"softened only by the light of a single candle"

Here is a small little something, before I go to bed. I would read more, but I've already read my quota for the day, 3 chapters of one single book, --I could read another book, but I want to read this book, so to compensate (and not violate my guidelines), I'm going to blog about a tiny thing it made me wonder.

The book is David Benner's Opening to God: Lectio Divina and Life as Prayer. At the start of chapter 4, he writes an engaging scenario:

"It is 3:20am and I am sitting in church. I am surrounded by darkness that is softened only by the light of a single candle on the altar. In front of me are forty or forty-five monks in white cowls---their hoods up, covering their heads and hiding their faces. They sit in silence, stillness, and expectancy. Together we wait for the beginning of vigils and the first reading of the day from God's word. I am a guest of Saint Joseph's Abbey in Spencer, Massachusetts, here for a retreat. Unlike these monks with whom I share these days of prayerful attentiveness, I do not regularly get up in the middle of the night so I can hear God's word."

What I noted has nothing to do with his point, or really anything in this scene except the time. 3:20 am.

I've struggled with insomnia since I was a child. I blame my vivid imagination --my parents used to tell me to imagine dream homes or to make up stories, thinking that this would make me tired, Ha!

I used to be haunted, it seemed, by the Winchester clock that would ding and chime every quarter hour so that I knew it was 11:00, 12:00, 1:00, 1:15, 1:30... Tip-toed trips down stairs were a regularity for me, so that I could hold the swinging, ticking pendulum and make it stop telling me how much sleep I was missing in the early hours of the morning.

My sleep has definitely gotten better, but I still have moments of wakefulness at night and simply knowing that I'm not asleep when I should be sends a tremor of anxiety.

Now, I know that I have company in the wee hours. When I spend that time praying, silently or softly humming worship songs, reading my bible with tea, and repeating verses to distract my worried mind, I guess I supposed that some people were awake: the night shift and bad guys. It just isn't normal or right to be awake then.

Good grief, I make myself sick by all of my attempts to please them. Whomever they happen to be. Those people, who say that I should be sleeping at 3:20: schools, employers, clocks, schedules, (I was going to write "the sun," but in Alaska when the sun ins't present, people still move and busy themselves), etc.

It is regular and expected for the monastic life to be awake at 3:20 am, and this hour is filled with infinite intention and purpose.

I am realizing that in the smallest things I am a conformist through and through, and always out to criticize myself because he or she or they do something differently.

Last night I told Patrick that I probably don't have a desire for children because evolution knows that I should die off --survival of the fittest and all of that Darwin stuff I learned in school. Runts don't reproduce. He started to laugh, "Maybe you should see a counselor and talk to them about your insecurity, since you think that every bit of you is destined, rightly so -according to you, for extinction."

So it was a serious-turned-funny moment, but the point in all of this is that I like the aha moments, when I realize that it's okay to be me, because other people are being themselves, and we aren't all one single person doing and being what and who we ought to do and be.

Savvy?