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