A Meditation on the Moral Meaning of Psalm 3-- Verse 5

I lie down and sleep; I wake again, for the Lord sustains me.

The moral meaning of this verse presents to us one of the saddest of all of the facts of our daily life in this world.  Our fervour for the Lord cannot be sustained, we walk in great fervour and devotion for a time, but later, because of our sinful nature, we devolve into a sense of complacency.  This complacency the psalm refers to as "sleep." Our fervour and devotion for the Lord cools, and we sleep.  Preventing this sleep is the work of a lifetime of mortification and labour in the spiritual life.  The great majority of our time in this world is spent swinging between the opposite poles of fervour and tepidity.  We have a conversion experience that puts us into what we believe to be an experience of communion with God.  There is a fervour that is engendered in us, which makes us "walk by faith, and not by sight." But the first fervour of conversion dies away. It wanes, and we are left, not as we were before, but complacent-- satisfied with our relationship with the Lord-- satisfied that we are right with Him, perhaps for the first time in our life.  Our sense of security and peace in our relationship with the Lord is here called a "sleep."

In this kind of state, it is something else-- some new development in our lives-- that must wake us again to the need grow and advance in our divine communion.  Something must wake us, and convince us that we, who thought we were very close to the Lord, need to advance yet closer.  Something has to convince us that we, who had worked to develop all kinds of detachments from the things of this world, need to become yet more detached-- that we need to part with that that is most dear to us.

It is the Lord Himself, Who has sustained us in the sleep of our complacency, but it is also the Lord, Who through various and different circumstances of our lives wakes us to greater knowledge of Himself.  We should thank Him with all our hearts for protecting us during the nights of our complacencies (when we were lulled to sleep by the false sense of security, but were, in reality, most vulnerable to the attacks of the Enemy), and we should also thank Him for the many times He has waked us from these sleeps, and set us once again on the path towards Him.  Let us ask Him to gently wake us from all of our confidences and egocentric phantasies, to the recognition that real growth and wealth is in the knowledge of Him as source of all created being.