How About a Little Reverie?
1st Sunday of Advent
Mark 13:33-37
November 29, 2020
Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
Church of the Redeemer Episcopal
Morristown, New Jersey
Ten months ago tomorrow the Centers for Disease Control announced the first person-to-person transmission of COVID-19 in the United States. The CDC Director Robert Redfield assured us that “based on what we know now, we still believe the immediate risk to the American public is low.” Seldom has such tragic ignorance been offered in the service of such fleeting bliss.
Our lives and our shared life have taken a terrible hit. We are grieving our many losses. We are approaching 1.5 million known dead across the globe, with the daily death toll now above 10,000 per day, a fifth of those in what we used to think was the most advanced nation on earth.
We are grieving. Too many have lost those whom we love. All of us are grieving the life we used to call normal. Our daughter Beth teaches eight-graders in a district using a hybrid model of remote and in-person instruction. To protect her daughter (our granddaughter) Diana, Beth is living alone for now. I hope you will forgive me if I express my admiration for her: this is a heroism I can barely fathom. It is a measure of how much things have changed that we are grateful that we could Zoom in her simulacrum to join us for Thanksgiving Dinner.
Some of us are coping, doing what needs to be done, our supports holding for now. Others are struggling to maintain any sense of control or well-being. Some have been pressed into a panic mode. And many of us sort of slide along the scale as circumstances and energy vary. I don’t know anyone who is thriving. We are drinking more1, eating more2, and exercising less3. I have yet to hear anyone say, “Well, at least we’re getting enough high-quality sleep!” In fact two-thirds of us report that our sleep quality has worsened in the last ten months.4
So, imagine how thrilled I was to discover that the gospel reading for the First Sunday of Advent is a parable that tells us—four times, no less—to “Stay awake!” And, lest we think that translation issues might have made this harsher than it should be, the word that is used doesn’t simply mean to avoid sleeping. No, it means vigilant wakefulness, the kind that lets us stay on guard, attentive to the risks and unknown dangers around us. A less helpful or welcome lesson I cannot imagine.
This idea of wakefulness, of vigilance, as a virtue isn’t original with Jesus. It’s a common theme in the literature of Jesus’ time in which God’s faithful people must go through great hardship. There may seem to be no end in sight for them, but they must not lose hope. Their rescue is on the way; something new is coming; creation is about to be remade. God’s people must stay alert to the signs of its coming, just as sentries in a besieged city watch eagerly for the arrival of a rescuing army.
Vigils—periods of the night spent in prayer—were a feature of the devotional life of early Christians and from there passed into the practice of monastics. Even a casual reader of early monastic writings can see that sleep deprivation was an integral part of the lives of the holy women and men who lived in the deserted spaces of Egypt and Syria.
Nowadays going without sleep has become a late capitalist virtue. Sleeping people neither produce nor consume anything. Sleeping people are economically meaningless. Accordingly, as capitalism has developed, we spend less and less time asleep. In the last century the average night’s sleep has fallen from ten hours to six and a half.5 In place of the praying monastic the sleepless entrepreneur is offered as an ideal.
For the Pentagon, 24/7 hyper-vigilance is a desired trait in its fighters. Some veterans have become such perfect embodiments of that injunction to keep watch that they cannot sit down in a room unless they are facing the door. This is just one feature of post-traumatic stress disorder. Many PTSD sufferers drink too much, eat too much, and don’t get enough exercise. They also have trouble sleeping.
I wonder if we aren’t all suffering from some attenuated form of PTSD. The trauma that we are going through is certainly not as intense as combat, but merely knowing that a quarter of a million of our friends, family members, colleagues, and neighbors have died—so far—while our President refuses even to acknowledge that we have been harmed is injury enough.
Is Jesus suggesting that we give up one of our last restorative strategies in order to spend our nights stoking our anxieties (and weakening our immune systems while we are at it)? If so, then I suggest we ignore this parable. I cannot see how voluntary sleeplessness can be anything other than a way of underscoring just how apocalyptically God-awful it is to live during a pandemic.
It was hard enough for me getting to this point. I’m a little tempted to leave it there and walk away. “Listen for the what the Spirit is saying.” “Thanks be to God!” indeed.
But it’s the First Sunday of Advent. Jody reminds me that Advent is her favorite liturgical season. She expects something Advent-y (her word).
Hoping to avoid the ugliness that may ensue I therefore turn back to the text. My attention focused by fear, I notice a couple of things. The first is that one little word is caring a lot of freight. “It is like” is how my version translated it. “It is like a man going on a journey...” It is like. But “like” is not the same as “is.” The parable is offered to us as like, as a simile of, as a figure of speech about a man going on a journey. “It is like a man” in some ways; but that means it is unlike a man in others. The trick is in untangling like from unlike. So, in what ways could a doorkeeper who never stops keeping watch be like us? Are there other possibilities than hyper-vigilant insomnia? If so, what are they?
The figure of the watching doorkeeper waiting for the absent master is a part of that apocalyptic literature in which history gets worse and worse until, with a bang, it ends and is replaced by God’s dream. God’s dream erupts into our world bringing a new creation.
God’s dream is like this, but also unlike this. More often God’s dream hovers at the edge of our awareness, doing its work but mostly unnoticed. It lingers at the limits of sight. It percolates below our consciousness. It teases at us, just out of reach.
This parable, then, could be read as an urgent plea for us to pay attention to what is happening mostly beyond our awareness and completely beyond our control. It comes to me in the moments between wakefulness and sleep when suddenly and unbidden there is what I can only describe as an almost-revelation of rightness, of sanity, of restoration. And then it is gone and I cannot remember why or how it was sane or even what it was that was restored and there remains only a longing for what almost is but isn’t…not yet, anyway.
This state is akin to reverie, when our guard is down, when our minds wander off and the task at hand (if there is one) is happily forgotten. It is the very opposite of productivity. It is useless to the system and there are whole shelves in bookstores dedicated to advice about how to stop “procrastinating” in favor of engaged thinking.
Advent takes place in the not-here/not-there spaces of our lives as in the imperial advents of Roman days in the not-here/not-there space between the urban centers of politics, business, and administration and the open spaces of the countryside. The advent of God’s dream comes in the cracks, the fissures, and the half-dreaming reverie of our lives. In this sense, nothing has really changed. For it is not in Rome or Washington or other center of imperial power that God’s dream creeps in to dwell with us, but in the college student facing down imperial storm-troopers, in the listening voice at the other end of the telephone line, in midst of the poverty of a peasant family finding respite in a stable from the whims of a far-away ruler, If we must be attentive as Jesus instructs us, let us be attentive to those places for they are where we will glimpse God’s dream.
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1Michael S. Pollard, Joan S. Tucker, and Harold D. Green, “Changes in Adult Alcohol Use and Consequences During the COVID-19 Pandemic in the US,” JAMA Network Open 3, no. 9 (September 29, 2020): e2022942, https://doi.org/10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2020.22942.
2AJ Owen et al., “Poor Appetite and Overeating Reported by Adults in Australia during the Coronavirus-19 Disease Pandemic: A Population-Based Study,” Public Health Nutrition, n.d., 1–7, https://doi.org/10.1017/S1368980020003833.
3Jaime Ducharme, “COVID-19 Is Making Americans More Sedentary,” Time, May 12, 2020, https://time.com/5831678/covid-19-americans-exercise/.
4Matthew Gavidia, “How Have Sleep Habits Changed Amid COVID-19?,” AJMC, June 2, 2020, https://www.ajmc.com/view/how-have-sleep-habits-changed-amid-covid-19.
5Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Terminal Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (London & New York: Verso, 2013), 11.
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