As
St. John often does, he cycles back to a previous topic, only to expand on it
further in the next. As I previously mentioned,
sleep will hinder our prayer life if we allow it. Again with all things, being
created in the image of God, this means that we too have the power to allow
things to happen or not. We choose what we want to do and allow to affect our
lives in the sense that if we succumb to the temptation of fatigue, then we
have rejected the necessity of prayer. One of the most important aspects of spiritual
life is keeping vigil over our souls. Even now as I am tempted to go to bed and reject
finishing this until the morning I know that my thoughts on this matter might
not be the same as they are now, fresh on my mind. But here, St. John gets
deep, deeper than we’ve gone before. Yes he was writing to monks, but if you replace
the word monks with Christians the meaning is still the same. He writes, “Now
let us see how we stand before God our King, when we stand at our prayers in
the evening, or during the day and night. For some at their evening all-night
vigil lift up their hands in prayer as if they were incorporeal and stripped of
all care. Others stand at that time singing psalms. Others are more occupied in
reading. And some out of weakness courageously resist sleep by working with
their hands. Others try to feel the horror of the thought of death, hoping thus
to obtain contrition. And of all these, the first and last are in all-night
vigil for the love of God; the second do what befits a monk; while the third go
the lowest way. Yet God accepts and values the offerings of each according to
their intention and power.” Keeping Vigil over the soul means that you are
watching it, allowing God to guide you and spending your time worshipping and
praising God rather than falling into idleness and sin.
As we look deeper into the world of keeping vigil, we are
looking at the world today and searching for the answers as to how to quench
our bodies from falling into to deeper sin and destruction. St. John writes, “Vigil
is a quenching of lust, deliverance from dream phantoms, a tearful eye, a
softened heart, the guarding of thoughts, the dissolving of food, the subduing
of passions, the taming of spirits, the bridling of the tongue, the banishment
of phantasies.” We keep vigil not
only to pray and praise God, but also to make sure that we are continually
striving towards the openness and the heart filled with the Holy Spirit.
Without doing so, we can fall into the trap of the devil and become more like
them, rejecting God and filling our lives with pleasure rather than with
salvation. Like anything else one wishes to master, vigil takes time and energy
and practice. If one believes they are going to be able to keep long vigil on
the first time they try, then they are greatly deceived. It takes years of
steady practice and growth for people to obtain high levels of vigil and even
then only with God’s help. If we wish to seek it solely on our own, then we have
lost our salvation without even trying. The demons will rejoice at this because
they have seen that their work was not needed to draw one away from God. Furthermore
an abundance of sleep does not do the soul good either. As my priest told me once,
“You can sleep when you’re dead.” Until then, sleep is simply a hinderance to
continuing the fight against Satan and his allies. St. John says, “Long
sleep is an unjust comrade; it robs the lazy of half their life, and even more.”
We spend half of our lives in sleep and lying down. How much more could we
accomplish if we put off the wild slumbers of the enemy and practiced prayer
and vigil during this time? How much more could we grow spiritually, singing
hymns and praising God? Alas, most people will reject this and call me a
fanatic. No, I am not, rather I am someone who cares deeply about God so much,
that I would rather sacrifice my own life for the sake of the Kingdom than to
lose my salvation in slumber and idleness of sleep. St. John says, “It may
happen that continuous meditation on passages of the Psalms is prolonged into
the hour of sleep. And it may happen that the demons put these passages into our
mind in order to lead us to pride. I would not have mentioned the third case,
had not someone forced me to do so. The soul which has spent all day
unceasingly engaged with the word of the Lord will love to be occupied with it
in sleep too. For this second grace is in a special sense a reward for the
first and helps us to avoid falls and phantasies. How much fun and
happiness that would bring to our souls to spend even those hours of our
nightly slumber with the Lord? But if we do not have the proper heart and mindset,
we will be led to pride and our downfall, being puffed up and disobedient
towards God. But how often do we dream of things that we have thought about all
day? I do that a lot. I tend to think about it continuously all day and suddenly
I have a dream that either solves my problem for me, or makes me terrified even
more of the situation at hand. So too with God. If we meditate on his words and
his commandments all day long, then at night at the hour of our sleep, we will
drift into a meditation that will expand our knowledge and foretaste of the
divine. But if we are not careful in guarding our souls, the demons will come
and hijack those meditations and cause our destruction as I mentioned above. But
now is the time to prepare our hearts, our minds for this spiritual struggle.
We have ten rungs left after this, the journey is perilous beyond this point.
Without the proper guidance, we will not be able to continue. May he who has ears
to hear, let him here.
I leave you with the words of St. John as he ended this
rung. He says, “This is the twentieth step. He who has mounted it has received
light in his heart.”
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