consumer products or services pertaining to mindfulness, fitness, beauty, personal care, vitamins, and lifestyle tracking apps. Of the wellness spending, 70% went toward products. With the continued rise of social media influencers who post ads for rose quartz facial rollers and brands that promise glowing skin, the industry is bound to boom even more in the coming years. Comparably, in 2022 global health insurance was a $1.6 tril lion industry. Digest (ha) that information as you will, but to me it is fascinating that the wellness market—with its Pelotons and athleisure—has risen to such heights that we consider it essential.
Less transactional, clickable, and flo ral-scented forms of self-care may include lis tening to your favorite album, napping in the middle of the day, calling your mom, watching baby otter videos, or taking your daily multi vitamin. Because self-care is “self” care, there are really no parameters or rules you need to follow; it can be whatever you want it to be.
Its laissez-faire lack of rules makes it ap pear to be the antithesis of self-help. Where self-help seeks to fix our problems, self-care wants to console us and ease our anxieties. Where self-help is an attempt at self-im provement, self-care reminds us to love our selves, with all our whims and quirks. Selfcare is meant to be a solace for our sorrows, a recess from our restlessness. It’s supposed to go against the grain of society’s incessant edicts of self-improvement, and to move us further toward learning to love and accept who we are in the present.
And in truth, it is important that we take care of our physical, emotional, and mental health. After all, are we not worthy of
being comforted when afflicted by worry? Are we not worthy of a love that surpasses our failures and fallouts? Moreover, it’s hard to care for other people (or about anything for that matter) when we don’t first take care of ourselves. Yet too often what we under stand to be self-care becomes just another way we grasp for control.
The self-care solution to feeling lonely is to stay in your cozy apartment, click on a comfort movie, and light a candle (or two). If we’re feeling burnt out or overwhelmed, that’s nothing that Super Target, Chinese takeout, or a glass of red wine can’t fix, right? Binge-watching TV, listening to true crime podcasts, or lathering on an exfoli-
“A Glittery Veil,” 2020, acrylic on canvas, by Ariel Dannielle.
ating body-scrub will supposedly help us find rest in the midst of stress. But even if we are bundled up like a burrito and hor izontal on the couch, what we perceive as rest may really just be anxiety disguised as a weighted blanket. Self-care quickly reaches a point when it is more about isolation and emotional numbness, and less about caring for ourselves.
Candles, blankets, Netflix, and takeout are all good things; I love crab rangoons just as much as the next person. But this kind of self-care is like trying to put a Band-Aid over a flesh wound, or duct taping your bro ken side mirror to your car door, or consult ing a magic 8 ball rather than a therapist. Perhaps it helps a little bit, but in the long term you’ll find that what you really need is a doctor, a mechanic, or a priest.
We all fall into the rabbit holes of health and wellness. We all make excuses—wheth er it’s canceling plans with a friend because you don’t want to get out of your pajamas or having DoorDash deliver your Chipotle when the restaurant is five minutes away— for the sake of “caring” for ourselves. But what does it mean to care for oneself? In her book An Ordinary Age, Rainesford Stauffer candidly reflects on the age of “treat yo’self”:
[Individualism] treats self-care like it should be the balm for everything… That fine line—between self-care, the fix, and self-care, the practice—gets trampled over when it is presented as something we should purchase with out addressing who profits when we do, who has access, and why “care” in this manner ultimately seems to involve picking products yourself, paying with your dollars, and solving whatever it is solo.
The evolution of self-care into the bil lion-dollar industry of “wellness” indicates that our troubles cannot be solved with retail therapy—there is always more to buy. It’s sad to say, but spending hours on pampering will not magically bibiddi-bobbidi-boo away our issues, whether they be loneliness, anxiety, depression, or exhaustion. The new skincare product may help the bags under our eyes, but that doesn’t mean it will reduce any of our emotional baggage. Nevermind the fact that we may be spending money on things we cannot necessarily afford.
I have insisted upon doing many things in the name of self-care. Much of my free time is spent talking myself out of buying yet another basket from the Magnolia Home section at Target. (I’m somehow convinced that a wicker container will make me hap pier.) I fall for the marketing schemes that tell me I’m one step closer to wellness if I buy passionfruit metabolism-boosting gummies. I’ve lost count of the times I’ve canceled plans with people for the purpose of caring for myself (really, I just didn’t want to leave the warmth of my own home and its abundance of snacks and ambient lighting).
We could read—all day, every day—about how consumerism has left society in sham bles and the world to rot. But what strikes home are the last words that Stauffer writes, that whatever we are trying to solve we are trying to solve solo. This raises the questions: can our practices of self-care sometimes make us feel more lonely? Has self-care become a side hustle for self-reliance?
In a 2021 survey from Morning Consult, 58% of American adults consider them selves lonely. Of that population, 24% expe rience sleep disorders. Surprisingly, among lonely adults, disorders involving sleep were more prevalent than substance abuse and
neurological disorders. People sleep better when they feel safe and protected. In this context, self-care lacks the ability to pro vide what’s really needed. It’s hard to feel cared for when you’re the only one looking out for you.
It makes sense that we would want to turn inward to ease our anxieties. Either we don’t want to burden others, we don’t think others will understand, or perhaps we just want to fix whatever is plaguing us on our own. And for a while, isolating in order to alleviate our angst might feel like the right thing to do, the thing that will allow us to heal, the thing that will be our saving grace. But this solitude simply leaves us alone with our problems. And to be alone without any voice but our own, with our penetrating, intrusive thoughts and debilitating doubts, is enough to keep anyone up at night. .....
In Zach Braff’s idiosyncratic indie film, Garden State, Andrew is depressed, estranged from his family, and grieving the recent death of his mother, whom he hasn’t seen in years. It’s safe to say he has a lot of issues to sort through and feelings to feel. But empathy and vulnerability aren’t in Andrew’s vocabulary—he’d much rather be alone, even if being alone leaves him feeling dazed and empty inside.
Enter: Sam (played by Natalie Portman— need I say more?). Sam is a compulsive liar, hamster owner, and original oddball. She isn’t afraid to ask blunt questions that poke at the hard exterior surrounding Andrew’s heart. After he’s been numb to the world for so long, their awkward and peculiar friendship is the thing that brings him out of his head. For the first time, he’s allowing
someone to care for him. For the first time in what feels like eons, he feels safe.
At the end of the movie, Andrew makes the decision to say goodbye to his hometown, leave the girl behind, and get on a plane (gotta love clichés). He needs to figure himself out, he thinks, maybe find a new psychiatrist, and focus on his health and wellness. He’s convinced that the best thing for him, and for Sam, is to work through his problems solo before he commits to the relationship.
Alone on the airplane, he has no one to talk to, no one who cares about him, and no one who even knows his name. He’s stuck in his head again as the world hums along and the familiar numbness begins to sink in. Is this really all there is?
The camera cuts to Sam, heartbroken and sobbing, in a telephone booth. Her tears are interrupted by the opening of the glass door, revealing a breathless Andrew, who mutters:
Remember that idea I had about working stuff out on my own and then finding you once I figured stuff out? … It’s dumb. It’s dumb. It’s an awful idea. And I’m not gonna do it, okay? ’Cause like you said, this is it. This is life. And I’m in love with you, Samantha. I think that’s the only thing I’ve ever been really sure of in my entire life. And I’m really messed up right now, and I got a whole lot of stuff I gotta work out. But I don’t want to waste any more of my life without you in it, okay?
Perhaps our relationships with others are more invaluable when it comes to self-care than Epsom salts and massage chairs. Perhaps what’s more important than burrito
blankets and hydrating facemasks is just allowing others to care for us as we care for them. We don’t have to do self-care before we free ourselves up to receive love.
When going into Gethsemane to pray, Jesus asked a few of his disciples to come with him. He was full of worry and sorrow, as the hour of his death drew closer. In his troubled spirit, Jesus wanted to be in the presence of friends—even friends he knew would later betray him.
Like Jesus, we too need the companion ship of those we love. We need someone to grasp our hands and pull us out of the abyss of our weary minds. Someone who can free us from the voices in our head that spew the lie that we must figure out all our ish on our own; the myth that tells us we can buy our way out of despair; the tale that promises we could be happier if we had clearer skin, silkier hair, or thinner arms.
Comfort movies and heated blankets make you feel nice and warm, but there’s only so many times you can hear Fezzik offer his precious peanuts in The Princess Bride
before you get too hot and have to turn up the A/C (metaphorically speaking). Unfor tunately, no amount of wellness products, self-care routines, or self-reflections can save us from our sadness, nor from our insecurities.
And of course, other people can be just as unreliable as face serums and vision boards. We’re human, after all—and humans can hurt us, betray us, fail us, or leave us. This may be perhaps the biggest reason why the lonely “industry” of self-care exists in the first place. The fact is that people are just as incapable of loving us as we are them.
But it’s also true that there is One who is more than capable of caring for us. Even when we feel we are in the Garden alone (with our so-called companions who have fallen asleep on us) we are nevertheless there with a reliable friend. Someone who will never hurt us, betray us, fail us, nor leave us. And because he knows exactly what it’s like to feel lonely and lost, he can comfort us better than even a tray of one hundred crab rangoons.
My nasal passages are a problem, have been for some time.
At the ENT, the doctor asked if what he did in March did any good. “I can’t tell,” I said. It was, however, unpleasant and costly.
He wants to rule out sleep apnea, so I got a little test, a questionnaire faded in its type by lots of copying and no updates over the years.
Do you fall asleep while driving? No. When you’re a passenger? No
Do you fall asleep during conversation, when watching t.v., waiting for your train to come? When you stand in line to vote? Eating a quesadilla?
Performing the act of love? No, no, no. My score was low,
assuaging my worry till the follow-up next month. What small, welcome mercy that respite from worry is, written for me by the nurse on a little card.
By Chris DavidsonIn Greek mythology the god of sleep, epony mously named Hypnos, is born from the gods of darkness and night. When the sun sets, Hypnos goes to work. With wings that emerge from the sides of his head, Hypnos flutters across the land, dispensing opiates and giving rest and refreshment to the weary; he vanquishes woes and confers peace of mind. Seneca, the first century Stoic philosopher and tutor of Emperor Nero, praised the god as the provider of “peace after wanderings, haven of life, day’s respite and night’s comrade.” But alongside Hypnos there was his twin brother: Thanatos, the god of death. While Hypnos flew around the world on his nocturnal vocation, Thana tos would dart from house to house, taking souls with him to the underworld. One twin was welcomed, the other feared.
Seneca believed Sleep and Death worked in tandem, two sides of the same coin. The god of sleep “comes alike to king and slave” to “compel the human race, trembling at
death, to prepare for unending night.” Just as everyone sleeps, so everyone dies. Our nightly ritual therefore anticipates our final rite. More broadly, Aristotle considered sleep to be the boundary between life and death, being and non-being. Greek language further blurred the lines, with sleep serving as a common metaphor for death, an indirect way to say that someone had died.
In a similar fashion, many of us today prefer to speak of death through metaphor and eu phemism. We might say someone has “passed away,” “lost their life,” or that “they’ve left us.” We circuitously talk around death to soften the blow, to obviate the discomfort, perhaps even denying death entirely by way of taboo.
Though ancient Greek speakers had a plethora of analogies for death, sleep was— by far—the most regularly used in the New Testament. But rather than reflecting cul tural or personal discomfort with death, or a desire to mute the tragedy of it, the sleep metaphor was chosen because of its rich theo logical implications. Perhaps oddly to us, death was euphemized not as an expression of denial but of hope.
In the ministry of Jesus, the linguistic coincidence between sleep and death proves to be crucial in two of his healings (Lazarus in John 11:1–44, and the daughter of Jai rus the synagogue leader in Mark 5:21–24, 35–43). In both scenes, Jesus is beckoned to the bedside of someone gravely ill. But in each case, Jesus is delayed—by the time he arrives, the person has already died. With perhaps a hint of accusation, Jesus is told that he is too late. He responds with an exhorta tion to believe and declares that the deceased is not dead, but asleep. In both instances, Jesus’ audience is more than confused by
his apparent loose grip on reality. It is plain to them that their beloved is, in fact, dead.
But in Jesus’ terms, Lazarus and Jairus’ daughter are “sleeping,” wordplay that fore shadows the upcoming miracle. They are not dead but waiting to be awoken, just as the prophet Daniel foreshadowed in the con clusion of his vision: “Your people will be delivered … Many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth will awaken” (Dan 12:1-2).
Meanwhile, in his epistles, the apostle Paul takes the metaphor of sleep and gives it a sig nificant theological twist. Though almost ev ery English translation makes no distinction between Paul’s literal and metaphorical references to death, parsing the two is illumi-
nating: his chosen language follows a curious pattern, one that can hardly be a coincidence.
Whenever Paul references the death of Jesus he does so with variations of the unequivocal terms (variations on thanatos or nekros, both of which imply a literal death). It is important to him that Jesus did not appear to die—he did not hold his breath long enough to fool the Romans. His heart in fact stopped beating; his brain neurons stopped firing. One should not confuse Jesus’ resurrection with waking from a particularly long nap. Along the same lines, saying that Jesus “fell asleep” for our sins, or that he “fell asleep” for the ungodly—well, suffice to say it doesn’t really get across the same point.
But when Paul uses the literal language of death for believers, he seems to mean it more abstractly. Believers “have died to the law” (Rom 7:4), or they are living in the world as though they are dead, yet living (2 Cor 6:9). Describing his life as an apostle, Paul declared that he dies daily (1 Cor 15:31). He uses the literal language of death to describe the death of Christians before their hearts stop beating and their neurons stop firing. Paul believes
that death must be experienced before death actually arrives. But it’s not some Stoic ac ceptance of death’s inevitability—that one must “come to terms” with Thanatos before he comes knocking on your door. No, the kind of death Paul has in mind is the death of the old self, crucified with Jesus, so that one may also share in the life of the risen Jesus (cf. Rom 6:5). Or as Paul succinctly declared, “I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who lives, but Christ who lives in me” (Gal 2:20).
This “death before death” then informs how Paul writes of the physical demise of believers. In these cases, Paul almost exclu sively uses the metaphor of sleep. He says that Jesus’ earliest followers have now fallen asleep (1 Cor 15:6); a widow is free to re marry after her husband has fallen asleep (1 Cor 7:39); and some have fallen asleep after eating the eucharist in an unworthy man ner (1 Cor 11:30). Writing of sleep in such mundane contexts suggests that the meta phor was commonplace for Paul, his go-to way of talking about the death of Christians.
But why is “sleep” Paul’s preferred lan-
guage here? His usage elsewhere arises pre cisely within debates over the resurrection, explaining how it’s possible that death is de feated and that Christians can still die. When members of the Thessalonian church begin to die, they urgently write to Paul, worried that these individuals will miss the boat when Jesus returns. Paul assures them that God will bring with him those who have fallen asleep They should not grieve over those who have fallen asleep, like the Gentiles, who have no hope (1 Thes 4:13-14).
A few years later, when the Corinthian church denies the possibility of any future resurrection of the dead, Paul retorts: “Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have fallen asleep” (1 Cor 15:20). If there is no resurrection from the dead, then “those also who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished” (15:18). Paul’s distinction be tween falling asleep in Christ and perishing signals that he holds death in two different categories. There is perishing, where death is the only end, and then there is sleep, a death that anticipates waking up: resurrection.
The broader logic here is striking. Jesus died and was then raised from the dead. Christians share in his victory over death, which trans
forms the loss of perishing into the hopeful ness of sleep. As the scholar Simon Gathercole notes in his short work, Defending Substitution, “there is an asymmetry or disparity be tween the kind of death that Christ died on the cross and the death that believers die at the end of their lives.” Strangely, Paul seems to think that even when believers die, they never actually die—they simply fall asleep.
When someone you love dies, it might seem bizarre to say they are not dead, but peacefully asleep. It might seem like a bald lie or a delusion, conflicting with the coro ner’s report and the open casket at the front of the church. It could appear to deny the harsh and irrevocable fact that Thanatos comes for everyone eventually. But that is precisely what Paul and Jesus do. Death is neither an inevitability nor a universal truth one must confront. The question to ask isn’t whether there is life after death, but if there is a morning after the night. The scriptures suggest there is. Just as the dark sky gives way to the dawn, so too will the dead in Christ arise. Believers who have died have fallen asleep for a time; they will awaken when the light of the world comes to stir them from their slumber.
I’ve been praying for a friend who might be nearer to death than either of us knows. Be cause he is an atheist, I have asked in my prayers if I should take the opportunity to say to him, “You know, regarding God, you could be wrong.” I can’t seem to let it go. In my med itative state I saw a vision of God the Father, bigger than a mountain, drawing into His embrace thousands of people who were fast asleep. I silently asked what this meant. The answer, whether real or imagined (I invite you to decide), was that everyone, no matter what their beliefs, is welcome in Heaven. Some may have chosen spiritual sleep as their modus operandi on earth, but when they die, they are given an opportunity to wake up to the experience of Heaven, or to simply keep napping. Either way, God’s got them.
This meditation got me thinking that no matter who we are or what we believe, God is in charge, especially in our sleep state,
which I like to think is another dimension of existence. If we don’t choose to listen during the day, perhaps He speaks to us at night, showing us mysterious images that we either cannot remember when we wake, or clumsily attempt to analyze. Our analyses rarely involve the idea that God has spoken to us or given us something to do. Often, we miss the point entirely. But occasionally, a dream affects us deeply.
In one such dream I sat at a picnic table across from two parents and four children. There was a tiny blue-eyed girl named Gre ta, to whom I said, “You are the cute one.” Shyly she nodded. Then there was Siobhan, an intense-looking girl with a rebellious vibe and a touch of genius in her dark eyes. I ob served, “And you’re the one in charge.” Her parents smiled and shook their heads no, but I kept my gaze on her and said, “Oh yes, you are.” She smirked with pleasure. Next was Manuel, a slight boy with sad eyes. I said, “You’re the sensitive one.” He nodded and searched my face for a sign of simpatico. Then he closed his eyes and telepathically sent me flashing images of starving children
and natural disasters. I wanted so much to ease his pain. The special phrase from Julian of Norwich came to mind: “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well,” but I couldn’t say this to him. I also somehow knew that I couldn’t help him. My heart aching, I moved on. The last kid, Frederick, very handsome, was ready for college. I said, “You’re the successful one.” He nodded aristocratically, enjoying the sin gular attention. I never did make eye con tact with the parents, but the pride pouring out of them was palpable. I woke up then, feeling full of emotions and thoughts that were difficult to organize, but it felt as if I had just met people who exist as surely as I do, in high color and emotional detail, with unique dispositions and names.
Many dreams are made up of impossible characters or strange moving patterns, and from these I wake up puzzled but dismissive. I realize that some dreams are a symptom of my mind cleaning out unneeded files; and nightmares, the baser, stray emotions that just need release.
Not this time. Like a piece of art that is neither beautiful nor ugly, but provoca tive, with visceral sensation and lingering thought, these people I “met” in another dimension continue to haunt me. Who are they, and why did I dream them? Each child impacted me uniquely, and even the quiet parents beckon me to think about them. I wondered if they represented people I al ready knew in real life, but I couldn’t match them up with anyone familiar.
Arriving at work one morning, the dream continued to nag me. I considered its main theme: I had recognized something beauti ful in each child, and they had received my observations gracefully (though I sensed the exchange with Manuel was incomplete, cast-
ing a humble shadow on my reverie). I de cided to try something with my coworkers. As each person came to me with an issue, regardless of whether it was business-related or personal, I tucked into our conversation words that recognized their talent or goodness. Their expressions of surprise and sometimes relief were priceless. The Holy Spirit was in my office that day. I’m not suggesting that this dream was absolutely a message or even that I’d gotten it right. But in reconsid ering it as a divine communication, some thing truly wonderful had occurred.
There’s a misty bridge between sleeping and wakefulness, with gradients of aware ness as we drop off or come to. In the twi light of sleep, I sometimes sense departed loved ones around me. They don’t say much, but their presence is comforting. One night as I drifted off I pictured the wing flaps of a small airplane being tested for flight, and flapped my feet in sync under the blanket. I think my father was having some fun with me. Not only had he been the pilot of a small airplane himself, but he used to marvel at my enormous Norwegian feet. I giggled like a little girl and felt just lovely as I melted into deep rest.
These funny moments in dreams offer a playfulness that we don’t normally expect in life. One time my oldest son, already a postgraduate and fast asleep on his back, sat bolt upright and said with a great deal of alarm, “Someone has to keep track of the cookies!” He gently fell back down onto his pillow and remembered nothing the next day. In another dream, he was tasked with improving the sales of greeting cards, and came up with the idea of including a leaf of romaine lettuce inside each one. This one he remembered and posted on social media to the amusement of hundreds of friends.
Smoke, 2021, charcoal on paper, by Stephanie Buer, © the artist, stephaniebuer.com.
The facility of our minds to write elaborate scripts in dreams raises the question, which side of our existence is reality? The sixteen earthly hours we spend clamoring for mon ey, love, food, entertainment, or perfection, or the other eight we give up involuntarily? Sometimes this lack of control bugs me. Through an irrational fear of missing out, I will often fight sleep. After work I eat dinner and watch a little TV with my housemate, then go to bed and watch more mindless drivel on my iPad. When I’ve obviously nod ded off and can no longer keep my eyes open, I struggle to watch anyway, turning a poten tially good rest into a long series of catnaps and frustrating rewinds. When I finally give up, I put on Aaron Sorkin’s The West Wing (the best show ever written for television) and burrow into my pillow. Because I have watched the entire series so many times, I know every line and have convinced myself that I sleep through it quite well. But in my more honest moments, I worry that down the road, when dementia kicks in, the only things I will remember are scenes from The West Wing. Regardless, I must finally concede that everything sleeps, even me. It is mysterious and a little unnerving. If I had been given the choice when Creation was happening, would I have included sleeping as a thing? No. I barely acknowledge it now. Nice dreams are one thing and, if we re member them, can even be fun. But night mares can be deeply disturbing. We must understand that very little of the imagery we see in our scariest dreams will ever materialize in our regular lives. I believe they are simply expressions of our subconscious mind releas ing the tensions and anxiety of our own fears and unresolved conflicts. I have woken up in a cold sweat at times, and can physically feel the relief upon discovering that it was “only
a bad dream” flooding my body with endor phins. Though stressful, I must admit that on some level I feel better after my brain takes out the trash. The thing that often eludes me is what specifically my dreams mean, whether they are “good” or “bad.” There are very wise people who can interpret dreams quite fittingly, but like daily newspapers, I don’t necessarily want to read them all!
No matter what our sleep realms con tain, our vulnerability during this part of the clock is absolute. In sleep we are like newborns, soft and small, unconsciously trusting that we will just rest now, and open our eyes again in the morning. How do we have such faith in this vast unknown? Or is it merely biology that forces the human mechanism to blank out for one-third of its life? Mysteries abound, but we are not equipped—or tasked—with solving any of them. Life could be simpler if we just got out of our own way.
One day I was sitting in my local mechanic’s shop waiting for my car to get fixed. The gruff patriarch of the place, an A-list baseball player who had made a fair show in his day, had died recently. My first encounter with him, many years ago as a broke single mother, involved a check I’d bounced for a repair. He was a bit mean about it despite my apology. Thoroughly embarrassed I returned with cash the same day to make good on the bill. Shaking his head in apparent surprise he showed me an envelope full of bounced checks that were years old, long uncollect ible. I told him, “You should throw those away, you’ll live longer,” and he laughed. From that point on we grew to like one an other very much. His family continues to run the place, as they have their whole lives. They’ve set up a glass case for their father’s gloves, bats, and other baseball memorabil-
ia, including a handsome photograph taken when he was young and happy. I was looking at this picture when I started to daydream, a thing that happens often, sleep deprived as I am from watching TV through my eyelids. I gradually felt peaceful, hyper-aware, and light as a feather all at the same time. Suddenly I had goosebumps as I said almost involuntarily, “Oh, you’re here?” To which the old man said, “Of course I’m here!” It was his tone of voice and his inflection that convinced me that he was, in fact, there. I sucked in my breath and whispered, “Hel lo!” Oh my, what diaphanous curtain sep arates us from the dead? Is it only our cor poreal form that limits our senses? Perhaps their idea of Heaven includes earth. May be we are asleep to the reality that earth in cludes Heaven, and we all sit together now in Heavenly places.
had the muscle strength to do), and now looking into a corner she suddenly giggled delightedly, like a much younger person, as if the funniest joke in all the world had just been told to her. Her expression said, “Oh, I see!” The nurse gasped and ran for help; I just stood there, shocked, fascinated and thoroughly useless in the face of this miracle. She quieted down then, and as the doctor examined her, she seemed to be ask ing something, but couldn’t speak. Short ly after this, she fell asleep again, only this time she died.
I used to be an aide in a nursing home, and took care of a lady named Pauline who was in her upper nineties and had not wo ken from sleep for years. She was fed and hydrated intravenously; it was my job to keep her clean, warm and dry. She had hor rific bedsores which the nurses attended to. She never made a sound when her dressings were changed. I felt sorry for her and her family, who faithfully visited despite her silence, and wondered why God did not bring her home.
One day while I was bathing her, she opened her eyes wide and stared up at the ceiling. Startled, I looked at the nurse who told me it was just a reflex, that it happened all the time and didn’t mean she was awake. I continued washing. Then she gently turned her head to the left (which she no longer
I will never forget Pauline. In my dark est hours, if I ever doubt the existence of God or the weirdness of His plan, or wor ry about the sheer scope of all that I don’t understand, I think of her. I feel sure that in her last moments here, she saw some thing so wonderfully funny it transcend ed her atrophied muscles, enabling her to open her eyes and laugh, not hysterically but with genuine, cognitive amusement. Perhaps her friends and lovers were toasting to her longevity while Jesus gave her a smile and a wink. I can’t even get close to the humor of what Pauline saw. It is not our privilege to know. But witnessing her death was an undeniable gift to those of us who were in her room that day. Her long sleep had ended, and now she was free and wide awake in Heaven.
This suggests to me that we’re getting things backwards. Life on earth is the dream state, and dreams, Creation’s method for helping us deal with living in this wild out post. Look at the outrageous creatures we have here, the catastrophic events we suffer through, our own industrial inventions we seem to require for life on this planet. For that matter, consider the planets, the sun and the moon, the infinite galaxies we can’t
even see! These are the stuff of dreams. But we don’t feel awed by it anymore. We’re too busy. We’re sleep-deprived. Did we look up at the sky today, even once? When we rise in the morning, we believe this is waking up. Scientifically speaking this is true. But looking at it spiritually, we tend to sleepwalk all day, and barely notice the magnificence that is the universe we occupy, or the fragile beauty of the beings with whom we share it.
God works mysteriously, but He is not elu sive. We receive Him best in the tiny spaces of time when we have willingly relinquished control over life, including cooperating with our own fatigue and going to sleep. Our pow er is imaginary to begin with (we can’t even keep track of the cookies), so our difficulty in giving it up is like a child clutching a toy. We receive God in every single unconscious breath! There is no choice in the matter, not even for those who would deny His existence.
Though we try to define our experiences
of birth, life, sleeping and death—secularly or otherwise—we can’t do it with any kind of precision. And it seems that the more we learn about living here, the less we understand. Science shines a beam on what is, but can never answer why anything exists. This inability to explain life keeps us spellbound and a little insecure. So we compartmentalize what we do understand and shelve the rest as “yet to be discovered.” After all of this hard work and confusion it seems to me that the easiest part of the entire experience of living life, other than sleep, is death—and I don’t mean the protracted horror of dying slowly. I mean the final instant of closing our eyes, lights out, The End. I once read somewhere that death is like taking off tight shoes. As a person with unusually large feet, this com forts me more than I can say.
As I imagine it, we effortlessly pass through to a different here when we die, and can choose to be awake or take a nap.
Sleep is finally optional. I’ll probably run around like a toddler who does not want that nap! If you buy my premise that earth is where we walk in sleep, with every gor geous thing that surrounds us, then ponder how much better it can be in the new here. I bet it’s spectacular—blindingly beautiful oceans, meadows, forests and mountains under skies full of stars too bright to be hold. I imagine friends and family who’ve passed this way before us—all looking so young and beautiful again—greeting us with hugs and kisses and chatting about all the amazing things they’ve been doing, eager to introduce us to new people they’ve met. I imagine the many mansions in which our Father, His Son and the Holy Spirit dwell, and the sumptuous feasts They provide. I see the mystical city where Mother Mary is conducting her choirs of angels, their songs so exquisite that we could die again in holy ecstasy. In this place where all are welcome, we can be and do anything that makes us happy, become our favorite version of who we are. We can eat and drink anything and never get fat. We can love everyone and nev
er get hurt. We will finally enter into the full awareness that our Father, who is the architect of everything we thought we un derstood, loves us unconditionally, with no performance reviews to defend or invoices to pay or clocks to watch. Time is no longer a thing. In the new perfection of our eternal present, we can go to the places where we used to live, visit the old gas station and say hello (and sometimes folks will sense we are there). We can check in on friends and fami ly who are grieving our absence and sit right down with them at the picnic table. Or we can go to the nursing home, hold the hand of a dying friend, perhaps whisper a funny joke in her ear, and stay with her until she wakes up here. That’s how it is when Love is all there is. And in the stunning moment when we make this discovery, it might even occur to us that that’s how it always could have been. We are Love, manifested by God.
It’s hard to believe and impossible to conceive. But nestled deep in the arms of the Holy Trinity, in Heaven where all things are possible, where our lives have always been, we wake up and begin again.
Now concerning the times and the seasons, brothers, you have no need to have anything written to you. For you yourselves are fully aware that the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night. While people are saying, “There is peace and security,” then sudden destruction will come upon them as labor pains come upon a pregnant woman, and they will not escape. But you are not in darkness, brothers, for that day to surprise you like a thief. For you are all children of light, children of the day. We are not of the night or of the darkness. So then let us not sleep, as others do, but let us keep awake and be sober. For those who sleep, sleep at night, and those who get drunk, are drunk at night. But since we belong to the day, let us be sober, having put on the breastplate of faith and love, and for a helmet the hope of salvation. For God has not destined us for wrath, but to obtain salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ, who died for us so that whether we are awake or asleep we might live with him. Therefore encourage one another and build one another up, just as you are doing. (1 Thessalonians 5:1-11)
Company Car, 2010, by McNair Evans from Confessions for a Son. © the artist and EUQINOM Gallery.
Today’s passage is pretty unsettling. It comes from 1 Thessalonians, one of the earliest and most eschatological letters written by the apostle Paul. By “eschatological” I mean that it has to do with the end of the world—the end times. As such, the epistle brims with darkness and the expectation of Christ’s imminent second coming. In the Church today, we read this passage right before Advent, right before we celebrate the light coming into the world.
Regardless of context, the picture Paul paints of life and what will happen is not one we would paint for ourselves. He tells us that the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night. He says that when people are talking about peace and security, sudden destruction will come upon them the same way that labor pains come upon a pregnant woman. There will be no escape. These are scary words—but also true ones. Security can be ripped from you in a heartbeat. Parents know that any day can end at the emergency room. Some preachers are fond of saying that all of us—whether we live in Hollywood or not—are only three bad days away from being a tabloid headline.
I was speaking to someone recently who had experienced just such a destruction— very much through his own engineering. A series of bad decisions came to light, costing him both his job and his marriage. The man in question, Tullian Tchividji an, wrote about it publicly, saying that with those two losses came a thousand other ones:
The loss of close friendships, the loss of credibility, the loss of security on my children’s faces, the loss of con fidence in God’s goodness, the loss of financial stability. Life went from feeling like a fairy tale one moment to feeling like a violent tragedy, the next. Overnight, everything was gone.
This sort of thing happens more than you’d think. Sometimes we’re complicit in the reversal, sometimes not. It could be an ac cident, a diagnosis, a natural disaster. And so Paul urges us to be awake rather than asleep, to be sober rather than intoxicated, to be on guard. It’s harder than it sounds. It’s so much easier to ignore the possibility of emergency.
We prefer to sleep through life. At least I do. And from what I can tell, most of us are walking around half-asleep, halfawake, in a state of constant drowsiness. I’m not just talking physically (though I’m not not talking physically). I mean, everyone I know is tired. Who of us couldn’t use a nap? Perhaps you beg to differ. Perhaps your life feels like anything but slumber. I never sleep, you say: life is all go, go, go, activity after ac tivity. Well, it could be that you’re someone for whom activity or work has become a form of sleep. Writing a couple of years ago in The Economist, the essayist, Ryan Avent tried to answer the question of why Americans lead the world in untaken vacation days, why we seem to prefer to work so hard. One of the things he proposed struck me: He said that “part of the reward” of workaholism is the relief that occurs when you “immerse your self in something all-consuming while oth er difficulties float by. The complexities of intellectual puzzles are nothing to those of emotional ones. Work is a wonderful refuge.”
Work, in other words, can serve as a dis traction from consciousness or loneliness or grief or vulnerability. It can be a means of imposing order on the everyday chaos of relating to another person or oneself. There is a security—a comfort—in this kind of head-down mentality.
What I’m trying to say is that when Paul talks about people being asleep, he’s talking about you and me. All of us have sedatives that we lean on in life—simply whatever it is that lulls us, whatever allows us to tune out the unpleasant stuff of life and gives us a sense of control over that which cannot be controlled. Our sedative of choice distracts
us from the core precariousness of life. It could be busyness. It could be buying things. It could be social media. Yes, even religion can be a sedative.
More dramatically, you hear people say that they feel like they slept through their children’s childhood, or they slept through their twenties: I don’t know where I was. I don’t know what I was doing, but I wasn’t present. Not really. Keeping one’s head down blocks out some of the fear that comes with being vulnerable in a world where disasters happen, but it also blocks out a lot of the love.
What, then, does it mean to be awake? When Paul urges us to keep awake, is he
asking that we be anxious? That we think constantly about how anything that can go wrong will go wrong? Clearly, that’s not it; his injunction is rooted in a deep, abiding faith in God. So, is he talking about wakefulness the way we do today, i.e., as self-awareness? Is he exhorting us to get in touch with how we’re affecting the world? To wake up to our bias, our privilege, our sin, or simply our feelings? All good ideas, no doubt, but not what Paul is talking about here.
The wakefulness he’s describing is a form of expectancy. Expectancy that Christ will return. And in the meantime, being awake to the fact that there is a God, and you’re not him. “Don’t get too comfortable in the world,” is what he’s saying. “And please, wake up from the nightmare that God is absent or impotent or against you somehow. Open your eyes to see the mercy of God, the pow er of God, the hand of God in and around you—in both the good and the bad.”
This state of mind (and spirit) sounds nice, but how does it actually come about? How do people wake up? Those who’ve logged late night hours on the highway know that it can be exceedingly difficult to stay awake sometimes. You’ve slapped yourself in the face, rolled the window down, pumped up the tunes, called everyone you know—and still, your head keeps nodding. Drowsiness overtakes a person; it feels like someone’s hands are physically on our eyelids.
Cases like these—where you cannot will yourself to stay awake—are instructive when it comes to spiritual drowsiness. Just like with highway hypnosis, it could be that we need something more than willpower to make us alert. Something stronger than caffeine, even. What we need is the jarring vibration of the road’s shoulder. We need a good wake-up call.
What was the last real wakeup call you received? Something that woke you up to reality, both the good and the bad?1 Lord knows, life can sometimes feel like a nev er-ending series of wakeup calls. And there are some things you can’t sleep through, no matter how hard you might wish you could. Death and divorce and war, for example. At its best, I think church can provide a more compassionate form of wakeup call.
Alas, life will wake you up. God will wake you up. It is inevitable. Yet perhaps Paul’s choice of words isn’t arbitrary when he refers to sudden destruction being akin to “labor pains.” I’ll return to my friend Tullian, who lost everything in a heartbeat.
Looking back on his crisis, he admitted something remarkable:
My losses did not simply usher in grief and shame and regret. They ushered in a severe identity crisis. Without these things that I’d come to depend on to make me feel safe and valuable, I no longer knew who I was. I had lost my very self. It was at that moment that a friend said to me something I’ll never forget. He said, “The purpose behind the suffering you’re going through now is to kick you into a new freedom from false definitions of who you are.”
The disaster—self-engineered as it was— transferred this man, at least for that week, from a false sense of security into a true sense of security. Another word for which
1. I’m reminded of a joke. There’s a guy in a hotel room, and he calls down to the front desk and says, “Hi, I’m in room 326, and I’d like to order a wakeup call.” And the person at the desk says, “Okay, none of your coworkers take you seriously, and no one is fooled by that comb over.” Heh.
is freedom. Thankfully, the freedom that comes from God extends beyond this life and our present circumstances, whatever they may be. It is not a one-time thing, nor is it necessarily premised on our ability to keep our eyes open when the road gets long. Paul gets at this later in the same passage. He says, “For God has destined us not for wrath, but for obtaining salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ who died for us so that whether we are awake or asleep, we may live with him.”
If this sermon is a wakeup call, so be it. I hope you’ll join me in a few moments when we get down on our knees and accept the love of God in prayer. But if not, then hear me when I say that, no matter what you’re
dealing with right now, God is awake to you. He is awake to your exhaustion and your fear. And he is awake in love, forgiving you your endless addiction to sedatives. This is the same God whose own destruction births new life for those stuck in cycles of darkness and pain and slumber. You are safe, in other words, not because you are able to will yourself to stay awake, or because you are strong or in control, but because God is. Not because you are blameless, but be cause God is. Not because you can redeem your circumstances, but because God in Je sus already has. That is his promise to you right now: Whatever darkness may come— and it will come—you, my friend, belong to the light.
MISSY ANDREWS is the author of My Divine Comedy: A Mother’s Homeschooling Journey, Wild Bells: A Literary Advent, and Teaching the Classics: A Socratic Method for Literary Education. She lives with her hus band in the mountains of Eastern Washing ton in a house that remembers her six grown kids—and the bear that once climbed in her kitchen window.
LAURA BONDARCHUK is a frazzled book keeper by day, and by night she would rather write than rest, but can never find her glass es (they’re on her head). Instead, and with great resignation, she will put on a video of thunderstorm sounds to help her sleep, un til her next shift at work where she pretends her job is important. Calling herself a writer by day is the dream.
TODD BREWER is the managing editor of the Mockingbird website. He graduat ed from Durham University in 2015 with a Ph.D. in New Testament Studies, and his thesis, “Hermeneutics and Early Christian Gospels,” is under contract with Mohr Sie beck. He co-edited the Cambridge Compan ion to the Gospels, 2nd ed.
SUSAN COWGER is the author of a poet ry collection, Slender Warble, and a chap book, Scarab Hiding. Founder and editor emeritus of Rock & Sling, her most recent publications include Ekphrastic Review , Windhover, Perspectives, Crux, McGuffin, Presence, and In A Strange Land: Introducing Ten Kingdom Poets
SARAH CONDON never sleeps better than she did at her grandmother’s house in 1989. Those Dolly-esque cream colored ruffled curtains only let the good light in.
CHRIS DAVIDSON is associate professor of english at Biola University and editor of The Curator. His essays and poetry have ap peared in several journals and anthologies, including Monster Verse: Poems Human and Inhuman; Orange County: A Literary Field Guide; and Why To These Rocks: 50 Years of Poems from the Community of Writers. He has published two chapbooks — Poems (Canvas Shop Press, 2012) and Easy Meal (Califor nios Press, 2020).
JOSHUA EDWARDS is the author of The Double Lamp of Solitude (Rising Tide Projects), Imperial Nostalgias (Ugly Duckling), and several other books, and he translated María Baranda’s Ficticia (Shearsman) and co-translated (with Lynn Xu) Lao Yang’s Pee Poems (Circumference). He teaches at Pratt Institute and Columbia University.
LAURA HUFF HILEMAN is a certified Dream Worker and Spiritual Director who has pretty good evidence that God is talking in her sleep. She facilitates online dream groups and personal dreamwork through her practice, Fire by Night Dreamwork, and teaches at The Haden Institute. Current projects include working up the nerve to kayak the Nolichucky River near her home in Jonesborough, TN.
ANNE LE DRESSAY’S poetry has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. She has published two chapbooks, This Body That I Live In and Woman Dreams and two books, Sleep is a Country and Old Winter She is retired and teaches memoir writing in Ottawa.
HANNAH LOCK is an illustrator whose clients include Politico, the New York Times and the Brontë Parsonage Museum. She has been known to fall asleep with her head in a good book.
KATHLEEN NORRIS is the author of Jour ney: New & Selected Poems, and nonfiction books including Dakota, The Cloister Walk, and Acedia & Me. She’s the co-founder of SoulTelegram, a bi-weekly e-newsletter on cinema and literature.
GREG PAUL is a pastor and member, as well as a founder, of the Sanctuary commu nity in Toronto. Greg is the author of the recently released Resurrecting Religion and several other award-winning books: Simply Open; Close Enough to Hear God Breathe; The Twenty-Piece Shuffle; and God In The Alley. He is married to Maggie; between them they have seven children and a growing brood of grandchildren.
BEN SELF spends most of his days shov ing knowledge down the throats of his 8th grade civics students. But in his free time he also enjoys collecting things—children’s books, fossils, vinyl records, etc.—while always maintaining that he is definitely not a
hoarder and has all of this under control. As a new dad, his latest hobby is hoarding and coveting sleep like Gollum with the One Ring. “We wants it, we needs it…!”
STEPHEN SEXTON’S first book, If All the World and Love Were Young, was the winner of the Forward Prize for Best First Collection in 2019 and the Shine / Strong Award for Best First Collection. He has been awarded the E.M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, and was the win ner of the National Poetry Competition. Cheryl’s Destinies was published in 2021.
CALI YEE is the assistant editor of The Mockingbird and mbird.com. She loves falling asleep to National Treasure and Ratatouille on the couch before bed. Her “nappitizer” isn’t conducive for a good night’s rest, yet she continues to do it at least once a week.
DAVID ZAHL is the director of Mocking bird, editor-in-chief of the Mockingbird website, and co-host of The Mockingcast. In 2019, he was diagnosed with mild sleep ap nea, which translates to “he’s a middle-aged man who snores a lot” and means he now uses a CPAP machine at night. His sons think it makes him look like Darth Vader. But he and his wife both think that who ever invented that thing deserves a Nobel Peace Prize.
