The greatest act of faith a man can perform is the act that we perform every night. We abandon our identity, we turn our soul and body into chaos and old night. We uncreate ourselves as if at the end of the world: for all practical purposes we become dead men, in the sure and certain hope of a glorious resurrection.
G.K. Chesterton, The Meaning of Dreams, from In Defense of Sanity, p. 119.
Each night is like the last judgment for the thoughtful soul. We, if we are thoughtful, look back on our day, and perhaps the days that have gone before that day, and ask, ‘Have I done all that needed to be done?’ And, closing our eyes, we give up the ghost, and find ourselves in uncontrolled darkness. What comes after that is out of our control. We may dream of the glories of heaven or the fires of hell. We may dream recompense or pretense or nonsense. And, we hope, by God’s grace, that we will rise to a new day of sunshine and light.
Then the dream startles, or the buzzer sounds, or the voice of a child beckons, and we find that we are awake. We are resurrected every day. The leaves appear every spring, and we appear every morning. Yet, somehow, we doubt the reality of resurrection and new life.
Chesterton has made the point that lying in bed can be an amazing thing. Sleep is more amazing. And we get to do it every day.
One of my great besetting issues, I do not know if it is a sin, is the constant fight against sleep. I love to be awake. I love to be doing, moving, learning, teaching, reading, playing, praying. And every night God says, ‘Fool, your soul is required of you.’ This isn’t my life, this isn’t my body ultimately. The One who made it did so in such a way that it must rest. And that rest reminds me that I am not God, for only he ‘slumbers not, nor sleeps.’
Perhaps I fear the reckoning of realizing that I did not do enough. For each day I am a failure, and the act of giving up at the end of the day only serves to reestablish that fact. But we need to give up. It’s only then that we find we will wake up to a new morning, and new life.
