Andrew Bishop, Theosomnia: A Christian Theology of Sleep

Abstract

We spend about a third of our lives asleep, ‘dead to the world’, but intensely alive. Our culture often sees sleep as an affliction or at best a regrettable necessity, time lost from meeting the demands on our attention, commitments and actions. In Theosomnia, Andrew Bishop seeks to reclaim sleep as a gift, a state of grace – not a sin – and in doing so he offers a spiritually searching, rich and profound ‘systematic theology of sleep’. Don’t be put off by the word ‘systematic’, for what we have here is a thoroughly readable, frequently moving, intellectually stretching and spiritually lively invitation to search further into the mysterious experience of sleep. Bishop rightly rejects the traditional theological method of offering a critical survey of the literature before offering his own conclusions. Instead, he finds his theological resources in the way Christians use liturgy, speak and pray, sing and act, and offer counsel to others around the times of preparing for sleep, seeking a good sleep, and experiencing wakefulness within the time set aside for sleep. He bases the structure of his exploration on the distinct parts of the liturgy for Night Prayer. A particularly refreshing insight, and one with the capacity to transform Christian living and ministry, is Bishop’s understanding of the connections between sleep and wakefulness. He reflects the creation story – ‘And there was evening and there was morning, the first day’ – that the start of a day is not when we wake with a diary full of commitments, but in the evening as we prepare for the sleep that will lead us to awake to a new day. So, the day of God’s grace begins with the act of trustful resting into the night of God’s peace. The connections between sleep and waking and dying and resurrection are clear throughout the book as Bishop draws on a wide range of biblical material, poetry (Thomas Browne’s celebrated seventeenth-century meditation on sleep provides a particularly fruitful resource), sayings of the Fathers, and contemporary theologians as diverse as Ben Quash and Joseph Ratzinger. Sleep is not unconsciousness, but transformed and transforming consciousness, ‘thin time’, populated with dreams, fantasies and wonderings that reveal more about the truth of our desires and longings than we might easily recognize in our waking life. ‘I sleep, yet my heart wakes’ is a key text taking us into the world where our desires and God’s grace and love are brought together. Bishop has titled his book with the neologism Theosomnia – ‘God-Sleep’ – to indicate ‘hallowed sleep. . . intentionally open to God; [that] is blessed by God; and is offered to God’ (p. 24). Sleep is an increasingly complex and mysterious field to explore, so his structure of preparation for sleep, trustfulness into sleep, vigilance in wakefulness and looking to the morning gives a clarity, freshness and joyfulness to this original and thoroughly stimulating offering of systematic practical theology.