Sleep as a Spiritual Discipline

In a recent issue of Books and Culture, Lauren Winner offers a suggestion for Christians seeking to be countercultural. Get some sleep. She writes,

The unarguable demands that our bodies make for sleep are a good reminder that we are mere creatures, not the Creator. For it is God and God alone who "neither slumbers nor sleeps." Of course, the Creator has slept, another startling reminder of the radical humility he embraced in becoming incarnate. He took on a body that, like ours, was finite and contingent and needed sleep. To push ourselves to go without sleep is, in some sense, to deny our embodiment, to deny our fragile incarnations--and perhaps to deny the magnanimous poverty and self-emptying that went into his Incarnation.

Yesterday a room full of people laughed when Joni said her Lenten discipline was to get more sleep. They thought she was kidding, describing an indulgence rather than a discipline. But sleep is a discipline. It is a confession of finitude and humanity, an expression of faith in God's ability to manage the world without us for a few hours.

"Why are you sleeping?" the disciples asked Christ. It is not a sign of Christlikeness that people are more likely to ask me, "Why are you so tired?"

Sleep well.

Bob