A beginning and some sleep

Welcome to the Pendleton's End house church blog. Ideally, this should be a place where the members of our house church can share thoughts, ideas, and prayer requests without barraging one another with email via listserv. If you would like to share something with the group mid-week, this is one excellent way to do it.

I'd like to start by offering this interesting article from Books and Culture Magazine. "Sleep Therapy", by Lauren F. Winner.

When folks from my local church gather for an evening meal or adult education class, we usually close with Compline, the nighttime service from the Book of Common Prayer. This service--in which we pray for a peaceful night and a perfect end, repeating the nunc dimittis (originally uttered by Simeon in a somewhat different context, asking God to let his servant depart in peace)--—is helping me to understand sleep as part of faithfulness. For it is sheer hypocrisy to pray with my community for a peaceful night and a perfect end if I know I am going home to put in three or four more hours answering email.
...
It's not just that a countercultural embrace of sleep bears witness to values higher than "the cares of this world, the deceitfulness of riches, and the desire for other things." A night of good sleep--a week, or month, or year of good sleep--—also testifies to the basic Christian story of Creation. We are creatures, with bodies that are finite and contingent. For much of Western history, the poets celebrated sleep as a welcome memento mori, a reminder that one day we will die: hence Keats's ode to the "sweet embalmer" sleep, and Donne's observation, "Natural men have conceived a twofold use of sleep; that it is a refreshing of the body in this life; that it is a preparing of the soul for the next." Is it any surprise that in a society where we try to deny our mortality in countless ways, we also deny our need to sleep?

[Edited 2006.11.15 to repair the dead link to article]