Sunday 15 May 2011

Sleep as Worship

I'm intrigued by this, via the improbably named rob helpy-chalk:
There's a bit in 100 Years of Solitude which describes a wise priest whose afternoon meditations on scripture had become so subtle he was actually asleep. I've had something like that happen to me both in Buddhist meditation and Quaker meeting, although it is not really appropriate for either.
Why not appropriate? Isn't sleep (as opposed to dreaming, which presumably has a different set of religious valences) a perfect passivity, a perfect harmlessness, the epitome of Christian observance? I don't mean this as snark: I love to sleep. De Quincey says something like this somewhere ...

No comments: