Singing in the Shadows

On my bed I remember you;
I think of you through the watches of the night.
Because you are my help,
I sing in the shadow of your wings.
I cling to you;
your right hand upholds me.
(Psalm 63.6-8 NIV)

The night is increasingly a time of prayer for me. I don’t mean that I stay wilfully awake in order to pray, but that prayer has become a refuge and a homecoming, the place I find myself when I’m awake in the night, as happens increasingly, whether through age or, as seems more likely somehow, as a natural part of what is happening while I am sleeping.

A quick search online reveals any number of articles on prayer before sleeping, walking early in order to pray, prayers for a good night’s sleep, the problem of falling asleep while praying… but little or nothing that I could see about what happens during sleep itself. However, an article I found on the Orthodox Prayer site gives a clue that my experience may not be quite unheard of:

At night time you can also say the Jesus Prayer as you try and go to sleep. There will come a time when you will actually pray while you sleep. At the time of falling asleep we enter a path that leeds into our deepest consciousness. This occurs between the time we are awake and asleep. Its the ideal time to send this prayer deep into your heart. Rejoice when the first thing you want to do when you awake in the morning is to repeat the prayer.

There is a term used in sleep medicine, hypnagogia, which refers to the state between waking and sleeping, when, among other effects, repetitive tasks or experiences sometimes dominate mental imagery when falling asleep. (Gamers are familiar with what is called the Tetris effect, when images from gaming flood their mind as they fall asleep, or in idle moments of unfocused time.) Something similar may be at work here, but then again, if experience is to be trusted at all, waking is more like an uncovering of prayer that has been present, flowing beneathdreams, beneath the currents of the sleep cycles.

It is as easy to be drawn away into reductionist, quasi-scientific attempts at explaining phenomena like this as it is to become unmeshed in superstitious notions of divination and so on. But, “Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words. And God, who searches the heart, knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God.” (Romans 8.26-27 NRSV)

Surely our very sleeping is threaded with the Spirit’s searching, as our defences and distractions disengage in the dark hours? I know my own dreams have been shot through with light of late, unexpectedly, as the traces of old griefs and paths of remembering are questioned by a sure and accurate love that is not of my making.

The Jesus Prayer, says Metropolitan Anthony Bloom, “more than any other,” helps us to be able to “stand in God’s presence.” In sleep God is present as at all times; but there is nothing to resist our knowing that, if in sleep we “cling to” him. The prayer goes on – it becomes itself the song of the  shadow of God’s boundless love.

Asleep in the Mercy…

Very often the word “awakening” is used to describe the ways of God in the heart of his people (e.g. Timothy Jones’ Awake my Soul or Cynthia Bourgeault’s Centring Prayer and Inner Awakening) and of course in many ways this is a good image. God does, by his grace, wake us from the half-conscious life we live in the world, caught among images and the desire for images, living in a reality that is far from real, but a kind of user interface with reality—for, as Eliot said, “human kind / Cannot bear very much reality.”

In a recent article in Church Times, Tony Horsfall (the quote is from his recent book Rhythms of Grace: Finding Intimacy with God) wrote, “We live in a God-bathed world. There is no place where God is not, although sometimes we may be asleep in his presence.” I know what he means, and of course we have all known times like this, when we realise we have spent the entire space of the Eucharistic prayer at Mass thinking about HTML5, or the need to weed the garden. But truly being asleep, sound asleep, in the presence of God, falling asleep in the conscious presence of God, consciously longing for the mercy of Christ, and letting oneself slip into sleep as into that mercy—that is something different, and I would want to be clear about the distinction…

I seem to be collecting a little cache of writings about this, and I don’t want to repeat myself here, so do start with this Lent’s post The Shores of Perception, which links back to the earlier posts—or else just click “dreams” in the tag cloud in the sidebar. There is so much more to explore here, and yet by its very essence it is hard to capture, sitting here at a keyboard. But I will try, over the next few weeks I will try as best I can…

The shores of perception

I am increasingly fascinated by the relationship between prayer and sleep. I have written on this before, but all I manage to say describes an absence, like writing a treatise on a vacuum. This is not the absence of God—rather it is the presence of God unmediated by word and image, that leaves an absence of knowing. God is he whom the mind cannot grasp, since he is far more in all ways than any human mind can comprehend. If he were not, he would not be God. We cannot really comprehend another human being, however close they may be to us.

We may not be able to grasp the incomprehensible, but we can love. Our love reaches out to the unknowable in each other, and still more it reaches out to God, calling back to the unimaginable love that God is.

Lent is a curious time. We follow in our minds the journey of Christ to the Cross, and as we do so (if we give our hears as well as our minds to the task) we draw closer to that path ourselves, and to that encounter with God. As Jesus himself put it (John 14.7 NIV) “If you really know me, you will know my Father as well.”

What has this to do with sleep? God sometimes can use our prayers in the hours of sleep in ways the waking mind not would understand. In the post I linked above, I wrote:

What is happening here? I think that God is reaching down to these hidden, seemingly forgotten connections with the needs and pains and brokenness of others, and is retrieving our unspoken prayers in the silence of contemplation, or of sleep. This is an extraordinary, profound thing, and I think it is here that the distinction between dream and prayer becomes blurred. To be honest, there is much I simply don’t know about these shadowed paths of prayer, but I think that possibly, if we (as is often attested to in the Orthodox tradition) find ourselves praying the Prayer as we go to sleep, it will run quietly on in some part of our mind even in the deepest sleep, and our hearts, remaining attuned to God in Christ Jesus, will be open to that gentle touch that lifts our memories to prayer. And who is to say that our dreams may not echo that divine lifting, that holy, unthought-of participation in the work of redemption that goes on, even as the Cross goes on, in every generation till our Lord’s return.

Our closer encounters with God leave the conscious mind merely with the awareness of its own limits, and it is natural to fear the unknown. In sleep our prayers can lead us beyond that point, deeper into God than we thought possible, and often we are left with dreams cast up on the shores of perception—strange spindrift, and the wrecks of heartbreak...

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner...

The bridge of prayer…

Prayer is the bridge between our conscious and unconscious lives. Often there is a large abyss between our thoughts, words, and actions, and the many images that emerge in our daydreams and night dreams. To pray is to connect these two sides of our lives by going to the place where God dwells. Prayer is “soul work” because our souls are those sacred centres where all is one and where God is with us in the most intimate way.

Thus, we must pray without ceasing so that we can become truly whole and holy.

Henri Nouwen, from Bread for the Journey

Following on from yesterday’s post, I wonder how many others find, as I do, that the more they pray, the more they dream? Last summer I wrote:

The longer I go on in this life that is about prayer, the less I realise I know about it. As Rohr [says], prayer happens. Sometimes, I’m not even sure I am there. Prayer is all wrapped up in dreams, these days, too. Some nights are so filled with dreaming that is prayer, or prayer that is dreaming, that I’m not always sure what is sleep and what is not. But these are not dreams of the prophetic, “God gave me a dream – better sit up and write it down!” variety. They rise out of sleep like the wrecks of crippled warships rising out of sand and silt, full of pain and the memory of pain, and sink again in the half-waking susurration of the Jesus Prayer. They are nothing I do; their content has generally nothing to do with my life or even my experience.

Our dreams are rooted deep in a life we see little of in our waking hours; our prayer, I increasingly feel, is rooted there too. Certainly contemplative prayer draws on the sap that root lifts up from the dark soil of our human, and beyond human, connectedness. Each of us is the end-point of countless generations; still more, each of us is God-made, Spirit-breathed. The imprint of our making is on us, whether we will recognise it or not, and so is the imprint of our redemption: we are marked with the Cross. If this is what we are, how can we not be a part of each other, of all, ultimately, that is made, for “Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made.” (John 1.3 NIV)?

In each of us the memory of our heart’s path is traced, often quite unconsciously. Everything that has moved us, grieved us, concerned us is there, waiting to be touched, woken. Associations will often do it, as Marcel Proust found when he tasted the madeleine he had dipped in his tea, but they produce a frail, surface recollection, quite unlike the deep and resonant representations of dreams.

Deepest of all, perhaps, is prayer. In prayer God is reaching out to us, far more than we are reaching for him, and he knows all; for in Christ all things hold together (Colossians 1.17). Paul also reminds us (Romans 8.27) that “God, who searches the heart, knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God.”

What is happening here? I think that God is reaching down to these hidden, seemingly forgotten connections with the needs and pains and brokenness of others, and is retrieving our unspoken prayers in the silence of contemplation, or of sleep. This is an extraordinary, profound thing, and I think it is here that the distinction between dream and prayer becomes blurred. To be honest, there is much I simply don’t know about these shadowed paths of prayer, but I think that possibly, if we (as is often attested to in the Orthodox tradition) find ourselves praying the Prayer as we go to sleep, it will run quietly on in some part of our mind even in the deepest sleep, and our hearts, remaining attuned to God in Christ Jesus, will be open to that gentle touch that lifts our memories to prayer. And who is to say that our dreams may not echo that divine lifting, that holy, unthought-of participation in the work of redemption that goes on, even as the Cross goes on, in every generation till our Lord’s return.

The wings of my dove are sheathed with silver...

To enter into solidarity with a suffering person does not mean that we have to talk with that person about our own suffering. Speaking about our own pain is seldom helpful for someone who is in pain. A wounded healer is someone who can listen to a person in pain without having to speak about his or her own wounds. When we have lived through a painful depression, we can listen with great attentiveness and love to a depressed friend without mentioning our experience. Mostly it is better not to direct a suffering person's attention to ourselves. We have to trust that our own bandaged wounds will allow us to listen to others with our whole beings. That is healing...

It is important to know when we can give attention and when we need attention. Often we are inclined to give, give, and give without ever asking anything in return. We may think that this is a sign of generosity or even heroism. But it might be little else than a proud attitude that says: "I don't need help from others. I only want to give." When we keep giving without receiving we burn out quickly. Only when we pay careful attention to our own physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual needs can we be, and remain, joyful givers.

There is a time to give and a time to receive. We need equal time for both if we want to live healthy lives.

Henri Nouwen, from Bread for the Journey

I'm not sure how far this applies to everyone, but I find that there is a hidden cost to this kind of thing - which may be what Nouwen is talking about when he speaks of giving ourselves time to receive - which feels like a kind of weariness that I at least don't automatically associate with its source. I find myself listening eagerly at one time, and then later, maybe hours later, suddenly unaccountable very tired. We need, I think, to give God time to heal us, at least as much as we need to consciously receive from other people.

Sleep is a gift from God's Holy Spirit which we have a terrible tendency to undervalue, and undervalue at our peril. Even Jesus slept, and slept deeply, too (Mark 4:38).

"I lie down and sleep; I wake again, because the LORD sustains me." (Psalm 3:5)

"In vain you rise early and stay up late, toiling for food to eat - for he grants sleep to those he loves." (Psalm 127:2)

[Title refers to Psalm 68:13]