First Parish Bedford UU

Audio

“In Praise of Sleep”
A sermon by Rev. John E. Gibbons
delivered on Sunday, February 27, 2011
at The First Parish in Bedford, Massachusetts

Opening Words

Wynken, Blynken, and Nod
by Eugene Field (1850-1895)

Wynken, Blynken, and Nod one night
    Sailed off in a wooden shoe---
Sailed on a river of crystal light,
    Into a sea of dew.
"Where are you going, and what do you wish?"
    The old moon asked the three.
"We have come to fish for the herring fish
    That live in this beautiful sea;
    Nets of silver and gold have we!"
                      Said Wynken,
                      Blynken,
                      And Nod.

The old moon laughed and sang a song,
    As they rocked in the wooden shoe,
And the wind that sped them all night long
    Ruffled the waves of dew.
The little stars were the herring fish
    That lived in that beautiful sea---
"Now cast your nets wherever you wish---
    Never afeard are we";
    So cried the stars to the fishermen three:
                      Wynken,
                      Blynken,
                      And Nod.

All night long their nets they threw
    To the stars in the twinkling foam---
Then down from the skies came the wooden shoe,
    Bringing the fishermen home;
'T was all so pretty a sail it seemed
    As if it could not be,
And some folks thought 't was a dream they 'd dreamed
    Of sailing that beautiful sea---
    But I shall name you the fishermen three:
                      Wynken,
                      Blynken,
                      And Nod.

Wynken and Blynken are two little eyes,
    And Nod is a little head,
And the wooden shoe that sailed the skies
    Is a wee one's trundle-bed.
So shut your eyes while mother sings
    Of wonderful sights that be,
And you shall see the beautiful things
    As you rock in the misty sea,
    Where the old shoe rocked the fishermen three:
                      Wynken,
                      Blynken,
                      And Nod.



Sermon

Many of you, quite gleefully, have told me that last week’s guest speaker spoke for a mere 12 minutes, quite unlike the usual occupant of this pulpit. Apparently you agree with the maxim, “Stand up to be seen, speak up to be heard, and sit down to be appreciated.”
 
I disagree, for this morning I preach in praise of sleep, and I will not be insulted if you take my advice. There is a long and noble tradition of sleeping in church.
 
In the Book of Acts, it is reported: “On the first day of the week we came together to break bread. Paul spoke to the people and, because he intended to leave the next day, kept on talking until midnight. There were many lamps in the upstairs room where we were meeting. Seated in a window was a young man named Eutychus, who was sinking into a deep sleep as Paul talked on and on. When Eutychus was sound asleep, he fell to the ground from the third story and was picked up dead. Paul went down, threw himself on the young man and put his arms around him. ‘Don’t be alarmed,’ he said. ‘He’s alive!’ Then he went upstairs again and broke bread and ate. After talking until daylight, he left. The people took the young man home alive and were greatly comforted.”

Early in the 18th century, Dr. Robert South, eminent court preacher in London, interrupted his sermon to awaken the prime minister, warning that if he did not stop his snoring he might awaken his majesty, the king.

It is said that if you laid, end to end, all the people who on any Sunday morning fall asleep in church, they’d all be a lot more comfortable!

Theologian James Luther Adams tells us that in ancient pagan times, sleeping in church was actually a sacred practice, a kind of dream therapy. Its technical name was “incubation” – the Greek and Roman practice of sleeping within a temple so as to receive a vision, a prophecy, or relief from disease or pain.

For many years we had Zazen, Buddhist sitting meditation, upstairs at 9am on Tuesday mornings. Among the regular meditators was our elder parishioner Louise Rickley. Invariably, within seconds of the beginning bell-sound, the room would fill with the gentle vibrations of Louise’s snoring. Saint Louise, the Incubator! I see some of you are already incubating!

A journalist named Jeet Heer says, “If sleep is undervalued, then the virtues of wakefulness are overrated. The fact is we live under the tyranny of alertness. Frenzied activity is far too highly valued in our society. We praise those who work hard and play hard. ‘The early bird gets the worm,’ our proverbs tell. … ‘You snooze, you lose.’ Entire Latin American nations are devoted to the production of drugs to keep us industrious and jumped-up: chiefly coffee and cocaine. Our nerves are so jangled that many people now require pills to help them sleep, an activity that humans have performed naturally since the dawn of time.
When the North American Free Trade Agreement was first signed, it was my hope that the siesta, that wonderful Hispanic ritual of a daily afternoon nap, would migrate north. Alas, the opposite has happened: Mexicans have now adopted the horrid gringo work ethic, a consequence of long shifts in factories where the workers are required to be as untiring as the machines they operate.”

In the Bible, it says that God is always awake. “He will not allow your foot to slip; he who keeps you will not slumber,” the psalmist sings. “Behold, he who keeps Israel will neither slumber nor sleep.” The Buddha is the “awakened one.”

“The entire fable of Snow White is about the dangers of sleep. In fact, one of the seven dwarves (or “dwarfs” to use Disney’s illiterate term) is Sleepy. All the Dwarves are characterized by unsavory traits: Dopey, Grumpy, et cetera. In a just world, there would be a dwarf named Wide-Awakey.” (Heer)

There is a tyranny of wakefulness and too often I am among the tyrants. Often, as opening words, you hear me quoting the poet Robert Francis, “Keep me from going to sleep too soon/Or if I go to sleep too soon/Come wake me up./Come any hour/Of night./Come whistling up the road./Stomp on the porch./Bang on the door./Make me get out of bed and come/And let you in and light a light.” These are the rantings of a sadist.

Or I’ll quote to you Rumi: “The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you. Don't go back to sleep. You must ask for what you really want. Don't go back to sleep.” How cruel of me!

A few sermons ago I noted that the favorite and most sung hymns of UU’s have lyrics that extol – not God, not Jesus, not Aphrodite, for that matter – but daylight and morning. Morning Has Broken, We Sing of Golden Mornings. What diurnal prejudice!
“Wake up,” I crow! “Sleep is for the weak!” “You can sleep when you’re dead!” What a crock!
 
And so this morning I recant; I come not to slander but to praise sleep.
Another of my favorite First Parish stories involves a UUA consultant who came to us to help with some project and, when she asked a roomful of people what they most liked about this congregation, one of our elder blue-haired doyennes eagerly chirped, “I just love the circus-like atmosphere!”

I know what she meant and often I share the sentiment, but one thing we don’t do so well around here – and in most of our lives – is to quiet the circus, be contemplative in repose, close our eyes, slumber and sleep, perchance to dream. Often I’m the chief offender. We need some mimes in this troupe.

Were we monks or nuns, we might have two (or more) Sunday services, but one would be matins at dawn, and another would be vespers in the evening. Our final hymn is a vespers hymn, and it’s a pity we don’t have more opportunity to sing – not our customary adrenaline-pumpers but such different spiritual expressions, calming and even soporific.

Even activist movers and shakers – perhaps especially such doers such as yourselves – need times of being quiet – rest and restoration.
I preach in praise of sleep.
 
Noted sleep researcher William Dement quotes Albert Einstein who said, “The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science.” Despite his and others’ research, Dement says the most fundamental questions remain mysteries: Why do we sleep? What is its function or purpose? “We sleep,” he concludes, “because we must.”
 
It is difficult even to define sleep, but Dement suggests “the essential difference between normal wakefulness and normal sleep is the direction of perception. In wakefulness, we perceive and are conscious of the external world…. Sleep, in contrast, is a disengagement from the outer world, accompanied by an engagement with the inner world and dream world.” He points out that this is an active process: sensory input is blocked or modified to effect a complete perceptual shutdown; to all intents and purposes, we are blind and deaf. Even if our eyelids are taped open during sleep, we do not see.”

I consulted with our in-house biologist, Abby Hafer, who gave me a short course in sleep, the deeper slow-wave levels of which, she says, seem to restore human tissues. The active dreaming stage called REM sleep is paradoxical because in REM brain waves and heart beats are indistinguishable from awakeness; and yet skeletal muscles are actually paralyzed – which Abby points out is a good thing as otherwise you might be acting out your dreams – leaping out of bed, for example, to catch a touchdown pass.

There is a human circadian rhythm, biological clock. Our core body temperature is lowest at 2 or 3 in the morning . It gradually warms until peaking around noon, then drops off in early afternoon (accounting for early afternoon sleepiness). There is an uptick in the early evening - which is why Olympic records are often set in the early evening. Then our temperature descends to its lowest.

The average Joe, says Abby, is stupidest in the wee small hours. Most industrial accidents – including the Titanic, Chernobyl, the Challenger and Exxon Valdez disasters - occurred due to bad decisions made in the wee hours by sleep-deprived people.

While the 24-hour day approximates our circadian rhythm, it does so imperfectly and is off by an hour or so each day, thus requiring daily readjustments. This is why, for most people, it is easier to stay up late than to go to sleep early.
There is a daily need for clock re-setting and the most effective means of adjustment is sunlight. A walk outside, for the same reason, helps to offset jet-lag.
In this regard, artificial light can often fool our eyes, which acclimates to lower light, but not our brains. While seemingly bright indoors, it is not nearly as bright as outdoors. Brightness is the critical factor – not full spectrum – and people with Seasonal Affective Disorder are prescribed time in front of a bank of incredibly bright lights.

Humans, by the way, are not the only species with a biological clock – animals, insects, even bacteria and fungi do also. In 1748, Swedish scientist Carolus Linnaeus planted a kind of garden clock. Each plant opened or closed its flowers at a different, specific time of day. Linnaeus could tell the time just by looking at which flowers were open!

I preach in praise of circadian rhythms.

The invention of the light bulb, by the way, has had a major deleterious effect on human sleep. Thomas Edison thought sleep was a huge waste of time. He claimed to sleep but four hours a night but actually he also took two daily naps of up to three hours each - which may have contributed to the creativity that helped him invent the very thing that keeps us awake longer. In 1910, before the light bulb, young adults slept about nine hours each night. Thanks to the light bulb, people sleep an average of seven hours.

Thus, “for well over a century we’ve been insulting our natural wake-sleep cycle by expecting to fall asleep precisely at 10 or 11pm, sleep solidly the entire night, and wake promptly at 6 or 7am. There’s accumulating evidence that human beings, like many other mammals, were not meant to have 16 uninterrupted hours awake and 8 hours of uninterrupted sleep.” Historians say that, before the 19th century, people wrote of sleep intervals as if the prospect of awakening in the middle of the night was common knowledge and normal. “People might get up to do chores, smoke a pipe, engage in prayer or reading, converse, visit neighbors, make love, or simply lie there in contemplation and fantasy.”

We sleep in cycles, scientists say, lasting an hour or two. We progress a descending staircase of four sleep levels: the 1st and 2nd levels hardly distinguishable from awakeness, then our deepest sleep is at levels 3 and 4, then rising again through levels 1, 2 and ultimately REM sleep…only to be repeated again and again.
This means that naps of 2 hours are especially restorative; even those of 10-20 minutes are good; while those of 40 minutes, taking us to a deep level - but then being interrupted - may leave us with a hangover.

Certainly some people are early birds, others middle of the road, and some are night owls. Little kids are typically early bird “larks,” sleeping as much as 11 hours and getting up early, as Abby indelicately says, to put their fingers up their sleeping parents’ noses.
 
Teenagers and those past puberty are more likely night owls. It used to be thought that this was mostly socially-reinforced – teens wanting to hang out with friends later at night – but now it’s also thought to be endogenous, natural. In an agricultural era, kids got up before dawn to work in the fields, returning home in the afternoon to nap or study and eat, off and on until bedtime. In a post-industrial era, this makes little sense as teens need more sleep for their brains to be fully functional.
 
And so, of course, schools are altering their schedules and in the headline to this week’s Bedford Minuteman newspaper we read that teens will now start school a bit later, a schedule that better cooperates with their bodies.
I preach in praise of sleep.

I want, finally, to name four kinds of tiredness from which we all need some rest. The first kind is sleepiness – the consequences of which range from slow-headedness to accidents to obesity to war. The antidote is sleep. When the emperor of Persia asked his Sufi master how best to renew his soul, he was told to sleep as much as possible because, ‘The longer you sleep, the less you will oppress!’

The second kind of tiredness is fatigue, a tiredness of activity. Ours is a hyperactive culture. I used to be skeptical of orthodox Jews whose refusal to work on the Sabbath can lead to bizarre contrivances, or Christian athletes who refuse to compete, or the Amish and their horses-and-buggies, or the Massachusetts blue laws that once forced me to go round to the back of Lynch’s Drug Store in Uxbridge to surreptitiously buy a Sunday six-pack. Now, however, I think these are good examples to follow and we ought declare a Sabbath even unto cash registers.

The third kind of tiredness is ennui – that feeling of being stuck in a rut, going nowhere, bored. Here the antidote is not mere activity, but activity that engages the whole person – body, mind and spirit. Gandhi taught that work can be sacred. So too play can be sacred, and yoga and sex, and martial arts and walking and dance and moving meditations that replenish body and soul.

And, last, there is the tiredness of satiation and over-consumption: too much food and stuff and busyness. Classically the answer to satiation is sacrifice, making do with less, sharing with others, refraining and refusing to eat or buy or wear all the juicy, shiny and fashionable morsels, trinkets and raiment with which mammon would seduce us.

The trouble here, though, is that sacrifice and having less has never been a popular or effective sermon; and thus I reframe and urge you to indulge and do more of those behaviors that are salubrious and healthful. Do more of what is good for you and for all people.
 
I preach in praise, just for example, of sleep. More sleep.

It’s time to put this sermon to bed – and just like at the end of most days – there’s so much that remains incomplete, undone. I haven’t talked much about dreams – inspiration to musicians like Mozart who said he merely wrote down the notes he heard while asleep to scientists like Kekule and James Watson who foresaw in dreams the molecular structure of benzene and DNA’s double-helix.

I have not spoken of insomnia or the many fascinating, strange and serious sleep disorders, nor have I gone into sleepwalking or sleeptalking. Yawning, you should know, is technically “pandiculation” and some of you are pandiculating right now!

A few weeks ago I asked for your insights and experiences of sleep, and I incorporated many into these remarks. I’ll close, however, with a panegyric to sleep, a perfect praise-meditation written by Ginni Spencer. Feel free to close your eyes, if you haven’t done so already, and be transported:

The kind of "sleep" I treasure most (she says) is that summertime stupor you experience while dozing on the beach: warm sun on your skin, faint aroma of Coppertone in your nose, and the sound of the waves mixed with the voices of the people you love...a combination of idle chatter, kids arguing over the shovel, and, if you're lucky, maybe an iPod somewhere nearby playing "Under the Boardwalk.” I'm not really asleep, I seem to be hanging out in some kind of a half-way place where I can't quite commit to either slipping into deep sleep or coming fully back to consciousness.

Sometimes I recall this sleep later, this fuzzy place that's half-way between here and there, and hope that death will be like that and when I make the decision to let go the last sounds I hear will be the quiet conversation of those I love the most sitting in a circle on the beach, talking about life, and digging their toes into the sand.

I have preached in praise of sleep. No one, as yet, has fallen from the windows. Amen. May it be so.



Among the sources for this sermon:
Matt Carmichael, “Get Radical. Get Some Rest,” Utne Reader.
Mary Sykes Wylie, “The No Wake Zone: Can’t Sleep through the night? You’re not supposed to,” from Psychotherapy Networker.
Jeet Heer, “In Praise of Sleep,” National Post (Oct. 7, 2004).
Trudee Romaneck, Zzz…The Most Interesting Book You’ll Ever Read About Sleep.
James Luther Adams, “In Praise of Sleep,” in The Prophethood of All Believers, edited by George K. Beach.
William C. Dement, The Sleepwatchers.


Closing Words:

Recognizing these dimensions of sleep and of theological reflection on sleep, we become aware of the necessity of preparing for grace through meditation and prayer (including prophetic prayer), in order that sleep may become one of nature’s chief nourishers at life’s feast. For even though the whole person is not active in sleep, or at least not in the fashion of the daytime, a sort of work can go on in sleep, a providential, divinely therapeutic work that is not of our own doing or deliberate intention and which lures us on toward integrity and authentic mutuality. From this therapy of redemptive sleep we may sense anew what Job affirmed in the face of pain and loss: "I know that my Redeemer liveth."  (James Luther Adams)