Holy rest

It started with 15-minute catnaps on the seminary campus. Tricia Hersey was juggling study, work and raising a young son on very little sleep. Now a ‘sleep activist,’ Hersey runs Collective Napping Experiences – rented rooms filled with mats, pillows, freshly washed blankets, and an open invitation to rest. If it seems incredible that 40 people can fall asleep on the floor next to strangers in the middle of the day, Hersey would say that’s evidence of our collective exhaustion. Our bodies are being damaged by “grind culture,” she declares. How often are we given the chance to simply be, to receive care, to daydream? We’re slaves to productivity, Hersey argues, which makes rest a way of breaking free.

A few years after Kevin Makins started a church plant in Hamilton, Ontario, he came to the same realization as Hersey – that “we’re hooked on being busy,” and church “was no different from the world around us” (Why Would Anyone Go To Church?, p.80). Initially, “I was convinced Christians needed to move faster, be more efficient, and make more happen,” Makins writes. “But I was an idiot.”

Sleep as resistance

Hersey’s U.S.-based Nap Ministry is inspired by Black Liberation theology. “The Nap Ministry is not a religious movement,” the New York Times reported in 2022, “but a spiritual antidote to the very earthly problems that are plaguing communities: exhaustion, chronic diseases and mental health crises, issues she sees as arising from systems of capitalism and white supremacism.”

Hersey, who lives in Atlanta, says that we’re all caught up in capitalism’s insatiable hunger for profits.

“I come from a legacy of exhaustion,” Hersey writes; rest is “my way of refusing to donate my body [as a Black woman] to a system that still owes a debt to my Ancestors for the theft of their labour” (Rest is Resistance: A Manifesto, p.4). But true rest is about more than naps, she says repeatedly. Black people must stop operating from a place of fear and urgency, of having “to do more just to be seen as equal” (5). White people need to heal from a spiritual deficiency and from feeling “superior to other divine human beings” (75). “Everyone on the planet, including the planet itself, is suffering from white supremacy and capitalism,” Hersey believes. It’s important not only for individuals to slow down but for our communities to resist the paradigm of Never Enough.

On March 15, “sleep advocates” around the world will host activities on behalf of 2024’s World Sleep Day. Justice is at the heart of its theme, “Sleep Equity for Global Health” (see p.24). Sleep advocates will raise awareness of how a bad night’s sleep can come from more than just noise or light; it can also be the result of stress, financial burdens or feeling unsafe. Research shows that sleep is as crucial to our health as nutrition and physical activity, so – as Hersey intuited – it’s an issue of inequity if not everyone has access to deep, restorative sleep. One study conducted by Sleep On It Canada, for example, found links between sleep and homeownership, with “renters being two times more likely to sleep less than seven hours per night compared to homeowners.” The study found that a variety of challenging housing conditions were linked to poor sleep health.

“My body could never truly relax or pause,” Hersey confesses. Financial pressure, family illness and the threat of racial violence led to Heresy’s burnout. “My mind was always going as I constantly thought about the next thing I had to do, the newest bill to be paid, the hours I had to work this week to save money, the side hustles I could create to pay for an unexpected expense. Every single moment of the day was dedicated to what I could accomplish” (75).

The sleep of the just

One Sunday, wiped out by a month of special Christmas events and services, Makins invited everyone who came to Eucharist church to find their own pew and lie down. He skipped his sermon and everyone napped for 30 minutes instead. “This, my friends, is how we invented Nap Sunday . . . a sacred day we totally made up” (88). It’s become so popular that congregants now come in pajamas, bring pillows and invite their friends.

On Nap Sundays, as Makins describes in his book, the church is filled with the deep, uncommunicable presence of God. With the sounds of saints breathing quietly and steadily. With someone in the corner beginning to snore. With the presence of the One who holds it all together (89). Nap Sunday is “usually right around New Years,” Eucharist pastor Nina Schuurman-Drenth told Christian Courier over email, “which is great because it means the practice also includes a layer of subversion against the ‘do-better, be-better, work-harder’ message of New Year’s resolutions. It feels good to start the community’s new year off with a practice of unearned grace.”

In the Christian tradition, Makins reminds us, we gather to worship on Sunday – the first day of the week – to receive the gift of rest “because God’s grace is given before we do a thing to earn it” (86). ‘Stop being productive’ is one of the 10 commandments. ‘Ordinary time’ is the longest season in the church calendar. “I assume everyone wants a great sermon,” Makins writes. “What people really need is time” (90).

Time to be human, to acknowledge that we are not machines. Time to reintegrate body, mind and soul. Time to resist the pressure of productivity and remind ourselves that we are God’s beloved from the first moment we draw breath.

After all, as Heresy emphasizes, “how can we access pleasure, joy and liberation if we are too tired to experience it?”