The Sacred Ordinary: Neither Slumber Nor Sleep
Photo by Quin Stevenson on Unsplash
The Sacred Ordinary is a blog series originating from a writing course led by Ellie Roscher for the Collegeville Institute, centering on the sacred ordinary. The authors read and wrote essays designed to make ordinary moments shine, and we are grateful for the opportunity to share these essays with the Church Anew audience.
A LITURGY OF THE MIDNIGHT HOURS
I would hear her before I saw her. Like clockwork, my three-year-old would thump down the hall toward our bedroom, her footed-pajama feet skidding across the hardwood floors, right around 4 a.m. each morning. In the darkness, she would reach out her warm, chubby hand and find my cheek, softly whispering, "Mama?"
I would peel my eyes open, trying to climb out of my dreams to answer her, but usually, I would just reach out my arm and scoop her into the middle of our bed, slipping her under the mounds of blankets next to me. I knew better; but I had also birthed three kids in four years, so by the time she burrowed into our bed each night, I had typically already been up with the baby two or three times. At that point, I didn't care about sleep-training; I just cared about sleep.
So into our bed she came. She'd fall back asleep within minutes, her heavy head nestled in the crook of my shoulder, her exhales hot on my neck. But even as I felt the steady rise and fall of her breathing, I would find myself, once again, awake in the night.
IN THE VALLEY OF EXHAUSTION
In that season, sleep felt almost as elusive as God did. The practices that had sustained my faith prior to having kids now felt like laughable impossibilities. Get up early for quiet time? How could I do that when I wasn't even really sleeping? Make it to church each week? How, pray tell, were we to do that when we had what felt like a perpetual family cold?
As a certified product of 90's evangelicalism, I had been programmed to be, well...programmed — God was best found in the official Bible studies, the sanctioned small groups, the certified church services. And for much of my life, those spaces had served me well. But in the early years of motherhood, I wondered if God could be found where I actually was — in rocking chairs and at the kitchen sink, pushing my kids on playground swings and pushed to the very edge of my bed each night while three of us tried to share a bed made for two.
NEITHER SLUMBER NOR SLEEP
It was one of those nights, as I tried in vain to settle back into sleep, that the image of God found in Psalm 121 enveloped me:
"I lift up my eyes to the hills — from where will my help come? My help comes from the Lord, who made heaven and earth. He will not let your foot be moved; he who keeps you will not slumber. He who keeps Israel will neither slumber nor sleep."
In the past, I had always thought about this verse from my vantage point...Look! Here comes God, like Gandalf on glistening Shadowfax, thundering down the mountainside to come to my rescue! But in that moment, I tried to picture the scene from God's perspective, and what I saw looked surprisingly like me — a mother, lying awake in the night, decidedly not sleeping, but instead listening for her children's cries, ready to tiptoe down the hall to their rooms the moment she hears them.
He who keeps you will not slumber.
I found God there, in the sleepless nights. I sensed Divine love each time my hand gently patted my baby's tiny back, as I paced a pathway across the nursery rug at midnight. I heard God's voice singing over me with each repeated stanza of You Are My Sunshine as I coaxed my babies into rest to the rhythm of my creaking rocking chair. "This is my body, broken for you," blazed across the night sky each time I woke to nurse my babies in the night, my nipples sore and bleeding.
She who keeps you will not slumber.
THE ROUTINES & RHYTHMS OF THE DIVINE
In those pre-dawn hours, I discovered a connection with God that enhanced everything I had ever experienced in a church pew. In every moment that I spent guiding my children towards rest, I found that I was mirroring a God who, at the beginning, infused the very rhythm of created time with intervals of ceasing, a God who included the command to Sabbath rest among his top ten hopes and dreams for his children. Each afternoon as I administered nap time for my kids, I knew a God who encouraged his own beleaguered prophet Elijah with a snack and a nap in the wilderness, a God who, like a mother, "gives to his beloved sleep."
And when I finally closed my own eyes at the end of each long day, I would find comfort in the love of God as my exhausted longing poured out in tears that wet my pillow. In those moments too, I would know the God of Exodus 33:14 who assures us that his very presence is rest. I would remember Jesus - the embodied God who rested in lonely places and boat bottoms alike, the limitless Divine who needed a nap - and know that just as I cared for my kids' needs to be comforted and sleep, so God cared for me.
EMBODIED LITURGY
Each Sunday morning, the bells of a church in our neighborhood ring out, calling the faithful to file into the sanctuary to meet with God. But our bodies provide their own liturgy of the hours, calling us to remember how we are both dust and stardust, both the limitless imagination of God and limited human frailty. We are created for rest. And in the very ordinary moments of cultivating rest each day-- whether our own as we dim the lights before sinking into the mattress or for our children as we pad down the hall at midnight to re-swaddle and rock the baby — we can know the love of God anew.
