Going to God to find rest

By Mia Pohlman

I love to take naps, the 20- to 30-minute power kind, as a reprieve from the busy-ness of the day. My family and friends enjoy poking fun at me for this, and because of their loving teasing, I admit that I do have a bit of personal interest in defending napping.

But I also think, all joking aside, there is something deeper about God and about ourselves we can learn from rest -- a theology of napping, if you will. I think there is a holiness about sleep, that it can become a prayer and time of union with God.

Thomas Merton wrote about sleeping as an exercise in making ourselves poor and humble and trusting God with abandon:

"Who is more little, who is more poor than the helpless man who lies asleep in his bed without awareness and without defense? Who is more trusting than him who must entrust himself each night to sleep? What is the reward of his trust? Gentleness comes to him when he is most helpless and awakens him, refreshed, beginning to be made whole. Love takes him by the hand and opens to him the doors of another life, another day. (But he who has defended himself, fought for himself in sickness, planned for himself, guarded himself, loved himself alone and watched over his own life all night, is killed at last by exhaustion. For him there is no newness. Everything is stale and old.)"

Our need for sleep reminds us of the mortality of our human state, that we can't go on forever without being renewed. It reminds us we are human and not God, and it is God whom we need to renew us.

Over and over again in scripture, God invites us to come to him to find rest. To be still and know he is God.

Even Adam is given what his heart is yearning for while he sleeps, as Eve is made from him. Because of Adam's sleep, Eve is given her solitude with God.

A penance in reconciliation Father Bill always liked to give us was to go to our bed and fall backward onto it, without holding back. While we fell and landed on the softness of our pillows and mattress, he wanted us to think of this as falling back into the loving arms of God.

We can remember the holiness of rest and sleep when we allow God, in our sleeping, to hold us like a small child lies asleep against her mother, with abandon, allowing all she is to press into her, without ever fearing or even considering there will not be flesh there to press back.