‘Well I’m looking for a lover who will come on in and cover me,’ sang Bruce Springsteen in his earthy, inimitable style. Most small babies love to be tightly swaddled. Little kids beg to be ‘tucked in’ and kissed good night. The security of adequate cover seems to me to be a basic human need.
One of the reasons I look forward to the evenings drawing in and the nights becoming chilly is the prospect of being covered by more than a mere flimsy sheet. It is so hard to sleep when the thermometer hovers in the high twenties or worse all night long and all that even my trusty fan seems to do is stir up the stuffy air. But my theory is that it’s not the temperature so much as the fact that it’s hard to sleep when you aren’t sufficiently covered.
For those of us fortunate enough to have somewhere to live and decent bedding, one of the best feelings in life is getting horizontal at the end of a long day and pulling up the doona.
It’s not just at night either. Some of the most delicious moments in my life come at the weekend, when I nap in the afternoon: snuggling into bed, pulling a rug up to my shoulders, shutting the world out, knowing that it will keep turning quite happily without me for an hour or two.
These are some of the moments when I most keenly experience grace: when I realise that nothing depends entirely on me. The times when sleep eludes me are the times I have an exaggerated sense of my own importance in the scheme of things, and fret into the small hours about what I’ve done wrong or failed to do right.
Meditators often do their thing wrapped in a shawl. At a practical level, this is because you can get cold, sitting so still for so long. To me, it is also a physical reminder of God’s love. You sit down, you wrap your shawl around you, shutting out external distractions, and you seek to go deep inside and meet with God, wrapped in God’s love.
All day, most days, I am a grown up – working hard, making decisions that are sometimes complicated and taxing, thinking thinking thinking, negotiating, not forgetting, trying my best to be smart and competent and kind. At the end of these days, when I pull my blankets up to my chin, I am a child again, tucked in by parent God. The moment when I pull that warm symbol of love around me is the moment when I try to shed my worries and remind myself that the only thing I need to hold on to is that God loves me.
Sleep is a rehearsal for death, and in the moment of death, all I will need to know is that I am eternally covered by God’s unstinting love.
Published in the May issue of The Melbourne Anglican
