Insomnia's gift
My father was tortured by insomnia. He’d wake at two or three every morning and roam around the house, especially the kitchen, opening and shutting cupboard doors. Then he’d return to thrash and groan in bed. He’d doze off briefly and jerk himself awake, muttering, “I wasn’t asleep, I wasn’t asleep.” And in the morning he’d lament his exhaustion.
“Black circles under both eyes,” he’d proclaim from the bathroom mirror.
Like dad, I wake in the dark hours, night after night. For a long time, like him, I’d lie sleepless, gripped by the frigid steel bands of anxiety, thoughts whirling, adrenaline surging, wishing for, yet dreading, the day.
But I found a different path from his.
I learned to pray.
It began with breathing: the simple technique of mindfulness, subject of dozens of self-help articles and books. Breathe in, breathe out. Empty the mind. Breathe in, breathe out. Thoughts are like butterflies: let them flutter by, but don’t follow. Just breathe in, breathe out.
The books recommended repeating a mantra of some kind—and that’s how I cheated my way into prayer. The teachers suggested a meaningless mantra, effectively a collection of syllables. I chose instead the name of Jesus, and graduated from that into the Jesus Prayer, a huge shift in intention. It goes like this: (inhale), Lord Jesus Christ; (exhale), Son of God; (inhale), Have mercy on me; (exhale), A sinner.
This prayer is rooted in the appeal of the blind beggar, Bartimeus, who called out to Jesus from the edge of the road at the gates of Jericho. It’s been foundational to the prayer of Orthodox monks for centuries.
I’m no expert. I’m constantly distracted. But night after night, year after year, this fertile combination of breath and prayer has filled me with the sweet warmth of peace, like a golden cloud in my chest.
It’s not all sweetness, of course. There are hurts and injuries and I myself fail all the time. Dread still visits with its icy grip. But I’ve learned something important about that. I don’t try to suppress it, or push it away when it comes. And above all, I don’t try to force a visitation from that gentle feeling of peace. I just let the anxiety lie, coiled, in my cupped hands.
“Oh, there it is, anxiety. That’s all it is.” Breathe in, breathe out. Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, breathe in, breathe out. “It’s only anxiety. Let it be.”
After a while, sleep returns.
That quiet, unseen habit of prayer has changed my life, healing me and showing me that the Lord accompanies me, here, now, as I am, in my joys and sorrows: a sinner. Because prayer is alive. It’s like yeast in a batch of bread, or like the mustard seed tossed into moist earth. Its essence is growth. It’s organic. So at a certain point, it became both natural and necessary for me to begin each day with scripture, and then there were praiseful intercessions. And before I knew it, I had written an icon of the Theotokos, and I was marking the passage of the day with the Angelus, morning, noon, and evening. And then there was Vespers and Compline.
I’m not a monk by any means.
I’m a gay man.
But the Unseen God speaks to me.
He accompanies me, a gay man.
He loves me, a gay man.
His ongoing presence in my life tells me that he blesses my gay identity. It’s not an affliction, and certainly not a disorder. It’s a gift and it is good, as he is good.
That’s a radical discovery, in the Catholic-Christian context. Not just because standard Catholic teaching and culture tell us that our gay sexuality is something bad that needs to be suppressed—a source of shame; but also because even when we’re “accepted” (how I hate that condescending word) there’s an implicit or explicit caveat: Don’t sin again.
Translation: stop having sex.
I don’t believe that my long experience of quiet prayer carries that particular tag line. I think that warning comes from human controllers, not from God.
My experience, however hidden, however simple, is radical in its implications. I’m still working those out, a project that will last my lifetime. Because it isn’t just a matter of being kind and “accepting” gay people like me. The reality that I have discovered challenges the heterosexual bias that underlies church teachings on the family, on gender, on the role of women, along with the purpose of sexuality. It challenges scripture itself, demanding an exegesis that takes account of the prejudices embedded in cultural history. It questions standard, long-established approaches to the spiritual life—such as the somewhat Manichean worry that the voice we ascribe to God in prayer is really the devil in disguise. I think that particular notion insults the goodness of God.
So my story is different from my father’s. Thanks to insomnia, I have discovered the treasure in the field, the pearl of great price; the gift that no one can take away.
