In Praise of Sleep

So, I have a confession to make.  I am a perfectionist, and it is a disease.  One of its many symptoms?  The trail of accumulating posts in my drafts folder.  I don’t know why I never posted this, back when I wrote it (Thursday, Nov. 12th).  Clearly, at the time, I did not think it qualified as “finished” or “good enough.”  And probably it doesn’t.  

After all, all writing, like all living, is ultimately process rather than product.

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Sleep is a daily reminder from God that we are not God. “He who keeps Israel will neither slumber nor sleep” (Psalm 121:4). But Israel will. For we are not God. . . . Sleep is a parable that God is God and we are [human]. God handles the world quite nicely while a hemisphere sleeps. Sleep is like a broken record that comes around with the same message every day: [Humanity] is not sovereign. [Humanity] is not sovereign. [Humanity] is not sovereign. Don’t let the lesson be lost on you. God wants to be trusted as the great worker who never tires and never sleeps. He is not nearly so impressed with our late nights and early mornings as he is with the peaceful trust that casts all anxieties on him and sleeps.

-John Piper

A few weeks ago, I asked my AP Lang students to begin the day by reflecting on part of the above passage.  I asked them to write about the challenges in their life that were currently reminding them that they are not God.  I asked them to consider how those challenges — how that reminder — might be a blessing, even if a painful one.

Today that challenge was turned on me.

I spent the morning at a ladies brunch organized by the church I attend.  And the topic was cultivating a thankful heart.  Ann Voskamp’s One Thousand Gifts — which spoke to me so powerfully when I read it several years ago — was repeatedly referenced, and the message was powerful and simple and convicting and familiar all at once.

I have long advocated (to myself, mostly) a life of gratefulness — a life lived fully alive — fully aware, and awake, to the beauty that surrounds us.  To the presence of God in the Other and in the world at large.  As G.K. Chesteron declares: “I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought, and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder.”  I have long wanted to exist — to live — inside of that wonder.

But finding things, in all situations, that I am thankful for, is not quite the same as being thankful for all things, or for all situations.  Enjoying the beauty of the flaming bougainvillea outside my window does not keep me from grumbling about my daily grading, or my distance from family, or my loneliness, or my singleness, or my migraines — or whatever else I happen to be discontent with on this particular morning.  And when the bougainvillea starts to fade, becoming no more than a wall of dusty green (as is the case at this moment), what then am I left with?

I feel that God is challenging me — as I tried to challenge my students — to find his presence, not on the periphery of the struggle, of the pain, of the heartache, of the weakness, but within it.  As Voskamp states (and as I have quoted elsewhere), “I want to see beauty. In the ugly, in the sink, in the suffering, in the daily, in all the days before I die, the moments before I sleep.”

Not on the edges, but within.  The costly thanksgiving.  The thanksgiving that is repentance and surrender and submission — that is a prayer of “your kingdom come, your will be done.”  Not my way, not my dreams, not my best, but yours.

And as we were reminded today, God’s kingdom coming is, in its very nature, disruptive.  I am currently reading Rosaria Champagne Butterfield’s The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert, and her story, if nothing else, reminds one that conversion is always “arduous and transformative.”  The paradox of the Christian faith has always been that one must die to live.

And truth be told, I am trying not to die.  I have always been trying not to die.  To hold on to my dreams, and my story, and my control, and my mastery.  I am trying to live my life my way.  To fully give in — to give thanks — for singleness, and teaching, and the lessons learned through loneliness and heartache — to embrace the life that God has given me, in this moment, as it is — to do so it to truly give my life over to the one who created it to do with as God pleases.

I remember, as a child, responding to requests to wash dishes, or clean my room, with a grumbling reluctance that was intended to communicate, “I will do what you ask (because I must), but I want you to know that I resent your authority over me.”  To respond cheerfully (without complaining or arguing) was to relinquish some imagined right of resistance.

And, like George MacDonald’s Lilith — with her clenched fist — I am still clinging to that right.  That right to say, “No, this is not what I want,” when the path of joy is there before me.  Requiring only that I give thanks.  That I say, “Yes.” That I allow myself to fall into the arms that wait to catch me.  Into the story that has been prepared.  Into this day, and this one.  That I accept each and every breath, every task, as gift.  As possibility.

The path to life is not complicated: all we need do (once more in MacDonald’s imagery) is accept the bed prepared for us.  Accept the sleep that reminds us we are not God.  Lie down, rest, and relinquish our burdens.  Salvation is not, I think, so much a doing, as a ceasing.  An accepting of what has already been done, and what we could never have done ourselves.  The end of striving, and the beginning of thanks.

Fall in, let go, and live.

It is not complicated, but it is hard.  The way is narrow and the cost is high.  I must choose to be human, and to be satisfied.  Submitted to the One who governs my life.  The One whose ways are good (but also inexplicable and mysterious: higher than mine).

I must choose thanks.

Beginnings

There is a tortoise in my yard.

I am only five or six, and I’ve recently cut off the fly-away tendrils of wispy blond hair that once framed my face.  All I have left is an inch or two of chaotic, burnished gold, rather resembling a halo.

The steps into our backyard are cool, even in the sunlight.  The smooth tile reminds me of the fragile porcelain of seashells, each discovered, like a story, amidst hot sun, coarse sand, and the Mediterranean’s ever-moving waves.

Within the house there is laughter and work.  My older brother is sure to be bouncing a basketball down the marble staircase while my father grades assignments in his roof-top office, and the kitchen hums with the melody of interwoven spices — garlic, harissa, cumin, and the dense, pungent richness of ripe olives.

But here, with the North African sunlight on my face, and the garden alight with an interplay of shadows cast by hibiscus plants and bougainvillea vines, the world is hushed, and heavy, and expectant.  My tortoise moves in lumbering steps, a gentle giant with scales like dinosaur skin, and I watch him with the awe I feel for all small things.  The earth is alive with tiny insects, burrowing in pursuit of unknown goals, and pearl-white snails carry their homes from one small leaf-island to the next.

I am five or six, my family is within the house, and I want to climb inside this moment, with its promise and its hope, and never, ever come out.

———————

I will move forward from this moment into baptism, and communion, and membership with the saints.  I will move forward, but when asked for a beginning, I will always hesitate.  For I have no story to start from, no account of incantatory prayers or white-light visions or unquenchable certitude.

I have only this: a childhood immersed with the sacred holiness of existence and a God who met me in the profound stillness of my joy.

It never took a voice of fire and smoke to awaken me to the holiness of the ground beneath my feet; rather, it began with a tortoise and a garden and the feel of sunlight on my skin.  It began with joy — for “in the beginning God,” and it was good.

An Anime Conversion

I grew up hating anime.

When I say “hating,” please don’t think I’m exaggerating.  I may be a writer, but there are still no words to describe the utter loathing that built beneath my ribcage  every time I saw a large-eyed, spiky-haired, open-mouthed, cartoon-animated youth leaping interminably through a psychedelically flashing sky.

You see, I didn’t grow up with the Disney Channel or Cartoon Network or even Sesame Street.  Occasionally, when my brother and I were lucky, relatives from the States would send us VHS tapes recorded with hours of Mr. Rodgers and Big Bird, Psalty and McGee and Me, and, every once in a while, even Charlie Brown.  We would watch and re-watch these treasures until every episode was memorized, every word learned — wearing them out with use until the tracking became so bad it was impossible to decode an image through the static.

When we weren’t so lucky, however, there was anime.  Hours and hours of Arabic-speaking, Asian-looking youth leaping through the air in pursuit of the illusive winning goal.  And it made my stomach hurt.

Julia Kristeva, in her nearly incomprehensible feminist treatise, explores the idea of the abject — that which represents the breakdown of meaning and must be expurgated from our bodies, eliciting a violent (and non-logical) physical reaction.  For Julia Kristeva this response is garnered by exposure to sour milk. For me, it was anime.

I believed this response to be natural and right and (most probably) universal.  So when my brother first returned from college lauding the artistic power of the medium I hated (the dangerous result of rooming with an anime fanatic), I was incensed.  And deeply committed to returning him to the right path.

I felt sure he had been brainwashed, so, gearing up for battle, I went to face the source of the infection.  My brother’s roommate had been a family friend for at least a decade, but he had never (until then) shown such clear want of principle or taste.  I admit that turning up on his doorstep, demanding that he recant his position and return my brother to me in his original state, may have seemed a bit melodramatic.  However, he responded mildly enough: he invited me in to watch a movie.

I can’t quite recall the name of that film — Metropolis, perhaps?  It certainly lacked the atmospheric magic of Mushi-Shi or Kino’s Journey, and the sacred wonder of Haibane Renmei or Windy Tales.  It did not tear at the soul as Angel’s Egg does, or speak deeply to memory and love like 5 Centimeters Per Second.  It had no scenes of breathtaking beauty — a sky alight with the colors of dusk or dawn — and no plot that twisted and tied the mind.  In short, it was not Millennium Actress or The Girl Who Leapt Through Time or Voices of a Distant Star.  Neither, however, was it teenage boys forever leaping through a blinding sky, with faces distorted by rage and desire and the need to kick a ball into a net.

It was a cracked doorway into a world that was different than I was expecting.  And the doorway mattered.  C.S. Lewis, in his spiritual autobiography, equates joy with longing — the deep, desperate desire for something too sacred to name.  Is it ironic that it is now anime that most consistently awakens me to the deepest longings of my heart, and thus rekindles my joy?  Of course it is.

God has a twisted sense of humor.