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.