Does anybody else sometimes sleep until noon?

Ok, not much theology or music today because I didn't get moving until well past 12 noon!  Does that happen for anybody else?  Clergy?  Retired folk? Musicians and artists? Parents?  Man, was I beat.

I recall once that a monk friend told me something like, "If you fall asleep during your time of prayer, it means that your prayers were answered and you needed the rest."  (Grant this was the same monk who also noted that at the end of a rough week, it is sometimes wise to recall that "hard times are one of the reasons God invented 'happy hour!'" so I'm just sayin...)  Still almost always when I would go away for a time of personal spiritual retreat - an Oasis Day in the Caritas movement or a time of silence at the hermitage in Tucson - after settling in, I would always sleep for hours before getting into the rhythm of prayer and reflection.  Small wonder that my favorite gospel passage is:  Come unto me all ye who are tired and heavy-laden and I shall give thee rest!
Doing ministry is, I must confess, exhausting for me.  I love it, but being a closet introvert means I've learned to compensate.  And at the end of a week - or a Sunday - I find myself physically crashing into sleep, blessed sleep.  Over the past month, I've been having trouble sleeping at night given the side effects of a recent medication for GERD.  After about two weeks, I found myself agitated and depressed.  Then I was totally unable to get to sleep, too.  I thought I was going mad - which was a powerful personal encounter with what other people experiencing depression must deal with all the time - so until I got that drug out of my system, it was rough going.  Thankfully, that issue has been resolved and I'm getting back into my old groove.

Still, it has been said that many of us in the overly scheduled, all-too-productive industrialized West are sleep deprived. "For the past few years, the Sleep in America polls - conducted on behalf of the National Sleep Foundation - have provided a snapshot of the nation's bedroom woes. Today, about 20% of Americans report that they get less than 6 hours of sleep on average, and the number of Americans that report that they get 8 hours of more has decreased." (http://www.webmd.com/sleep-disorders/features/toll-of-sleep-loss-in-america)  I know that during the month of March, I was forgetful, cranky, sometimes confused and really blue.  It didn't help, of course, that March is a mean-spirited season in these parts with lots of mud and almost no sunshine.  What's more, it was the end of Lent moving into Holy Week (and I am SO grateful I switched meds before the demands of Palm Sunday, Maundy Thursday, Good Friday and Easter hit.)

For most people, getting less than six hours sleep translates into a bigger sleep debt than they may realize. Over a two-week period, missing out on the recommended eight hours of nightly sleep adds up to two full nights' sleep debt, one study found. If you're averaging only four hours a night, your brain reacts as though you haven't slept at all for three consecutive nights. The most worrisome part: Many people are too tired to realize how sleep-deprived they are, experts say. But they have slower reaction time, weaker memory, and other thinking impairments.

I know that sleep deprivation is used as a form of torture but I also wonder what it means for our deeper spiritual lives when our young men and women no longer dream dreams (because they are sleep deprived) and our retired folk no longer discern visions?  I remember reading years ago that R.D. Laing thought we had moved into an era not unlike the prophesy of the Amos:  "Behold, the days come, saith the Lord God, that I will send a famine in the land, not a famine of bread, nor a thirst for water, but of hearing the words of the Lord: and they shall wander from sea to sea, and from the north even to the east, they shall run to and fro to seek the word of the Lord, and shall not find it."

Hmmmm, guess I can't get away from the theology even when I'm tired.  Or the music either...

Well, today is our Sabbath day and sleeping was nourishing.  In an hour we're off to farm and hill country for dinner with our daughter.  Then Di will be away for 10 days on their farm taking care of chores as they travel west and she gets her own quiet retreat.  I like what Sr. Joan Chittister has written about the "ordered life" of praying the hours in the Benedictine tradition:

Benedict scheduled prayer times during the day (also rest times) to coincide with the times of the changing of the Roman imperial guard.  When the world was revering its secular rulers, Benedict taught us to give our homage to God, the divine ruler of heaven and earth. There was to be no stopping at the obvious, at the lesser, for a Benedictine. The point is clear:  there is to be no time, no thing, that absorbs us so much that we lose contact with the God of life; no stress so tension-producing, no burden so complex, no work so exhausting that God is not our greatest agenda, our constant companion, our rest and our refuge.  More, whatever other people worship, we are to keep our hearts and minds on God.

Rest well...