SLEEP & RESURRECTION

In this article I reappropriate the language of sleep in relation to death and to resurrection.

Christians are already awake. Baptism awakens us to a new reality: a splash of cold water awakens us to resurrection living. The letter to the Ephesians contains a wakeup call, ‘Sleeper, awake! Rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you’. (Ephesians 5.14). NT Wright suggests that this quotation is from an early Christian song or poem.  If that is the case then sleep imagery has been embedded in Christian thought from the very beginning. Sleeping, waking and rising from the dead are intimately connected and sleep, as a metaphor, itself becomes exhausted. This is the rising to the new and glorious day of each day of creation and, ‘the day which the Lord hath made, we will rejoice and be glad in it’ (Psalm 118.24).

Sleep through resurrection eyes: the death of a euphemism

Anthony Thiselton explores 1 Corinthians 15 with the Pauline construal of the ‘Christological heart’ as the key to unlocking Christian language of resurrection, which is being in Christ. So, he notes:

The metaphor of sleep for death on the part of believers who are “in Christ” was important in the earliest Christian faith, for the logical “grammar” of sleep (koimao) carries with it the expectation of awaking to a new dawn and a new day, ie the expectation of resurrection and the gift of renewed life and vigor [sic] (cf v. 51). It also anticipates the triumphant hope of the removal of the sting (to kentron), v. 55) of death when God through Christ has dealt with sin (v. 56).[i]

This ‘grammar of sleep’ is important. Typically the problem with using sleep as euphemism for death is that it cheapens what death is about and denies its finality. And yet this is what the resurrection of Jesus Christ does: death is conquered and loses its sting. Thistelton cites Oscar Cullmann and Wolfhart Pannenberg who have explored this ‘profound image’:

Cullmann compares the “wrongness” of death in pre-Christian biblical tradition with the deceptive optimism concerning death as “release” from the body in such Greek thinkers as Socrates. Only after the horror of Christ’s death can death “lose its sting”. Hence while “with sublime calm Socrates drinks the hemlock…Jesus…cries, ‘My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?’ (Mark 15:37)….This is not ‘death as a friend’. This is death in all its frightful horror….’the last enemy’ of God (Cullmann’s italics). Because it is God’s enemy it separates us from God. But once a person has grasped “the horror of death” it becomes possible to join Paul in the hymn of victory: ‘Death is swallowed up – in victory’ (1 Corinthians 15.54-55). Hence, if a Christian encounters death as an experience which has lost its sting, “the most usual image for Paul is: ‘they are asleep’….Death has lost its horror. Pannenberg points out that the logic of ‘waking’ is entailed in the notion of sleep: it promises resurrection: “The familiar experience of being awakened and rising from sleep serves as a parable for the completely unknown destiny expected for the dead”[ii]

As Thiselton says of the metaphor of sleep, ‘[it] regularly denotes the experience of death for Christians as pregnant with hope and becomes a standard term’.

It is out of resurrection that the eschatological dimension of sleep is illustrated in this language of the early Christians, specifically Paul’s view of eschatological imminence. This turns on the phrase in 1 Corinthians 15.51, pantes hou koimethesometha. Thiselton highlights its three possible meanings:

either (i) none of us shall sleep, i.e., the Parousia will intervene before any believer dies; or (ii) not all of us shall (as some of us shall) sleep i.e., the Parousia will come in the lifetime of some of us; or (iii) Not all of us humans shall sleep, i.e., the Parousia will interrupt human history at some point sooner or later (time unspecified).[iii]

Sleep as a resurrection metaphor has the capacity to generate this eschatological language. The last trumpet suggests both a signal of proclamation but also a wakeup call. It also connects this eschatological language to the image of the watchman who is deliberately awake whilst others sleep. Christ is the watchman par excellence who slept in the tomb is raised and by incorporation into his life shares with the Father, in the power of the Spirit, the capacity to raise all people. It is only if Christ has not been raised from the dead that those who have fallen asleep (or, in the New Revised Standard Version ‘died’) have truly perished, never to waken. That is the sleep of Sheol.

Dead or sleeping?

We saw above that Jesus’ declaration that Lazarus had fallen asleep and needed to be awakened caused confusion amongst the disciples. Paul’s treatment of death, sleep and resurrection in 1 Thessalonians and 1 Corinthians 15 informs how we may read John 11 and Luke 8 - Lazarus and the raising of Jairus’ daughter - with a Christological heart.

And yet a problem remains. In Wright’s work on resurrection sleep is a recurrent metaphor for death, and waking for resurrection. Wright suggests that in these two passages, ‘The disciples’ reaction, taking “sleep” literally, shows that for John at least, as for Mark in the story of Jairus’ daughter, this was not so habitual metaphor for death as to leave no room for explanation’. There is ambiguity in the gospels around sleep and death. This is illustrated in the misunderstandings of the disciples and the mocking of Jairus’ family. The problem is illustrated as an issue in biblical translation: how should the words koimao and katheudo be translated? They both mean ‘to sleep’ and are used across the New Testament.

In an apparent effort to de-euphemise the word ‘sleep’ the New Revised Standard Version translates koimao as it appears in 1 Corinthians 15 as ‘though some have died’ rather than ‘some have fallen asleep’. A footnote confirms that the Greek is ‘fallen asleep’. This sucks out the meaning from a key metaphor and glosses over the interplay of the narrative in the accounts of Lazarus and Jairus’ daughter that leads the hearers and reader to understand that these events are connected to the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

In the case of Jairus’ daughter the girl’s sleep has been another occasion, in which God’s resurrection power in Jesus has been demonstrated. The reaction to this is scornful because they knew she was dead. As Evans notes, ‘[h]ere death is not spoken of as sleep but is contrasted with it - “she is not dead but is dead” would be nonsense’. The verbs used in the New Testament for resurrection, egeirein, ‘to raise up’ and anistanai, ‘to get up’ can also both mean ‘to awake out of sleep’. The wordplay is used in Ephesians 5 and John 11.11-13. Wright comments that:

The mention of ‘sleep’ leads the mind naturally to the description of the girl’s ‘awakening’. Jesus’ word of command (Mark and Luke only) is egeire, ‘arise’, which in Mark translates the Aramaic word talitha koum. When the girl awakens, the verb used by Mark and Luke is aneste, and in Matthew is egerthe.[iv]

The key point in the use of sleep is that a Christian will ‘certainly think of Jesus’ own resurrection as a larger and greater instance of the same sort of astonishing power’. Wright notes that no one in the story expects resurrection in the way that a post-resurrection gospel writer or reader knows it, for them Jarius’ daughter, as Lazarus, will die again someday; the evangelists ‘end up telling a story about Jesus going through death and out the other side’.

The defining text for Barth in his consideration of sleep within his Church Dogmatics is from the Raising of Lazarus as Jesus says to Martha, ‘I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live’ (John 11.25). Barth says that in this text the New Testament’s conviction is that, ‘the “death” in death can be abolished’. As the story of Lazarus demonstrates, Barth notes, this achievement is not within human control but is ‘always the result of God’s extraordinary intervention’. Barth sees the final revelation in the coming again of Christ, ‘in which the exaltation that has already occurred in Jesus Christ will be made manifest’. This will apply to the dead as much as to the living (citing 1 Thessalonians 4.16f), hence why the language of sleep is so pregnant with meaning since they sleep ‘in Christ’ (1 Corinthians 15.18) and ‘in Jesus’ (1 Thessalonians 4.14). ‘Even though they die [they] will live’: ‘death’ says Barth, ‘now wears a guise in which we can look it in the face’.

The King slept

The confident adoption of sleep in relation to death and resurrection and in an eschatological sense, as a generative metaphor and not as a linguistic masking agent is shown in post-resurrection writing of which two examples will be given.

Luke’s account of the death of Stephen (Acts 7.54-end) illustrates this confidence in the sleep metaphor. Stephen dies during a highly traumatic lynching which bears features of the Passion of Christ. Luke Timothy Johnson notes these distinct echoes not least in the phrase, ‘when he said this, he died’, the words used of the death Jesus on the cross in Luke 23.46. The significant difference is that the word for ‘died’, (or ‘expired, breathe one’s last) is replaced with the word for ‘falling asleep’. The benignity of falling asleep sits at odds with a violent death. So appropriating sleep as an image of that sort of death is hard. Barth seeks to distinguish being asleep from falling asleep. This leads him to say that since Jesus has won the victory, ‘all the [New Testament Christians] had to do was to fall asleep’. It is hard to conceive of Stephen’s death being one in which all he had to do was fall asleep, and yet, Barth’s suggests, ‘we really look to Jesus Christ, who, as “the first fruits of them that slept’…robbed death of its sting and brought life and immortality to light even when they were in extremis, so that this death could not be anything but a falling asleep’.

This is about looking at someone who has ‘fallen asleep’ and seeing that person as delivered from death even in their dying. Thus for Barth the early Christians never sought to ask what it is like to be dead or speculating on an intermediate state but rather holding on to the confession, ‘I am the resurrection and the life’, and, he says, ‘in the light of this hope they came to see in the visible process of dying the last conclusive symptom of a life surrounded by the peace of God’. So the move from euphemism to metaphor is completed, a metaphor freighted with the Biblical witness of those who have already fallen asleep, the proclamation that God gives his beloved rest and watches over his people unceasingly and sealed in the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.

The second example is from an anonymous ‘Ancient Paschal Homily’ for Holy Saturday. In it Jesus is described as the ‘King who sleeps’ following his death, and because of this, ‘the earth was in terror and was still, because God slept in the flesh and raised up those who were sleeping from the ages. God has died in the flesh, and the underworld has trembled.’ The homily imagines how Christ, the New Adam, now in the regions of death goes to seek out the first Adam, ‘And grasping his hand he raises him up, saying: ‘Awake, O sleeper, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give you light.’ The use of sleep as a resurrection metaphor is striking in the call to awaken and arise: ‘Come forth, and those in darkness: Have light, and those who sleep: Rise’.

Even the crucifixion, a traumatic death as in the stoning of Stephen, is seen in the light of the sleep metaphor, `I slept on the cross and a sword pierced my side, for you, who slept in paradise and brought forth Eve from your side. My side healed the pain of your side; my sleep will release you from your sleep in Hades.’ This is vivid and immediate language and reclaims sleep as a metaphor and does not side-line it as a pastorally unsafe or damaging.

Depictions of the resurrection of Jesus Christ in art juxtapose the vigorous waking Jesus with sleeping guards in various poses of discomfort around the tomb. The guards are sleeping because they see neither the power of Christ nor the ‘capacious metaphor’ of sleep. Ratzinger captures what has happened with sleep, that sleep is ‘a portmanteau term for being dead – a term which Christians filled with their own content, namely the idea of (conscious) life with the Lord’.

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[i] Thistelton, A.C. (2000) The First Epistle to the Corinthians. William B Eerdmans: Grand Rapids, MI. 1220.

[ii] Thiselton, The First Epistle to the Corinthians. 603-604.

[iii] Thiselton, The First Letter to the Corinthians. 1293.

[iv] Wright, N. T. (2003) The Resurrection of the Son of God. London: SPCK. 404-5.

GUILDFORD CATHEDRAL LENT TALK: FAITH THROUGH ART - SLEEP

Guildford Cathedral Lent Talks - Faith through Art: Sleep

This talk given as part of a series on Thursday 15th March

Guildford Cathedral Icon - The Jesse Tree

+ In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

I begin with an image that is on the north wall of this chapel. At its centre is Jesus Christ, enthroned on the lap of his mother. Around him in the Jesses Tree are his ancestors of the line of Jesse.

Jesse is lying prone, fast asleep, yet something creative and generative is coming from him even while he sleeps.

Adam Sleeping - Medieval Woodcut

This evokes the image of Adam placed into a deep sleep, during which God removes his rib and creates woman. The message, gender issues aside, is that sleep is generative and creative.

It is often said that if you want to know what Christians believe then look at what they pray, as well as what they do. This evening the focus has been on sleep and what Christians believe and think about it. I have laboured over a book called Theosomnia, which means literally ‘God-sleep’ or hallowed sleep.

I could have spared myself a lot of work and words if I had just suggested that you read the Office of Compline, which is going to be sung shortly to close this evening, in which we find a Christian theology of sleep. Compline distils and encapsulates a Christian approach to sleep. It is what I have called a ‘theosomniac practice’, in other words something we do to hallow and commit our sleep to God.

The preparation element of Compline takes us to confession and seeking God’s watchful protection. There is something about the coming of night and preparation for sleep that heightens our awareness of our own precariousness, fragility and vulnerability; in others words we are mortal in the face of the dire warning of the first letter of Peter, ‘your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour’. If you are asleep it’s hard to see, let alone fight off, a prowling lion.

Hence we confess our sins, praying that death will not rush upon us if we fall asleep impenitent, and also asking God’s protection, mindful of the verse of the psalm ‘The Lord who watches over Israel shall neither slumber nor sleep’, confident that ‘The Lord himself is thy keeper’ (Psalm 121.4,5).

But the Compline office hymn suggests something more. It is not just physical threats that come during sleep, but spiritual ones too:

            From all ill dream defend our eyes,

            From nightly fears and fantasies;

Tread underfoot our ghostly foe,

That no pollution we may know.

So then we move into the Word of God. The psalms are the backbone of Compline, as they are morning and evening prayer, although typically not each psalm is sung every night.

Psalm 91 continues the theme of protection and God’s watchfulness, even when we are asleep, ‘Whoso dwelleth under the defence of the Most high…He shall defend thee under the shadow of his wings, thou shalt be safe under his feathers. For he shall give his angels charge over thee’. This reflects the profound sense of vulnerability that we feel around sleep, hence the desire to commit our sleep into God’s hands.

Psalm 4 is more explicit about the act of sleeping: ‘I will lay me down in peace’ is a reference to sleep, and we have the recapitulation of the protection theme, ‘for it is thou Lord, only, that makest me dwell in safety’.

Psalm 134 is an interesting one because it draws on a long tradition which spans religions but is attested to in the Old Testament especially if you think of Samuel trying to sleep in the temple. ‘Ye that stand by night in the house of the Lord, even in the courts of the house of our God’: the act of sleeping in the Temple seems a strange thing to do. Its point was proximity to God ‘both waking and sleeping’. It hallowed one’s whole life to God and doesn’t see a discontinuity in our sleeping and waking.

The Gospel Canticle proper to Compline is the Nunc Dimittis. This is where we begin to touch the association of sleep and mortality. Sleep is in some senses a ‘little death’, from which we trust that we will awaken. Simeon’s words speak of his own approach to death, for his eyes have seen God’s salvation before they shut in the eternal sleep of death.

The antiphon, or refrain, weaves together other themes, ‘Preserve us, O Lord while waking, and guard us while sleeping, that awake we may watch with Christ, and asleep we may rest in peace’. ‘Rest in peace’ is said of the dead as of the living.

The Conclusion of Compline draws together theosomniac themes:

V         We will lay us down and take our rest

R         For it is thou, lord, only that makest us dwell in safety

V         Abide with us, O Lord.

R         For it is toward evening and the day is far spent

V         As the watchmen look for the morning,

R         So do we look for thee, O Christ

V         Come with the dawning of the day

R         And make thyself known in the breaking of bread

So if you want to find the enacted practice of a theosomniac, one who entrusts their sleep to God, who sleeps trusting in God, who watches and wakes expectantly, then Compline opens it all up, along with our evening hymns and bedtime prayers (which time doesn’t allow me to explore further tonight).

But tonight is also about ‘Faith through Art’. A fortnight ago I reflected on the ‘Sleeping Jesus’ embodying peace in the midst of the storm on the Sea of Galilee. Tonight I want to focus on the awake Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, contrasted this time with the disciples sleeping: could you not stay awake just one hour?

Les Vierges Sages (The Wise Virgins) James Tissot, 1894

“As the bridegroom was delayed, all of them became drowsy and slept. But at midnight there was a shout, ‘Look, here is the bridegroom! Come out to meet him’. Then all those bridesmaids got up and trimmed their lamps.  The foolish said to the wise, Give us some of your oil, for our lamps are going out’” (Matthew 25.5, 6)

Les Vierges Sages (The Wise Virgins) James Tissot, 1894

The parable of the wise and foolish bridesmaids invites us to reflect on preparation, watchfulness and attention. Numerous parables end with Jesus saying, ‘therefore I say, stay awake’. This is to prepare his disciples both for his forthcoming passion and also to be alert to the signs and things of God in the world. For much of my life I thought the problem was the foolish bridesmaids was not just their failure to buy oil but that they fell asleep whilst the others stayed awake watching. I was wrong. The point is that the wise – as in James Tissot’s painting - still fall asleep; they are human, but they wake expectantly, ready for action. As the post-communion prayer of Advent Sunday puts it:

O Lord our God,

make us watchful and keep us faithful

as we await the coming of your Son our Lord;

that, when he shall appear,

he may not find us sleeping in sin

but active in his service

and joyful in his praise;

through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Vigilance is a state of mind and spirit, as much as a physical posture. Gethsemane takes us to the heart of the passion, for in it the disciples sleep inattentively. Asleep they cannot be the sentinels who cry that the enemy is coming. The sentinel usually eschews sleep in order that others can sleep. The lanterns in this scene are not held by the disciples, but by Judas and the temple police coming to arrest Jesus.

I find it hard to think of any other figures in art so completely out for the count as Peter, James and John in Mantegna’s Agony in the Garden (c.1455). Their prone postures contrast with Jesus’ rapt and fixed attention on what is before him: the cross, which is held up in the painting by the angels in the top left hand corner.

In one sense, with them sleeping Jesus is not bound by the pressure of staying to face the cross. His sleeping disciples, like the sleeping guards past whom Paul walks in the Acts of the Apostles, would not see him if he walked out of Gethsemane beyond and over the hills to Bethany and beyond. Yet he stayed to face the cross, his arrest and to take their place in what would unfold.

‘Jesus came to them a third time and said to them, “Are you still sleeping and taking your rest? Enough! The hour has come; the Son of Man is betrayed into the hands of sinners. Get up, let us be going”’. (Mark 14.41, 2)

In two weeks’ time, on Maundy Thursday, this chapel becomes Gethsemane for us. In it the presence of Jesus Christ in the Blessed Sacrament, the consecrated bread, rests in our midst. We are invited to stay awake, to watch and to pray. Being in Gethsemane is a profound place to be. As the theologian Nicholas Lash puts it:

A Christian account of the ‘experiences that matter most’ should be derived from a consideration of the ways in which Jesus came to bear the responsibility of his mission and, especially, of how it went with him in Gethsemane.[1]

The Christ Child sleeping on a cross in a landscape,
after Reni, Adam von Bartsch

This image of the Christ Child sleeping on a cross in a landscape is benignly shocking and arresting. The infant we are used to seeing ‘asleep on the hay’ in the Bethlehem manger is now asleep on the instrument of his death. This takes us to the heart of Good Friday as Christ dies on the cross. Yet his sleep is not the eternal sleep of antiquity, nor less a sleep as opposed to death itself, this sleep is suggestive of Paul’s words, ‘death where is thy sting, grave where is thy victory?’, and ‘we shall not all sleep, but we shall all be raised’.

In this a dreadful paradox is held together: life and death, sleeping and wakefulness. The legend next to the cross in the woodcut holds a quote from the Song of Songs, ‘Ego dormio cor meum vigilate: I sleep, yet my heart wakes’ (Song of Songs 5.2).

The Dormition of the Mother of God

This image this evening is one of a scene known in Eastern Christianity as the Dormition of the Mother of God, from dormio ‘to sleep’ otherwise known as the Falling Asleep of the Mother of God. It reflects the conviction that in the life of the sanctified, for those who abide in Christ, like Mary, death is benign. This is why Compline traditionally ends with an anthem in honour of the Mother of God. It further connects our death bed and our birth bed, and suggests that word of Thomas Ken’s hymn,

Teach me, O Lord, that I may dread

The grave, as little as my bed

At the coming of sleep we entrust ourselves into the hands of God and pray that we will sleep in peace ready to be raised to the life of the new day, as Mary in her Dormition was swept up, like Elijah (2 Kings 2.1-12), to the very presence of God. Hence why the Church for centuries has associated sleep with the maternal care of Mary and as the icon shows Jesus Christ, watching over the daughter of Israel, for he will neither slumber nor sleep.

The Benedictine monk, Dom David Steindl-Rast describes the monastic practice of Compline at his community:

At the very end of Compline, it has become a custom for the Abbot to bless the whole community by sprinkling them with holy water, a sort of evening dew. The monks then file into the Lady Chapel for a final hymn to Mary. This hymn changes with the seasons. For most of the year it is Salve Regina; at other times, there are Marian antiphons like the Regina Coeli or the Alma Redemptoris Mater, jewels of chant.

This custom has always reminded me of children being tucked up in bed at the end of the day by their mother. It brings a smile to my face to think of all those monks sweetly singing at day’s end to their Mother, opening themselves to the anima realm of their psyche, and entrusting themselves to the infinite darkness as maternal. Thus the part of the monastery indelibly linked for me with Compline is the Lady Chapel, where we return to our spiritual womb to be reborn again next morning.[2]

The words of a French philosopher, Jean-Luc Nancy, could almost have been written as a meditation to be placed on Mary lips as she gazed upon the Christ-Child, the Bread of Life, in whom all our hungers are satisfied:

The Christ Child sleeping on a cross - Anon

"Tomorrow morning, God willing, you will awake again: sleep my child, sleep my soul, sleep my world, sleep my love, sleep my little one, the child will sleep soon, already he’s sleeping, look he goes to sleep with the first night of the world, the divine child who plays with the dice of the universe and of all its centuries, he sleeps with every night that rocks anew, tirelessly the repetition of the first, of the initial nocturnal lullaby where the first day fell asleep with the first sleep".[3]

As we prepare now to pray Compline, and to lay ourselves down to sleep let us close in a prayer before sleep with the words of St Alphonsus Liguori (1696-1787) entrusting us to the care of Jesus Christ, Blessed Mary and the angels.

Jesus Christ my God, I adore you and thank you for all the graces you have given me this day. I offer you my sleep and all the moments of this night, and I ask you to keep me from sin. I put myself within your sacred side and under the mantle of our Lady. Let your holy angels stand about me and keep me in peace. And let your blessing be upon me. Amen.

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[1] Lash, Nicholas,  Easter in Ordinary: Reflections on Human Experience and the Knowledge of God University of Notre Dame Press, Virginia, 1988. p 251

[2] David Steindl-Rast and Sharon Lebell, Music of Silence: A Sacred Journey Through the Hours of the Day. (Berkeley CA: Ulysees Press, 1998, 2002), 109.

[3] Jean-Luc Nancy, The Fall of Sleep, 32-33.

THE NIGHT IS COME, LIKE TO THE DAY - SLEEP IN SIR THOMAS BROWNE 'RELIGIO MEDICI

Sir Thomas Browne

Sir Thomas Browne (1605-1682). Browne was a noted polymath and churchman and in his Religio Medici (1643), wrote a meditation on sleep that has an autobiographical and confessional sense to it.[i] The fact that Browne reflects on sleep in prayer illustrates the point that sleep is well articulated in Christian understanding in prayer, liturgy and hymnody which, along with the Bible, are the source material for a systematic theology of sleep.

Browne’s prayer (see below) is an example of a non-systematic theology of sleep that is expressed doxologically: doctrinal and Biblical references woven into prayer. It entrusts him to sleep, mindful of its pitfalls and dangers. Throughout it he references scripture and his human experience and says of sleep that it is, ‘the dormative I take to bedward’ and continues, ‘I need no other laudnam than [prayer] to make me sleep’. Browne, who we can now call a theosomniac, writes that on going to bed, ‘truly ‘tis a fit time for devotion; and therefore I cannot lay my head without an orison, and take my farewell in a colloquy with God’.

That captures the impulse to see the boundary between being awake and being asleep as a hallowed time and a time, as Browne puts it, ‘after which I close mine eyes in security, content to take my leave of the sun and sleep unto the Resurrection’. Praying before sleep, in the expectation of waking in the morning, is what Browne calls, ‘an half adieu unto the world’. Sleep is the, ‘moderating point between life and death’, yet in life and in death, the Christian conviction is whilst we sleep, in life or death, the believer’s heart wakes to God.

Browne references many of the themes that will be explored in greater depth in subsequent chapters. His meditation maps out the terrain of a Christian theology of sleep and the doctrinal markers with which we will engage. A brief analysis of the prayer will serve as an introduction to our exploration in two ways. First, there are Biblical references to which he is directly alluding. This is not an exhaustive list of Biblical references to sleep, but is a good starter. Secondly, Browne raises some fundamental theological themes: sin, seeing sleep as possibly a consequence of humanity’s fallen state; watchfulness; the abandon and vulnerability of the sleeping individual; sleep as a regenerative state, both physically and spiritually; sleep and mortality; and the sense that this worldly human condition exists in ‘drowsy days’. 

In a rich set of images Browne’s prayer exposes contradictions and paradoxes in how sleep is treated in the Bible. Importantly though he sets sleep within a doctrine of creation. The opening lines locate sleep in the creative act of God who calls light into being ‘Let there be light’ (Genesis 1.3) and frames it by day and night ‘The night is come, like to the day, / depart not Thou, great GOD, away’. There is an allusion to Christ, the Light of the World, the one who shines in the darkness, and that the darkness has not overcome (John 1.5). Given that sleep is predominantly a darkness-based activity it could be an opportunity to collude with the darkness, and recognising this Browne asks that his own sinfulness does not ‘Eclipse the lustre of Thy light’.

Darkness alludes to sinfulness in Scripture. It contrasts the children of the darkness with the children of the day.  A more lasting concern of traditional Christian approaches to the night and sleep are less about sins of commission and rather more sins of omission. Sleep represents a time of loss of control represented in the possibility that ‘dreams my head infest’. Loss of personal control raises the question of who is in control of the sleeper. Traditionally the most likely suspect is Satan: prayers that ask for protection from ‘nightly fears and fantasies’ usually have Satan in mind, or, as Browne puts it, ‘guard me ‘gainst those watchful foes, whose eyes are open while mine close’. The sense of menace is clear.

It is not that sleep is sinful per se, rather that the opportunity for sin comes through, for example, erotic dreams or sloth in the form of a surfeit of sleep. This is mitigated by the way in which sleep is prepared for. Compline opens with confession as the fall of darkness heightens the acute awareness of sin and failings throughout the past day that can be carried into the long, dark night. As Browne prays that the lustrous light of God is not eclipsed by ‘my sins, black as the night’.

Compline prepares the Christian for the profound vulnerability and abandon of sleep (the state that the evolutionary biologists cannot comprehend). Weaving together both the sense of vulnerability and God’s watchfulness, Browne pleads, ‘Thou whose nature cannot sleep, / on my temples sentry keep’. In that Browne is clearly alluding to the death of Sisera at the hands of Jael who took a hammer and drove a tent peg through his temple because, ‘he was lying fast asleep from weariness’ (Judges 4.21).

The theological assertion of the watchfulness of God - ‘Thou whose nature cannot sleep’ – derives from Psalm 127, ‘The Lord who watches over Israel shall neither slumber nor sleep’, yet equally Psalm 44 implies that God really can sleep, ‘Up, Lord, why sleepest thou, wilt thou be absent from us forever’ (Psalm 44.23). Elsewhere God is described as being aroused from sleep (78.65). Nevertheless, the conviction that God watches over the sleeper is enduringly significant. It assumes a relationship between the Creator and the creature: ‘keep still in my horizon; for to me the sun makes not the day, but Thee’. There is a sense that the watcher and the watched over have a mutual eye on each other.

Keeping watchful is not simply what God ‘does’ when a person sleeps. The believer is called to keep watch too. Sleep, as already noted, is represented both as a time of inattention and deep attention to God. Attentive sleep is primarily shown by Browne in sleep open to the possibility of dreams, ‘make my sleep a holy trance, that I may, my rest being wrought, awake into some holy thought’. Some of the literature about dreams is highly speculative and perhaps over imaginative - and it is not the purpose of this book to analyse dreams - nevertheless it would be counter to Biblical witness and human experience to dismiss the impact and power of dreams.

Icon of Jacob sleeping
and dreaming

It is not unknown that dreams, or at the very least the act of ‘sleeping on it’ can influence a decision or course of action, not unlike Joseph who woke and arose from sleep and led Mary and Jesus to safety in Egypt, having been warned in a dream of Herod’s intentions (Mathew 2.13). In that regard sleep can be the arena for theophany, a manifestation of the divine presence. Sleep is integral to the relationship between mortals and God in God’s self-communication in dreams and nocturnal revelation. That in itself is an ambiguous experience, such as Jacob experienced at Bethel (Genesis 28.10-22) ‘Let no dreams my head infest, but such as Jacob’s temples blest’. We can note that not all dreams are benign or decisive in the Bible. For example, the dreams of Saul are very unsettling and his sleep disturbed as a consequence.

Sleep can be a fearful time, especially when elusive or disturbed. There is a deeper, perhaps connected fear, which is often articulated with regard to the relationship between sleep and mortality. The notion of loss of control connects sleep with death, when all is relinquished in a time when not even dreams will happen, because sleep anticipates death, ‘sleep is a death; O make me try, / by sleeping, what it is to die; / and as gently lay my head / on my grave, as now my bed’. What if, like Sisera, I never wake again: am I prepared? Sleep also relates to the fear of a ‘sudden death’ because it means dying unprepared.

Alongside the positive imagery of light, these fears of darkness, night, sleep and associations with death gives the context to liturgical practices such as the Lucinarium and traditional prayers before bed, both for children and adults. The anticipation of death is also, for the Christian disciple, the anticipation of resurrection, ‘however I rest, great GOD, let me / awake again at last with Thee; / and thus assur'd, behold I lie / securely, or to awake or die’. In the reference to waking again Browne refers directly to sleep and the resurrection and the Christian hope that the believer will be awakened on the Last Day.

Browne speaks of a time when he will ‘never / Sleep again but wake for ever’. That reference alerts us to the eschatological dimension of sleep and the nature of time. The eschatological parables of the Kingdom often have the refrain ‘stay awake’, as does the account of Gethsemane, and sleep is an integral feature.  For example, both the attentive and inattentive character of sleep is deployed as a motif in the case of the sleeping bridesmaids who miss the arrival of the bridegroom, with all its messianic overtones (Matthew 25.1-13).

When exploring sleep it is easy to focus upon the physical act of falling asleep, the phases of sleep and what it signifies and represents. However a theology of sleep is incomplete without the flipside of the wakeful life of the day or at the very least how one wakes, and how sleep has prepared for that. For Christian theology if sleeping speaks of death and mortality, then waking says resurrection. Again Browne captures this,  ‘These are my drowsie days; in vain / I do not wake to sleep again: / O come that hour, when I shall never / sleep again, but wake for ever’. The theosomniac has to be mindful of waking as well as sleeping since sleep delivers waking, and vice versa, a virtuous circle. In other words the theosomniac does not simply focus on sleep, but rejoices in the day as a gift which then makes sense of the entrusting of the self to sleep.

The night is come, like to the day,

Depart not Thou, great GOD, away.

Let not my sins, black as the night,

Eclipse the lustre of Thy light:

Keep still in my Horizon; for to me

The Sun makes not the day, but Thee.

Thou, Whose nature cannot sleep,

On my temples Centry keep;

Guard me 'gainst those watchful foes,

Whose eyes are open while mine close.

Let no dreams my head infest,

But such as Jacob's temples blest.

While I do rest, my Soul advance;

Make my sleep a holy trance;

That I may, my rest being wrought,

Awake into some holy thought;

And with as active vigour run

My course, as doth the nimble Sun.

Sleep is a death; O make me try,

By sleeping, what it is to die;

And as gently lay my head

On my grave, as now my bed.

However I rest, great GOD, let me

Awake again at last with Thee;

And thus assur'd, behold I lie

Securely, or to awake or die.

These are my drowsie days; in vain

I do not wake to sleep again:

O come that hour, when I shall never

Sleep again, but wake for ever.

Thomas Browne. Religio Medici.

© Andrew Bishop, 2018

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[i] Thomas Browne. Religio Medici. Edited by John Winney. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963).

‘I COMMUNE WITH MY HEART IN THE NIGHT’

This piece comprises excerpts of notes that I made after staying at a convent on retreat during which I rose in the night, at 2.30 a.m., to watch and pray. This represented an intentional disruption of sleep to watch and pray.

‘I sleep, yet my heart wakes’ (Song of Songs 5.2)

Something I have found to be a source of great comfort to those who cannot sleep is for them to know that they are being prayed for. As I wrote in my journal during that retreat:

Yet so many [other people] are awake too: all those suffering from the distress of war, the displaced; those in perils; travellers. Such a comprehensive list made me more aware, as I prayed, of the diversity of life and human society and its needs. Waking in the night opens up new vistas of prayer. Is it always sleep we need, or is it prayer? My inconvenience, albeit intentional, of waking is nothing compared to those at a death bed; identifying a dead body at the morgue; sitting on their bed contemplating not God, but contemplating the ending of their life. I prayed for the sleeping, working, those lying awake, and those tempted to sin: drug dealing, burgling, deceiving, ‘sleeping’ with someone in their bed by lust or force. I had the joy of praying for those being born, for new mothers and midwives.

This expresses the solidarity of prayer with all who go to that familiar yet deeply strange place, the place we call sleep.

And so I wrote:

The alarm went off. I woke. I felt refreshingly alert. I had gone to sleep early, straight after compline, having already prepared the place where I would pray. It was at a prie dieu in the other room. There was a crucifix, an icon and a candle. I had set out a prayer stool with the order of service and an intercessions list.

I made my way from my bedroom to where I would pray, in the small amount of light that seeped through from the bedside lamp. It was not pitch black, but dark enough that when I struck the match to light the candle the flash of light flared and momentarily lit up the room. Lighten our darkness we beseech thee, O Lord. Breaking sleep broke the darkness with the created, and inadequate, light of the candle. The uncreated light of Christ shines in the darkness.

I was intensely aware of my body, which had switched from the depths of sleep into a quite different mode. I felt almost more prepared than normal. The posture helped, i.e. the prayer stool, and I had made a point of wearing a cross around my neck. Take up your cross daily and follow me...

The ‘tea-light’ candle needed lifting up like a lantern.  So I lifted it up on a saucer. The candle did not light the whole room. It cast an inconvenient shadow and had to be in exactly the right position to illuminate the order of service. The candle placed by the icon on the top of the prie dieu was insufficient for reading the order of service. Indeed, as soon as I got to elements I knew by heart I put the candle down: Your word is a lantern to my feet and a light upon my path (Psalm 119.105).

Whilst I was aware of my body, the impact of the words was considerable. Phrases referring to light, darkness, sleep, night etc. were predictably, perhaps, ringing with connections, but also familiar texts in a new setting, context, were very powerful. The Trisagion [holy God, holy and strong, holy and immortal] made the very floor tremble, and was deeply stirring to my body that was moving from deep sleep. This bodily awareness made St Patrick’s Breastplate touch me in a new way. It moved from head to heart: Christ be with me (in the darkness), Christ within me…Christ beside me (as I pray with you ‘beside’ me in my bed)…Christ in quiet, Christ in danger (whose danger? Mine or his? He is with me in danger, but I was with him in the darkness of the night in which he was betrayed. But I had been a sleeping disciple prior to waking. I was too weak, too late to bed with me in his danger, like Peter I trailed in late).

On rising from sleep, we fall down before you. That was exactly it! As was You have roused me, Lord, from my bed and sleep…I had been roused from my bed... In the darkness the light, poor as it was, felt more searching than I have known before: You have searched me out and known me, You know my sitting down and rising (Psalm 139.1) In the darkness you see me more clearly, if that is possible, or, at least, I see more clearly that you are with me. This is my meditation in the watches of the night.

I read Psalm 3, the psalm of someone waking in adversity. As I was waking up I wondered what a waking/sleeping 24/7 world would make of what I was doing, how many there are who say, ‘There is no help for you in your God (Psalm 3.2). Stephen Hawking had said on the television the previous day that belief in the afterlife was a ‘fairy story for people afraid of the dark’.[i] He combined two strands of psalm 3, ridicule and the night.

I lie down and sleep and rise again, because the Lord sustains me (Psalm 3.5). Yes, that night I lay down, I rose up again with the benefit of the iPhone alarm. But, waking, deliberately, in the night raised bigger questions than in the morning. After all, in the morning I can rejoice in the gift of the new day and get on with it. At night I am going to lie back down on my bed and seek sleep. Where had I been when I was asleep, unconscious, and ‘dead to the world’? I was not there. I was not waking to breathe, pump blood, digest, perspire etc. but I was doing it. Where was I? What is it, then, that sustains me? …the Lord sustains me…waking and sleeping. Just as the seed grows whilst the farmer worries, sleeps and rises, so I continue to live and change.

If sleep anticipates death at all then I face it confident that in the life of the world to come the Lord sustains me. Since, as Paul says, nothing, not even death, can separate us from the love of God (Romans 8.38, 39).

The psalm also led me into the Paschal Mystery of the Exodus. Rise up, O Lord; set me free, O my God (Psalm 3.7). The plea that the Lord will be awake to my cry and, by the Holy Spirit, free me into all the truth. How the Spirit does that exceeds the expectation of the psalmist. Yes, regrettably, enemies are struck, drowned, no less, in the Red Sea. The people moved and escaped by night, led by the pillar of fire. My Night Prayer was a pale shadow of the vigils of Maundy Thursday and the Triduum but centred on God, and so I knew afresh, in the night, deliverance belongs to the Lord, I could claim his blessing (Psalm 3.8)…

A special prayer to me concluded the intercession: ‘Keep watch, dear Lord…and give your angels charge over those who sleep…’ And then mindful of God’s great mercy, the Kyries. The final collect took me back to the eternal beginning, Let there be light. I had lit my candle some ten minutes before, but by rising in the dead of night had felt the pulse of another rhythm throbbing in the world. This was the rhythm of day and night, morning and evening, inaugurated by the Creator, Logos and Spirit, which brooded over the waters in the beginning and whispered, Let there be light. And there was light (Genesis 1.3)

In that light I returned to bed. Hold thou thy cross before my closing eyes. I sleep, but my heart wakes.

© Andrew Bishop, 2018

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[i] ‘Dara O Briain meets Stephen Hawking’ 12^th June 2015, accessed 15^th June, 2015. http:www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p02tjndb accessed 15^th June, 2015.