Ladder of Divine Ascent: Rung 20

 

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.”

Ladder of Divine Ascent: Rung 19

 

We are now at rung nineteen, and we are dealing with sleep. Everyone likes it, everyone needs it, but is it really the best for us? Well both yes and no. Obviously the Lord grants us recovery from our weakness with sleep. We are able to heal and recover from illness with sleep. Sleep in itself is not a bad thing. However like anything in the Orthodox world, too much of something becomes a bad thing. In the same way, too much sleep becomes a bad thing. St. John says, “Just as prolonged drinking is a matter of habit, so too from habit comes too much sleeping. Therefore we must struggle with the question of sleep, especially in the easy days of obedience, because a long-standing habit is difficult to cure.”  So there we have it folks, Sleep causes us to lose our obedience. Lately I have been having trouble sleeping, rather I have been staying up, reading through the Ladder and through various other texts as I continue to compile my thoughts down, which is why there have been so many articles lately. As such, I have been discovering that through prayer I have also gained energy and revitalization that I was previously lacking. Sleep hinders us from keeping watch over our souls, as it did the apostles during the arresting of Jesus. We see that through this, they were physically and spiritually weak. Not regarding the commands of their master and teacher, who had shown them the devotion to God for those years they were with Him. In turn, they show us what we become when we do not heed the words of the master. St. John says, “Let us observe and we shall find that the spiritual trumpet serves as an outward signal for the gathering of the brethren, but it is also the unseen signal for the assembly of our foes. So some of them stand by our bed and when we get up urge us to lie down again: ‘Wait,’ they say, ‘till the preliminary hymns are finished; then you can go to church.’ Others plunge those standing at prayer into sleep. Some produce severe, unusual pains in the stomach. Others egg us on to make conversation in church. Some entice the mind to shameful thoughts. Others make us lean against the wall as though from fatigue. Sometimes they involve us in fits of yawning. Some of them bring on waves of laughter during prayer, thereby desiring to stir up the anger of God against us. Some force us to hurry the reading or singing—merely from laziness; others suggest that we should sing more slowly for the pleasure of it; and sometimes they sit at our mouths and shut them, so that we can scarcely open them. He who realizes that he is standing before God will be as still as a pillar during prayer and will pray with heartfelt feeling; and none of the aforesaid demons will make sport of him.”  So let’s once again delve into what St. John is saying and why this is important for our spiritual lives.

So the demons have hijacked our sleep. What a surprise. We know, being immortal and incorporeal they do the work of their own master, the devil who when they have grasped a hold of us, try with earnest to bring us down. So why should our sleep be one of the hinderances to their own plans? We see the demons try and develop in us a sense that sleep is good, that sleep will cure us from whatever ailments we have. They also try to use our own frailty against us, creating in us a fatigue that makes us perform all sorts of wicked deeds. From talking in church, to hurriedly singing the appointed hymns to even slowing them down, because it weakens our minds. We yawn, we have shameful thoughts, and we constantly laugh when we shouldn’t. All things I have discussed and pointed out. All this stirs within us the anger of God, that we would violate his sacred commandments over a few moments of respite. When we are appointed to talk our brains become mush and the words that we know and are supposed to be saying cannot come out from our mouths. Sometimes we have overindulged in eating so much that upon waking or before sleep we try to quench the belly for a moment of peace. Instead of taming ourselves we once again fall victim to the passions. Of course, the most egregious, is that when we want to attend church services and the liturgy in particular, the demons tell us that we need more sleep on a Sunday morning and so instead of forcing ourselves to go through with we know to be right, we return to bed, comforted by the warm cozy sheets that we have laid out.  They also try to make us skip Orthros, meaning we miss the reading of the lives of the saints, and we miss  getting to have spiritual food fed to us, for the well-being of our souls. And yet, all of this could be avoided if we merely decided to give ourselves a slap in the face and tell our minds that we can sleep once the job at hand has taken place. Maybe that means waking up five minutes early so you can get to church on time. Setting an alarm, whatever works. The monks would use a semantron to wake themselves up. The alarms on our phones would work just as well. Being able to force ourselves to do something usually yields the best results. And it wouldn’t be a struggle if it was easy.

There is a lot to digest from that quote from St. John. After the next rung, we will be two thirds of the way through and nearing the completion of this monumental task that has been laid before us. If we are to achieve any spiritual growth from this, we must learn to curtail ourselves and sleep. While it is good to rest for even the Lord rested on the seventh day, we cannot fall into perpetual laziness to the point that it interferes with our work and with our spiritual life. Going about our lives with a clear conscience means we must reject the idleness of sinners and force ourselves to do the things God has called us to do. It is difficult to get up at 5:30am on a Monday morning to say the prayers before we begin our day. Even more so when one has worked an eight hour shift and comes home to say the prayers before sleep. Our minds failing from the exhaustion placed upon them from the toils of this life, must be rejuvenated with supplication and prayers. Without this, we will not serve God in the full capacity that we are called to do. May God grant us freedom from sleep that we might serve God in fullness and faith.

Amen.