Chrysostom
Beloved of All
Your pain keeps you from rest, and this is a heavy trial. Yet consider how night itself is given by God as a haven of our ills, a solace for our woes. He has bound sleep up in the necessities of nature, that good might be done to us even against our wills. When grief afflicts you, friends may fail to comfort, but in sleep God grants a gentle medicine that no enemy can look in the face. The bitterness of pain parches the soul, but night brings it, as it were, to a quiet caravansary with fountains and a cooling breeze.
But we are mighty haters of ourselves, for we devise tyrannies stronger than nature’s need for rest. The anxieties that drive away sleep come not only from wealth, but from every worldly care and consuming thought. The heart stifled by excess, whether of food or of fretful reflection, cannot recover itself quickly. The truly wakeful and sober soul, even in sleep, rests decently and peacefully, for its fear of God suffers it not to drown in the depths of slumber nor in wild fancies. It is the orderly state of the soul, brought low by reverence, that prepares the body for composed rest.
Paul and Silas, having been scourged and thrust into the inner prison, their feet fast in the stocks, did not suffer themselves to sleep in self-pity or despair. At midnight they prayed and sang praises to God. The very things that would bow others down became the cause of their wakeful delight. They kept vigil, and God shook the foundations, opened doors, and loosed bonds. Their pain was not removed before they gave thanks; they found a joy that surpassed their stripes because their minds soared above the body.
You ask for sleep, and rightly so. Yet shake off something deeper: the evil sleep of the soul, which is drunkenness not from wine alone, but from despondency and from fixing the heart entirely on what the body suffers. This sleep sees only fleeting shadows, not the abiding and heavenly things. To be in the day depends on ourselves. We can always watch, always be sober. And sobriety is the very intensity of watchfulness, a collectedness that, when cultivated, makes even our physical rest something holy and restorative.
Cry out as the jailer did when he saw the doors standing open and his own life undone: “What must I do to be saved?” He found salvation not in complaining of his terror, but by washing the stripes of the prisoners and receiving the word of the Lord. In the same hour of the night, his trembling became rejoicing. Do not merely ask for the pain to lift so that you may sleep. Ask to believe more deeply, to trust the One who neither slumbers nor sleeps, who keeps your foot from being moved. When you lie down, let your heart be already wakeful toward Him, and your sleep will be light, decent, and truly restorative, a gift received from His hand rather than a flight from suffering.
But we are mighty haters of ourselves, for we devise tyrannies stronger than nature’s need for rest. The anxieties that drive away sleep come not only from wealth, but from every worldly care and consuming thought. The heart stifled by excess, whether of food or of fretful reflection, cannot recover itself quickly. The truly wakeful and sober soul, even in sleep, rests decently and peacefully, for its fear of God suffers it not to drown in the depths of slumber nor in wild fancies. It is the orderly state of the soul, brought low by reverence, that prepares the body for composed rest.
Paul and Silas, having been scourged and thrust into the inner prison, their feet fast in the stocks, did not suffer themselves to sleep in self-pity or despair. At midnight they prayed and sang praises to God. The very things that would bow others down became the cause of their wakeful delight. They kept vigil, and God shook the foundations, opened doors, and loosed bonds. Their pain was not removed before they gave thanks; they found a joy that surpassed their stripes because their minds soared above the body.
You ask for sleep, and rightly so. Yet shake off something deeper: the evil sleep of the soul, which is drunkenness not from wine alone, but from despondency and from fixing the heart entirely on what the body suffers. This sleep sees only fleeting shadows, not the abiding and heavenly things. To be in the day depends on ourselves. We can always watch, always be sober. And sobriety is the very intensity of watchfulness, a collectedness that, when cultivated, makes even our physical rest something holy and restorative.
Cry out as the jailer did when he saw the doors standing open and his own life undone: “What must I do to be saved?” He found salvation not in complaining of his terror, but by washing the stripes of the prisoners and receiving the word of the Lord. In the same hour of the night, his trembling became rejoicing. Do not merely ask for the pain to lift so that you may sleep. Ask to believe more deeply, to trust the One who neither slumbers nor sleeps, who keeps your foot from being moved. When you lie down, let your heart be already wakeful toward Him, and your sleep will be light, decent, and truly restorative, a gift received from His hand rather than a flight from suffering.
