What to do when sleep forsakes you
“The ability to sleep may well forsake us, leaving us wakeful for two or three hours in those darkest and most interminable hours of the night, say from two to five. This can be a real affliction: we can toss and turn and try angrily to fall asleep again. Or it can be an opportunity…
Now, in those wide-open night hours, we can begin to learn what “part of the creation” we have been praying to without knowing it, riches, strength, beauty, health, or whatever; we can watch what we do so we can find out who we are. Perhaps as we do so we can enlarge and re-focus our prayer, until we find, some fine night, that we are not so much praying as being prayed through, and all our own best hopes and the hopes of the world are flowing through us. Such prayer comes and goes; it is not at our bidding. But if it happens even once, perhaps that is enough. We have had a glimpse of what prayer can be.”
— Mary C. Morrison, 1993
Quaker teacher and writer
Today’s Invitation
Pray and be prayed through.
This Week’s Query
How has your relationship to quietude, solitude and stillness changed during your life?
What are the spiritual fruits of solitude?
Read the source of today’s quote
Banner art by Georgia Peterson
