April 3, 2020 - Night Prayer our practice for death

Yesterday we reflected on the importance of praying always, and how each of us can practically do this. Keeping our hearts and minds aware of God's presence we can carry the spirit of prayer throughout the day. Thus all that we say and do will in a real sense be our prayer. This keeps us praying during the times of the day when we are conscious or awake, so then what about when we are sleeping?

A great question! How can we make sleep a prayer, or prayerful? Certainly we cannot control what we dream, and it may seem that our night sleep is exempt from the command to pray always. However, I object to this reasoning and answer that we can have some control over our dreams and that our night sleep is the opportunity for our greatest prayer yet!

First regarding our control over our dreams, we can and should control what we do just before we go to sleep. What we do throughout our day and what we do right before we go to sleep can have a significant impact of what we dream. In order to make sleep a prayerful time, we should prepare well for sleep. First things we should try to limit or avoid before going to sleep: (1) Video games or screen time on our phones - texting, email., games, etc..., (2) Entertaining any impure or indecent thoughts, and (3) Watching TV or movies, perhaps with the one exception of it being a prayerful and holy show/movie. 

Now and more importantly here are some things we should do before going to sleep. (1) Read and reflect with a good spiritual book, the Gospels are a good choice, (2) Reflect on the past day and thank God for the blessings, (3) Seek God's forgiveness for the sins we committed and be confident in his love and mercy, and (4) Pray for others asking God to bless us, our families and our friends. These last three suggestions serve really as the structure for Night Prayer as given in the Breviary for the Liturgy of the Hours. 

Now given the structure for Night Prayer: Reflect in thanksgiving, seek God's mercy with confidence, and pray for others, let's discover how Night Prayer is the most powerful prayer of our day! Sleep provides the opportunity to be a sincere and total act of prayer if we are properly prepared.

To understand this we need to remember essentially what prayer is - conversation with God or entering into relationship with God, or essentially giving ourselves to God. The greatest prayer ever offered was Jesus prayer on the Cross - He gave himself to the Father completely with his last words, "Father, into your hands I commend my spirit" (Lk 23:46). For us then night prayer is our opportunity to imitate this prayer of Jesus. Indeed this is the intention of the official Night Prayer from the Liturgy of the Hours, that we commend ourselves to the Father and make the prayer of Jesus our own. Our day is complete, our hours are spent and we have completed as best we could our work as God's children. So as we lay ourselves down to sleep we rightly entrust ourselves to our Heavenly Father. 

Now, lastly sleep and night prayer is a preparation and practice for our death. Death is a reality that impacts each of us; death is part of our existence. The relationship between sleep and death is quite real. Just as we fear death there is an innate fear of sleep for us too at first. I remember back to my childhood and having an experience of anxiety at night, even being afraid of sleep. I also witness it as I watch my neices and nephews grow up. This fearfulness of sleep comes because we realize that we are not in control. When we have to entrust ourselves completely to something or someone else, we can become anxious. That is exactly what happens in sleep. We relinquish control to sleep, and our first awareness of this total submission of ourselves can be scary. However, we learn to do it with less and less anxiety because of the confidence we have in waking up! Similarly our death is the total submission of myself to God at the end of my life - entrusting myself to the Father and relinquishing all control. Should we be fearful of death? No, because as Catholic Christians we face this reality of death with great hope because of our Savior Jesus and the promise of resurrection.

Brothers and sisters let us live well, pray always and commend ourselves to our Loving Father through a sincere commitment to a good night prayer routine. Practice well each night for death. So when we come to our final day, we can be confident knowing we will wake up one last time to eternal life!