Vigils, Descending the Night Stairs
“I wake and feel the fell of night, not day.”
~Gerard Manley Hopkins
Amid the ruins of England’s medieval monasteries, one can still see traces of the “night stairs” which led directly down from the monastic dormitories to the church below—the most direct route for the monks to take to keep the vigil of the Night Office, the prayers prescribed by the Rule of Saint Benedict for the middle of the night.
In Northumbria’s Hexham Abbey the entire flight of night stairs remains intact, thirty-five stone steps smoothly worn to a polished concavity by centuries of monks, rising in the dark and descending to pray—sometimes until morning.
I find the sight of those worn stairs deeply moving—powerful mute testimony to enduring monastic devotion. I find it even more remarkable that monks and nuns all over the world (as well as laypeople who feel drawn to and sustained by the monastic practice of fixed-hour prayer) still rise from their beds in the middle of the night just to praise God.
They do this on purpose, I remind myself in wonder.
Even though presumably they may sometimes be groggy with lack of sleep, reluctant to leave their warm beds, those women and men remain steadfastly obedient to their vows, true to choices made with all their hearts.
Apart from some enthusiastic monastic retreats made when I was young (these days I confess I resolutely sleep through vigils), I have only risen voluntarily in the middle of the night, obedient to promises made and to the immediate needs of love, to nurse my infant daughters in the small hours, or to comfort them when they woke in the night with illness or alarm. I remember those quiet vigils as some of the tenderest moments in all my mothering. I did not begrudge those wakings then, and would not trade them now for any amount of unbroken slumber.
And I continue to admire the deliberate, disciplined nighttime wakefulness of duty or of love, the voluntary vigils of nuns and monks, of nurses and firefighters and young parents—all “those who work or watch or weep” by night.
At this point in my own life, however, I am awake in the night only—and most definitely—against my will.
These days (these nights) I am intimately and reluctantly acquainted with the un-willed, much-dreaded, mid-night wakefulness of simple insomnia.
Sometimes—far more often than I like to admit—with the Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins “I wake and feel the fell of night, not day.”
I dread those nights. I fear and loathe them.
I court sleep shamelessly, even superstitiously. I follow all the earnest advice I can find. (And there is a lot of it out there: an estimated sixty million adults in the United States suffer from insomnia. Our name is legion.)
I never drink coffee past noon; I read only soothing books after nine in the evening; I try to go to bed at the same time each night, in a consistently quiet, dark, cool room. I have taken thousands of warm lavender-scented baths, counted millions of sheep, drunk oceans of hot milk and chamomile tea, and swallowed every herbal and over-the-counter sleep remedy on the market. (For one long especially desperate season, I even resorted to prescription sleeping pills, which I came to recognize as too draconian a remedy even for me.)
Nevertheless, sleep has become increasingly elusive. More and more, I find myself unaccountably awake in the far reaches of the night, and completely unable to go back to sleep.
Those are times when “I wake and feel the fell of night”—“fell” in all the ancient meanings of the word: night as a vast mountain, a devastating blow, a deadly poison.
In another of his so-called “terrible sonnets,” Hopkins declared that the
“…mind has mountains; cliffs of fall
Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed…”
Sometimes, insomniac, we find ourselves in those wild steep mountains of the mind, alone in a terrifying landscape of insurmountable problems and precipices of despair. A vast Mount Doom of anxiety or dread that we have managed to hold at bay during all the busy daylight hours can loom inexorably over us at two in the morning, brutally demanding our attention, blocking out the sky.
Or it may not be present trouble or future catastrophe that rises up implacably before our sleepless eyes: it may be the demons of the past that take us hostage. Sometimes we are swept off our feet and whirled down into maelstroms of painful memory—into what Joan Didion in her memoir The Year of Magical Thinking called “the vortex” –a turbulent downward spiral into bottomless, devouring grief.
At other times, the “fell of night” may be a dark potion of anger or resentment, bitter and stimulating as espresso, deadly as nightshade. This last form of insomnia seems to me to be the most dangerous because it is, paradoxically, the most seductive: the only “fell of night” in my experience that contains an element of pleasure.
Grief and fear I avoid by night as well as day. But there is something morbidly satisfying about anger, something secretly delicious in a sense of injury.
Sometimes I wake in the night with a racing heart, realizing that I have been dreaming of vengeance against someone who has (I feel sure) done me wrong. Then, in a kind of macabre parody of those tender moments years ago when I held my infant daughters close in the night, I realize I am nursing those grudges. They are such promising little scraps of outrage. With proper care and feeding, they could grow up to be real monsters of self-aggrandizing offendedness.
Then, like Margaret in Gail Godwin’s novel Evensong, I find myself quite determined to protect my resentment, “to cherish my hot coal of umbrage, holding it close to my chest, guarding its heat even if it [is] slowly searing a hole in my heart.”
So that is my predicament.
There I am, awake in the night, tangled in the shrouds of untamed sleepless darkness. Peering over an abyss of fear or up a towering impasse of trouble. Or about to spiral downward into grief, or tempted to nurse grudges until dawn.
Is there anything to be done about these waking nightmares? Does this plain (and humiliating) physiological failure to sleep even rise to the level of a spiritual issue? More to the point, does it have anything at all to do with prayer?
Yes. Yes, and yes.
But it is important at this point to remember that the middle of the night is not the time for heroic struggles with demons, or for problem solving, or complicated analysis or even a full confession of sin. The traditional “night office” of vigils is marked by simple confidence in God in whom there is no darkness at all, not by intercession or even petition beyond the psalmist’s succinct “I am thine; save me” (Psalms 119:94).
The goal in the small hours—the point of night prayer in real (faithful but non-monastic) life—is simply to move away from the edge of the precipice, the devouring rim of the vortex—to push away the poisoned cup of resentment. And, if possible, to act on the faith implicit in “save me” by going back to sleep.
In my life, this night vigil can be a kind of journey—even if I never so much as swing my feet over the side of the bed. Sometimes, I am enabled (without moving) to move from my paralyzing fear or dread or sorrow (“I am so troubled that I cannot speak” Psalms 77:4) to awareness of the reality of the situation (“the Lord lightens my darkness” Psalms 18:28), and from there to consolation and quietness of heart (“return O my soul to your rest, for the Lord has dealt bountifully with you” Psalms 116:7).
One of the talismans I keep by my bed to comfort me in my occasional nocturnal “fellings” is a small photograph of those worn night stairs at Hexham Abbey. It reminds me that I am not alone in being wakeful in the night. I am companioned in my apparent isolation by a whole cloud of witnesses—by all those who, like me, are or ever have been awake in the night.
A traditional prayer for the night hours is for protection from “the snares of the enemy.” And one of the most effective of those snares is the illusion that we are alone or captive in the dark, when in fact we are both companioned and set free.
In A Grief Observed, written after the death of his beloved wife Joy, C.S. Lewis warned about this possibility of self-deception, noting how he, in his sorrow, was “utterly mistaken as to the situation he [was] really in.” We may imagine that we are alone (he wrote), and in total darkness, in a cellar or a dungeon. But then there is a small sound:
“It might be a sound from far off—waves or windblown trees or cattle half a mile off. And if so, it proves [we are] not in a cellar, but free, in the open air. Or it may be a much smaller sound, close at hand—a chuckle of laughter. And if so, there is a friend just beside [us] in the dark. Either way, a good good sound.”
Our apparent isolation and imprisonment are revealed to be illusion. We are not alone. We are not in chains. And not only are we companioned in our sleepless nights, we are free.
Part of that freedom is the liberty to descend (like those medieval monks and nuns) our own night stairs.
We too can—but without even leaving our beds—move from the edge of the precipice to a safe place, a stable point of connection with other believers in all times and places. And from there we can move to wordless gratitude and trust for the Presence of the One who is with us always.
The desert fathers and mothers of the 4th century longed for, and disciplined themselves to achieve, hesychasm—a form of prayer characterized by interior silence, quietness, and rest.
They described this prayer as the process of bringing the mind into the heart. They specifically called this process of quieting the busy mind the “descent”of the mind to the heart—a process that requires great self-control, humility, patience and perseverance, but may (if God so wills) end in mystical union with the Lord Himself.
One does not, in beginning to practice this prayer of quiet, repudiate or abandon the mind. The challenge is not, it seems, so much to leave the busy and talkative mind behind on the journey into God as to bring it along so that it might be contained and quieted within the capacious heart, which is where God dwells in us.
For the desert ascetics of the 4th century—and monks and nuns today—this business of the descent of the mind to the heart is no sentimental metaphor of spiritual progress, but an actual interior movement, a labor of love in which they rejoice to spend their whole lives.
For me—captivated as I am by the image of those night stairs in the abbey—this suggests that one might almost bodily pick up the demanding mind (like a fretful child or a cumbersome parcel or a wounded animal) and carry it down from the monastic dormitory to the quiet empty darkness of the heart at night.
In fact, that is often exactly the way I imagine it.
My mind, in the small hours, is usually wide awake to an unhealthy degree—indulging in a kind of overcaffeinated buzz of grandiose overwrought urgencies, squalling and kicking its heels and refusing to be put off with promises of attention in the morning.
In those moments, it is a huge relief just to lift my mind and take it, in the imagination of my heart, down those stone stairs to the chapel, where I lay it gently but firmly on the altar. There is no violence in this action, no harm done to my mind or my soul (or the altar); there is only grateful surrender, a relinquishment of all my mental drama to quietness and peace beyond my own contriving.
In the venerable Christian tradition of pilgrimage, there is a remarkably similar gesture, at once costly and liberating. When one makes pilgrimage to the shrine of a saint, it is customary to leave something on the altar. The offering can of course be something of worldly value, a donation to the shrine or the saint, a gift of gold in gratitude for prayers answered. But sometimes what one places on the altar is instead something the pilgrim wants to be rid of—a burden of sin or sorrow, perhaps a specific memory or grudge. In either case, one may not go back and reclaim whatever has been offered. Left on the altar, it belongs now to God.
On the sleepless nights when I am actually able (by a combination of those old friends, will and grace) to make such a descent with the mind to the heart, sometimes I am too worn out to do more than stay there in the stillness until morning. Sometimes (in the spacious and generous geography of my heart’s sanctuary) I might slide into one of the choir stalls, or curl up on the altar steps. I may rest quietly now, which was impossible “upstairs”—chivvied by my wakeful, grizzling mind.
I am content just to know that I have handed over the problem, whatever it was, and let go of it. It is restful to know that I need not—may not—pick it up again. At those times, I am thankful that I am safe, no longer on the edge of a cliff or in dangerous proximity to poisonous thoughts. But I am without the strength to climb back up the stairs to sleep.
However, one of the helpful aspects of the photograph of the Hexham Abbey night stairs that I keep by my bed is the visual perspective it offers. The photograph was taken from the foot of the stairs, looking up, making the emphatic point that the stairs not only descend to the church but ascend back to the dormitory again as well.
There can be yet another “snare of the enemy” hidden in a desire to stay awake in the small hours, to imitate God who neither slumbers nor sleeps. There can be a kind of arrogance implicit in the reluctance to lose consciousness. Like resolutely anxious fliers who are convinced that it is their white knuckles alone that keep the plane in the air, we can persuade ourselves that there is something necessary, even heroic in our sleeplessness.
I have noticed in insomniacs—I have noticed in myself—a trace of scorn for those for whom sleep comes easily, a whiff of pride in belonging to the elect fraternity of the suffering sleepless. I confess I have not always been disturbed by Vladimir Nabokov’s declaration that sleep is “a nightly betrayal of reason, humanity, genius.”
It is easy—and it is perilous—to believe that insomnia somehow confers or implies genius, a noble lonely watchfulness maintained while our less brilliant brothers and sisters placidly surrender their minds to sleep like cattle.
In the initial conversion experience that Elizabeth Gilbert relates in her memoir Eat, Pray, Love, she describes one particularly terrible sleepless night during a time of painful disarray in her life. Writhing in theatrical agony on the bathroom floor, without really meaning to pray, she finds herself weeping, begging the God in whom she is not sure she believes to tell her what to do. And to her amazement she receives a clear response: “Go back to bed, Liz,” God tells her firmly.
When we have confessed our helplessness to help ourselves, when we are at the end of our ropes, when we have surrendered our burdens to the Lord, then it is meet and right to go back to bed. That is in fact a sign of the authenticity of our surrender, an index of our trust (and obedience and humility). As the psalmist put it, “in peace I will both lie down and sleep, for thou alone, O Lord, makest me dwell in safety.”
Endless repetition of the “Jesus Prayer” (“Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me”) has for centuries been considered a most excellent way (as the famous Way of the Pilgrim recounts) to facilitate the mind’s descent to the heart. Eventually, as the pilgrim’s wise guide (staretz) explains in the book, this trusting appeal to the unfailing mercy of God, made without ceasing, will become so united to our bodies, so linked with every breath, every beat of our heart, that we will be utterly joined to Christ. We will eventually breathe Jesus.
Even in our sleep, the pilgrim discovers, the prayer continues. Somehow, beyond our own effort, the Holy Spirit prays within us “with sighs too deep for words.” We need not stay awake to keep the mind in the heart (which is where it belongs, where God wants it to be, where our mind’s true self longs to be at home).
The goal of this heart-deep prayer is integration. As the Lady Julian put it, “prayer makes the soul one with God.” The desert hermits knew this union to be so profound that it amounted to deification (theosis): made one with God, we somehow become part of God.
This is the weight of glory promised in Scripture and sacrament: eternal union with God, as God wills. Sometimes, the great mystics tell us, this union is granted in this life, an ecstatic vision of the uncreated light in which God dwells. This is the very light of Christ, the light that shines in the darkness that the darkness has not overcome. This is the “deep but dazzling darkness” that Henry Vaughn and Saint John of the Cross described.
Sometimes, as the Carmelite poet Jessica Powers put it, “what had been night reels with unending eucharists of light.”
However, this ecstatic vision is not, the hesychasts insist, the goal of those who pray in this way. In fact, such mystical experiences may be dangerous and must not be sought and are rarely granted.
I confess this is reassuring to me. In my own limited and lowly experience of taking my mind down the night stairs to my heart, the night remains night. Darkness is still dark.
But when I have laid the burden of my noisy mind on the altar of my quiet heart, the abiding darkness is, though not banished, nevertheless certainly transformed. It is no longer terrifying. It has no power over me. The night is no longer “fell.” I am not alone. I am not forfeit to the darkness, which is not dark to God, and which in fact is full of God.
Even if we lie awake until morning, we may rest in God. We may rest on the planet God loved into being, “this fragile earth our island home” that, even in the middle of the darkest night, flies swiftly toward the dawn.
Ancient Hebrew wisdom about the ordering of time knows that every day since the beginning of Creation begins with night: “it was evening, and it was morning, one day,” Genesis 1:5 reminds us.
“We are here in the land of dreams,” C.S. Lewis wrote. “But cockcrow is coming. It is nearer now than when I began this letter.”
Even in our longest, sleepless vigils, morning is coming. In fact, it has already begun.
Books by Deborah Smith Douglas
