Sermon for the first Sunday of Advent

But I have stilled and quieted my soul;
like a weaned child with its mother,
like a weaned child is my soul within me.

I have often wished that I could manage with three or four hours of sleep per night. At times it rouses me to fury to think that I am forced, by a mere quirk of human nature, to lose a third of my life in sleep. True, a cat – so I’ve heard – loses at least twice that; but on the other hand a cat lives with such intensity, is such a paragon of watchfulness, during that third of its life in which it is awake that I am not sure it doesn’t pack as much living into its eighteen years as I will into my threescore and ten. A cat does not mark time. A cat gets on with its life, and always with total concentration.

Jesus told us that we must become as little children, and that is generally understood – when it is understood at all, and not merely quoted – as referring to a child’s innocence (where did they get that idea from?) or its trustfulness; to a child adults are infallible, even if the child does have a tantrum when the infallible adult does or decrees something it does not like. That probably is true, and we are required to trust God equally absolutely, preferably without the tantrums. Another possibility is that it refers to a child’s simplicity; a child does not learn to be “double-minded” until it reaches the age of reason – now that I come to think of it, that’s quite a good definition of the age of reason. But today, meditating on wakefulness and cats, I wonder whether that might be it. Children and cats have quite a lot in common. Whatever a child or a cat does, it does with all its being. A cat seems to be concentrating not only with its mind but with its every muscle. A child can’t do that: its muscles are not sufficiently under its control; but that seems to increase the impression of concentration of the mind. Every movement needs complete absorption; anything less and the hand will not reach the toy train and the balance of body upon legs will be disastrously upset. Have you seen a small child fall asleep? He does it instantly, decisively, and often with no warning. A cat does the same, but there are two differences: first, most cats have a patch of thinner fur, sometimes almost a bald patch, just above their eyes. When the eyes are closed, the skin of the bald patch is stretched, so that, from a distance at least, it looks as if the cat is wide awake and looking at you. Then, a child wakes up by degrees, maybe reluctantly, and often in a bad temper; but a cat is all there at once. A dog rolls over and looks at you, bleary-eyed; a cat sits up instantly, takes notice, and washes.

When Jesus said “Be vigilant” or “Stay awake” (depending on your translation) he did not mean that we must never sleep. We are not designed never to sleep, just as we are not designed never to eat. Walter Hilton is very insistent that we must observe a reasonable measure in all our religious practices – except in mindfulness of God. We must eat and sleep as our body reasonably demands, as if we were taking medicine. He does not mean that obsessive humanist hygiene against which GK Chesterton rightly fulminated; he means simply that we must take our bodies as God made them and allow them what we may perceive to be their weaknesses. Paul explains the meaning of this kind of vigilance:

“The day of the Lord shall so come as a thief in the night…but you, brethren, are not in darkness that that day should overtake you as a thief. For all you are children of the day; we are not of the night, nor of darkness. Therefore, let us not sleep, as others do, but let us watch, and be sober. For they that sleep, sleep in the night, and they that are drunk, are drunk in the night. But let us, who are of the day, be sober, having on the breastplate of faith and charity, and for a helmet the hope of salvation by our Lord Jesus Christ who died for us, that whether we watch or whether we sleep, we may live together with him.”

The essential thing is not that we should not sleep, for whether we sleep or whether we watch, we can be with Christ; the essential thing is that we should not sleep “as others do”. The Bride in the Song of Songs was not trying to be paradoxical when she said “I sleep but my heart wakes”. She was certainly not making excuses for having fallen asleep despite herself; the issue was far too serious for that. Had she believed that the beloved would escape her if she slept she would have sat up all night drinking coffee and sticking pins into herself and if she had fallen asleep despite the coffee and the pins she would never have forgiven herself; there would have been no well-turned phrases to excuse the inexcusable. But as it was, she knew she could sleep safely, as long as she did not sleep “as others do”, as long as her heart was vigilant.

I suspect that a cat’s heart is always vigilant and that Christopher Smart was not far wrong: a cat is always ready to look up for instructions. It so happens that we cannot generally hear those instructions – maybe because our own hearts are weighed down and sluggish; and it is certainly quite unlikely that it is our instructions that the cat will follow. But a cat is not following its nose; it is drawn on by something outside itself; not a ball or a stick like a dog, but something always out of reach, always upwards. Why do you suppose cats so frequently get stuck up trees? They are not fools enough to believe that they will catch birds that way. They are trying to reach the Voice whose instructions they have followed since kittenhood. A cat does sleep. A cat does eat. But it knows that those are not its first priorities.

I think it is very difficult for us adult human beings to attain to that combination of recklessness and single-mindedness which cats display so naturally and which a child can clumsily imitate. But that is what Jesus is demanding of us when he tells us to watch. Can you imagine a cat or a dog sleeping through a burglary? Well, it is of little consequence, sub specie aeternitatis, whether or not we sleep through earthly burglaries. But it is of the utmost importance that we do not remain asleep “as others do” when the Divine Burglar (his choice of title, not mine!) comes to us, And I am not just talking about his coming at the end of our lives, or at the end of the world; we will wake up then, all right, but if we’ve been asleep “as others are” until then, it will be too late. The Bride knew that she had to be attentive, had to be awake in heart if not in body, at all times. There was no telling when, or how frequently, the Bridegroom would present himself, or what exactly he would require of her at each visit.

The post-resurrection appearances of the Lord provide a good parable to express the degree of attentiveness we need. He was not always recognisable, even to those who truly loved him. Short of a divine dispensation, you only saw him if you were expecting to see him, which was why John knew him at once. Peter and Mary Magdalen – who arguably loved him no less – needed telling, and as for the travellers on the road to Emmaus, they were like the Bride on the occasion when her attention did wander: he was gone before they knew it.

It goes without saying that it is not enough to remain “sober” in the strict sense, to abstain from excessive strong drink and food and other bodily pleasures. As I have frequently said (and I have a reluctant St Augustine on my side) these are not the serious sins, not the serious lapses in vigilance. And both Augustine and I know something about sin. Bodily sins are sins, and bodily excesses are excesses and not helpful in our journey towards God or in preserving our attention to him. But it is in our souls, in the spiritual part of our being, that we “chiefly resemble God” and it is certainly with that part that we chiefly attend to him and serve him. No bodily sobriety, vigilance or service is of any value if the soul does not watch and serve – and the mind too. We may eat, drink, marry and be given in marriage, as much as we like, as long as our soul is serving the living God and walking in his light. We cannot and must not judge others; we would not have known which of the two men in the fields, which of the two women at the grindstone, would be taken and which left. We should not be concerned about them except to pray for them (which is part of vigilance). The cat attends to itself and to the Voice it hears, its ears twitching as it sleeps to pick up the merest whisper. Let us do the same.