The Mockingbird | Sleep Preview

Sometimes I lie awake at night, and I ask, “Where have I gone wrong?” en a voice says to me, “ is is going to take more than one night.”

— Charlie Brown (Charles M. Schulz)

SLEEP

Photograph by Mohammad Metri / Unsplash

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

OFFICE

100 West Jefferson Street Charlottesville, VA 22902

PHONE: 434.293.2347 x 103 FAX: 434.977.1227 EMAIL: magazine@mbird.com

e Mockingbird is a nonpro t magazine that seeks to connect the message of God’s grace with the concerns of everyday life. Our sta believes that grace, by its nature, is dynamic, unmerited, and expansive; we hope the range of voices in this issue re ects 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.

For more, visit our website, www.mbird.com.

A four-issue subscription is $60. To subscribe to e Mockingbird, sign up at www.mbird.com/shop or by sending a check to our address. All monthly supporters of Mockingbird receive a complimentary subscription.

Fall 2022

Cover: Zachary in Priest Guesthouse in Salzburg by Navot Miller.

illustrations by Hannah Lock.

The Night Shift

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 eld? I guess sleep is now so complicated we need an expert to teach us how. If I seem sarcastic, it’s not because I nd sleeping easy; I just don’t see it as something to master. It seems more like something that masters. No matter how hard we ght to stave it o (or bring it on), eventually our eyelids droop, and our minds wander o 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. e 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 gure 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.” is 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 o 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 ght; 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 e ort of our own. In Walker’s terms, “Sleep provides overnight therapy… sleep will take di cult, 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: “ e Lord will ght 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 nd 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 e 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.”

is 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 o er you rest even when you’re restless and, when the windows are dark, the hope of dawn. — CJG

from the Pulpit

By Greg Paul

Sleeping in Church

When Sanctuary Is Safe

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.

However, 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 con dence 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 camou age—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. e slightly stu y 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 sopori c 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 o

knob on the end with which he could rap the noggin of a dozing parishioner. e rigor of that expression of Christian faith re ected 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 o cer 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 bene t 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. e tragic and un speakably sordid list of popular Christian leaders, organizations, and megachurches re vealed as purveyors of spiritual, emotional, nancial, gender and especially sexual be trayal and oppression grows by the day. e 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-

Now I Lay Me…

Flannery O’Connor and the Midnight Scaries

By Missy Andrews

struggle with sleep from time to time.

II’m told it’s common in mid-life. I’d like to believe this problem is age speci c, but after raising six kids, I doubt it. Any parent of young children will con rm 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? e 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 oreau wrote “to be awake is to be alive,” he had some child in mind. Of course, oreau 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.

e poet Dylan omas 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-justi cation 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? e social pecking order in her mid-century, Southern town further complicates these questions, distracting Ruby with its complex hierarchy of race, nancial 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. is, 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 nds 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

Jessica Hines,

Ornate Tiger Moths and Bats , 2021, aquatint etching and acrylic, by Julia Lucey, julialucey.com.

&A with Tish Harrison Warren

Praying in the Night

The book begins in darkness—under the uorescent 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 su ering 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.” Speci cally, 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 su ering, pity the a icted, 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

By Kathleen Norris

Sleep Stories

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 su ering dreadful nightmares when they nally man aged to drift o . 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 nishing 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 a liated 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. is can manifest as callous indi erence, 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 erce woman and magni cent 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.

e piece did contain some good stories, so I nally wrote something fancy about narrative as methodology, and that su ced.

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. ey were parts of myself I was discarding, and I needed to let them go.

Writers often have an intense and di 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 speci c 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 nd it nudging me out of sleep, with a speci c suggestion about how to improve a line, or delete one, or add something new. When I was nishing e 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. e next night I would sleep for seven or eight hours. is went on for

Photograph by Meg Birnbaum from the ongoing series Little Sorrow, Little Joys © the artist. megbirnbaum.com.

No Rest for the Working

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 o ce. Especially with the pandem ic-prompted uptick in remote jobs, many of us nd 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.”

e 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

By Cali Yee

When Self-Care Won’t Save You

n 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. e expression is materially de ned 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 signi cantly 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. e market involved any consumer products or services pertaining to mindfulness, tness, beauty, personal care, vitamins, and lifestyle tracking apps. Of the wellness spending, 70% went toward products. With the continued rise of social media in uencers 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 o 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 x 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 a icted 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 rst take care of ourselves. Yet too often what we under stand to be self-care becomes just another way we grasp for control.

e 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 x, right? Binge-watching TV, listening to true crime podcasts, or lathering on an exfoli-

Glittery Veil,” 2020, acrylic on canvas, by Ariel Dannielle. © the artist, byaridannielle.com.

THE SICKNESS & HEALTH ISSUE