Thoughts On Sleeping

This past week, Bettyann and I were on our annual pilgrimage of celebrating with Amy, Jason, Sarah, and Brayden, Christmas!  Some years ago there is a little deli I found that make marvelous bagel sandwiches and frequent when I’m in the area.  While slowly enjoying my bagel with Taylor ham, cheese and egg with mayo along with rich coffee, I grabbed a much crumpled, stained and mangled news paper.  The first section I looked at was the op-eds. A seemingly out of place essay brought this particular morning’s routine to an introspective mode. It was a short article, though it seemed out of place even there. It did not suggest a refutable opinion, or a thought to stir action, but a silent picture of my frail existence—a quiet look at sleep-needing humans. The writer described the nightly scene on a commuter train, after a workday has been mentally laid aside, and one “can see pajamas in homebound eyes.” The author’s conclusion was as unassuming as the passengers he described: “As long as I’ve been riding trains into New York—some 25 years by now—I’m still struck by the collective intimacy of a passenger car full of sleeping strangers.”

It was for me a picture worth adding to this; my journal of personal thoughts. Something in this scene; that easily transported me along side of napping strangers also brought me to my own weakness that morning, to life’s frailty, to my need. Something as simple as my body’s demand for sleep is a bold reminder that I am but a creature. “I am poor and needy,” says the psalmist.  “Remind me that my days are fleeting.”

The human condition is inescapable!  Simon Wiesenthal, the Holocaust survivor who devoted his life to tracking down those responsible for the mass murdering of Jews in World War II, announced at age 94, that he had ended his search. In an interview, he told reporters, “If there’s a few I didn’t look for, they are now too old and too fragile to stand trial.” What a bold indication of our days. “All are from the dust, and to dust all return.”

This morning, I’m reminded that in the Garden of Gethsemane, minutes before Jesus felt the grip of those who would hand him over to die, the disciples were sleeping. He was sweating blood, but they felt the heaviness of their eyes instead of the heaviness of the moment—or perhaps because they felt the heaviness of the moment they could not escape the heaviness of their eyes. He asked them to stay awake and pray, but they could not. I’m thinking that It’s a sincere look at humanity, not unlike sleeping commuters and dying regimes: weak and unaware, asleep, unseeing, and in need.

It’s been only a couple of years ago that I discovered that the Christian calendar is patterned in such a way that a person can remember this condition throughout their days and counter-culturally declare it to the world. For example, I try to do this by recognizing that the ashes of Ash Wednesday unmistakably remind me of the dust I came from and the dust to which I will return. I began celebrating the beginning of Advent two Sundays ago with the cry of John the Baptist to stay alert in my personal sleepy world for a God who takes my embodiment quite seriously. And the crushing weight of Holy Week pleads with me to seek a hope far beyond myself and my weakness. “Day by day,” instructs the Rule of Saint Benedict, “remind yourself that you are going to die.” Within this culture generally terrified of aging, uncomfortable with death, and seemingly desperate for accomplishments to distract most, the instruction is most likely unpopular.  That’s my observation, at least in the small world I move in these days.  And yet, for me, to keep this reality of weakness in mind need not be a source of despair, but a means of seeking and seeing God. “As for me,” referring to the psalmist writing, “I am poor and needy, but the Lord remembers me.” The apostle Paul cries likewise: “‘Wake up, O sleeper, rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.’”  My condition is fatal, but it is far from without hope.

It is somewhat odd to think of death in a season remembering the birth of the Christ child, I suppose.  But from the beginning, it was apparent that this birth was accompanied by death. The young couple was forced to flee at Herod’s edict to slaughter all the boys in and around Bethlehem two years old and under. Elsewhere, an aging prophet told the young mother that the child cradled in her arms would cause the falling and rising of many, and that a sword would pierce her own heart too—and at simply seeing this sleeping infant he himself was ready to die. The darker side of Christmas is as real as the parts I love to embrace.Minutes before his last breath in this life, Jesus was asked by the criminal beside him to remember him. “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.”  Sitting along side a death bed, holding the persons hand or wiping the forehead with a cool cloth or providing swabbing of the mouth, I am unable to remember, ever experiencing words more human.  No, I can't think of any prayer by me or anyone dying can be more sincerely uttered—however close to that last breath might be. Remember me! As Christ responded to the one beside him, so he responds to my needy, sleeping soul, “I will never leave you or forsake you.”

Father, God, thank You for Your awakening me from my personal sleeping world. Thank you for what the Church identifies as Advent, calling me to wakefulness. My request, this morning is that my journal thoughts will set those who read it, to take on a fresh understanding of the One who neither sleeps or slumbers.  Amen