The Gift of Sleep

Church of the Incarnation

July 25, 2010

Acts 20:7-12

We live in a culture that has trouble sleeping.  Sleeping pill prescriptions are way up.  Medical experts see this widespread insomnia as the result of a society that is “over worked.”  An article in the NYT yesterday chronicled the rise of married persons sleeping not just in separate beds but in separate bedrooms.  Homes are now being built with two master suites!  We crave a restful, uninterrupted night of sleep - and if you’re going to snore, or breathe on me, or stick a knee in my back, I’m getting my own bedroom!  Marketers are cashing in, selling us sleeping pills, special pillows, memory foam mattresses, and feng shui guides on how to decorate your bedroom.

We spend a third of our lives asleep.  Our question today is whether our sleep is connected to our spiritual lives.  Can our habits and patterns of sleep connect us to God, or are they largely irrelevant?  Does the Xan faith teach us anything new or interesting about the significance of sleep, or is it largely interested in stuff we do when we’re awake?

I propose that sleep is connected to our spirituality because sleep is a gift God gives to us, and can be received as such.  You don’t need to be overly religious to get what I mean here by gift.  Ask anyone who has gotten too little sleep - a mother with young children, a person working a double-shift, someone with leg aches or insomnia, a mortician on call at night, a nurse on third shift, a laborer exhausted by a day’s work - ask these people whether they can make sense of sleep as a gift, and I think they will confirm such an experience, even if they choose different language.  

So if sleep is a gift from God and not an irrelevant, taken for granted part of our lives, then our sleep can be a site of rich spirituality, of interesting questions, of exploration and discovery.  Our habits of getting ready for sleep, for sleeping, dreaming, and waking into a new day can become rich with potential for practices that open us to God and God’s grace.

The Bible is filled with people who are asleep.  All kinds of interesting things happen to them while they’re asleep.  Our text for today from Acts 20 is one of my favorites.  The meaning is clear, God kills people who sleep during services! Sometimes our need for sleep is simply overpowering.  Fall asleep in public, and you might snore, slobber, fart, or fall out a window.  I wish I knew more about this infamous Eutyches.  Had he been hard at work in the sun all day?  Did he have a young child, or a sick child, the night before?  Had he stayed out too late with his friends the night before?  Luke writes that Paul talked until midnight since he was leaving the next morning.  Maybe Eutyches heard Paul saying the same thing for the third time and just checked out mentally.  So come back to our question, how are we to connect sleep and spirituality?

Connecting Sleep and Spirituality Negatively

Perhaps sleep is connected to spirituality in a negative way.  I have in mind here both a set of passages of Scripture as well as a certain strain of the monastic tradition. Both these streams of faith agree that sleep is connected to a life with God, but it is relevant mainly for its negative functions - sleep is dangerous, a temptation, a sign of laziness, and an obstacle to a vibrant life of faith.  Sleep is primarily an enemy you should try to conquer if you want to love God above all else.

Let me take Scripture first.  Bad things can happen to you when you sleep.  Adam gets a rib surgically removed when he sleeps.  Sisera fell asleep during battle and got a stake driven through his skull.  Sampson fell asleep on Delilah’s lap and got his superhero hair cut off and his eyes gouged out.  Better known, of course, are the drowsy disciples, who are napping when they should have been keeping watch with Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane.  Listen to these warnings from Proverbs:

How long will you lie there, you sluggard?  When will you get up from your sleep?  A little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to rest - and poverty will come on you like a bandit and scarcity like an armed man (Prov. 6:9-11).  This is the anthem of American striving and workaholism.  Put together the dullard disciples sleeping and Proverbs’ picture of the sleeper as a lazy, no-good-for-work welfare recipient, and I think I’m beginning to understand why some people, my father included, pride themselves on never having taken a nap.

Now let’s leave Scripture for a minute and look to the rigorous asceticism of some of Egyptian monks of the fourth and fifth centuries.  These monks were very clear: sleep is a distraction from the love of God.  You read very little in their writings of the practical benefits of sleep.  They don’t say much about what a blessing it is to get a good night’s rest.  They don’t want a good night’s rest - they want to love God above all else, even more than sleep.  So fault them if you will - and they are a little bit crazy.  But they did not necessarily “hate their bodies” as we’re often told.  They just wanted to subordinate bodily pleasures like sleep to the higher calling to pursue matters of the soul, or purity of heart, or the kingdom of God.  I’d like a little of that to rub off on me!

You increase your chances of spiritual progress by depriving yourself of sleep, or at least refusing to sleep comfortably.  One monastery limited the monks to five hours a night.  Another went lower, three or four hours were sufficient.  Abba Arsenuis of Scetis eventually won the “who can sleep the least” contest.  In his monastery, one hour of sleep just before daybreak was plenty for a monk with robust faith!!  Sleep was an undesirable activity that was to be endured but not enjoyed - it had little value for the spiritual life.  Two extreme forms of ascetical practices were to sleep on rocks or to suspend oneself by ropes the entire night.  A far more common practice was to stand while sleeping or to sleep on the ground without bedding or pillow.  One champion of sleeplessness, Abba Bessarion, stood upright in a thorn bush without sleeping for 14 days and nights.  Note that the ideal goal for these monks was a state of sleeplessness.  What they settled for were all kinds of vigils as attempts to forestall sleep as much as possible.  

And so in their noble and weirdly inspiring quest to love God above all else, they enacted a kind of pride.  They were frustrated by the limits of fragile, vulnerable human bodies which need to sleep.  And so they developed a religious life that pitted the body’s pleasure and health and well being against care for the soul.  We’re in the exact opposite position, culturally speaking.  We tend to our bodies with almost no limits to our pleasure, and neglect matters of the soul.  If we do limit our sleep, it’s usually not because we want to sing and pray with others.  It’s because we want to get ahead, check the markets, answer a few emails.  

Connecting Sleep and Spirituality Positively

Can we imagine a spirituality where the body’s health and pleasure is not pitted against progress in the love of God?  Can our sleep be an opportunity to make progress in the faith?  Here are three ways of moving forward.

1. Spirituality and the Body

Getting a good night’s rest is a deep pleasure, and should be enjoyed and received as such.  It is one of the simplest ways of caring for the health and well-being of our bodies.  To live as an embodied person is to live within limits.  There is a limited time span allotted to our lives.  And there are the limited allotments of energy each day.  We wake, we work, we wear out, we lie down and go to sleep.  To get too little sleep - either because we are too busy entertaining ourselves to go to bed or because we wake so early to maximize productivity - may be a sign of sinfulness in us -- a refusal to live within the good creaturely limits God has given us with our bodies.

Sleep researchers admit there’s much we don’t know about sleep and its functions.  They have studied the sleep of all kinds of different animals to illumine the function of human sleep.  Bats sleep 20 hours, giraffes sleep 3 or 4.  Strangely, some birds, fish, and reptiles sleep one hemisphere of the brain at a time - enabling the animal to stay aware of threats, to fly while asleep, or to surface for air.  For humans, we know that newborns require about 18 hours of sleep per day, adults about 7.  We know that we all have a circadian clock that regulates our sleep patterns, controlling body temperature and the release of enzymes that make us feel sleepy and that close off our sense perception.  That same circadian clock reverses those chemical processes and wakes us up in the morning.  A good night’s sleep renews our bodies in several ways.  It functions in the healing of wounds, the immune system, and the secretion of growth hormones.

A recent article in the NYT on current neuroscience states, “Scientists have been trying to determine why people need sleep for more than 100 years.  They have not learned much more than what every new parent quickly finds out: sleep loss makes you more reckless, more emotionally fragile, less able to concentrate and almost certainly more vulnerable to infection.”  Scientists agree now that the sleeping brain is not a blank screen, but a secretive form of intelligence that comes out at night to work and play.  The sleeping brain organizes sense perceptions and long-term memory.  It enables pattern recognition - helping us learn a language or play chess.  Sleep is crucial for learning motor tasks - musicians playing an instrument or athletes playing a sport all get better while sleeping.  

If sleep is God’s gift that functions to renew and restore the body, the mind, memory, and learning, it need not be seen as an enemy to conquer.  Sleep is a profound good, one of the pleasures associated with living in the world God has created.

2. Spirituality and Rest

Often we find it difficult to let go of our list of tasks for the next day.  We have trouble sleeping because our minds are racing too fast and we can’t slow it down.  We worry about things left undone.  Researchers have found that the most common tone for dreams, across cultures, is that of anxiety.  Even in our sleep, we are processing our worries about performance, whether we can deliver or whether we will be made to look like a fool.  We like to think of ourselves as active, energetic, people who work hard and work efficiently, people who get things done.  This is one of our favorite ways of relating to God.  This is healthy, so far as it goes, because it enables a spirituality of cooperating with God.

 Yet we also relate to God in our sleep and our rest.  The biblical language of Sabbath and rest is certainly broader than the act of sleeping.  But sleeping is an important feature of rest.  Our circadian rhythms keep us in tune with the broader rhythms of the planets and the rest of creation.  Waking and sleeping invites us into a daily liturgy of paying attention to God.  We wake, work, fail, and find forgiveness, yield to sleep and trust that God can deal with all we’ve left undone.  And we start over again the next morning.  God gives us rest each day.

Every day, we go to sleep knowing there are many things left undone.  Sleep is God’s invitation to rest even though there’s more to do.  Every week, same thing, and God invites us into Sabbath rest for one day.  And at the end of life, there will be many things left undone, and God invites us into a final, merciful, gracious rest.  The gift of sleep and rest is God’s manifesto against constant striving and unlimited productivity.  

While we sleep, many good things happen without us.  Our brains and bodies renew themselves.  The flowers and crops grow, the earth spins and circles.  And God continues to bless and nourish and sustain the world without us.  Our sleep, at its best, can be a celebration that all does not depend on our work.

3. Spirituality and Dreams

I wish we had time for all of us to share our most bizarre dreams.  We humans are wired to dream.  We do it all the time.  We spend more than 6 years of our lives dreaming.  That’s more time than we spend getting a college degree.  For centuries, we humans have been open to ecstatic visions and illuminating revelations from God in our dreams.  The Bible is full of these kinds of stories.  Many major figures have dreams in which God appears to them or speaks to them.  For a little over a century, since Freud, we have been interpreting our dreams in psychological terms - in this sense dreams are the return of the desires we repress in our conscious life.  And now for just a few decades, we have learned to interpret our dreams scientifically - with various kinds of brain scans.  Some scientists see their findings about neuron firings as dethroning earlier Freudian and religious interpretations of dreams, but I see no reason to think the earlier interpretations false.  I see no reason why God could not speak to us in dreams and visions, why God could not communicate in and through the unconscious mind.

The reason we don’t reflect more on the significance of our dreams is pretty simple: we don’t wake up in the middle of the night to do so.  Most human communities, for most of human history, has done exactly that.  A scholar named Roger Ekirch published a book in 2005 called At Day’s Close, Night in Times Past.  His central argument is that patterns of human sleep in premodern or preindustrial society was strikingly different than our sleep patterns now.  Before the modern period, humans experience “segmented” sleep (as many wild animals do).  Here’s the explanation: Before artificial light enabled us to stay up, stay out, keep working, or entertaining ourselves after dark, humans experienced 12 to 14 hours of darkness.  In sleep studies that replicate those conditions, human subjects eventually came to practice segmented sleep.  They first lay awake in bed for two hours, slept for four, awakened again for two or three hours, and fell back asleep for four hours before finally awakening.  So there were two periods of sleep separated by a period of wakefulness that like an altered state of consciousness.  That period of first sleep often ends with vivid dreams.  Thus persons woke from first sleep with vivid dreams, could remember them in detail, and could contemplate them in the darkness.

Referring to this period of wakefulness after first sleep, Erkich writes: “Families rose to urinate, smoke tobacco, and even visit close neighbors.  Many others made love, prayed, and reflected on their dreams, a significant source of solace and self-awareness.”  One simple spiritual practice to take up would be to pay attention to your dreams and what they might mean.

Conclusion:

To receive the gift of sleep is one way of receiving all that God has to offer.  It is a way of receiving yourself - as the finite, fragile, prone-to-exhaustion creature you are, unable to work without regular periods of rest, unable to keep yourself alive forever.  But to receive the gift of sleep is also to receive God’s gift of himself - in the face of Jesus Christ and in the church, and in the middle of your life and heart as that mysterious presence that renews and sustains you.  God is the One who wakes you each morning into the freshness of a new day.  Until he doesn’t.  And then . . . we wake into Mystery.

To live the life of faith centered on Jesus Christ is to belong to a community amazed at God’s lavish and excessive love for us.  We respond by gathering up all that we can of our lives and offering it back to God as praise.  So we thank God for the gift of sleep when it comes, for dreams and visions when they come.  Perhaps today we have found yet one more little area of our lives that is a gift, and that can be offered back to God in praise.