The Nap: 30 years, 30 Days, 30 Stories. Day 7 out of 30

Where this nap took place. 

I shouldn't have been able to fall asleep. The seat that I was sitting on was really nothing more than a short stool with a back on it. It was very uncomfortable. There were 5000 people all around me. Bright fluorescent lights filled the room with a light that assaulted the senses. Thee space itself resembled something of a cross between a boat and a spaceship, and there were guards around that woke up people that they saw snoozing.

Somehow, I fell asleep. There with 5000 people mulling around, I managed to fall asleep. With a group of my college friends around, I slipped into unconsciousness. As much as I fought the urge to do so, I kept feeling my eyes get heavy, and my head began to nod.

The Audience Hall, from the front. 

            This wasn't just any place to fall asleep in either, this was the Pope Paul VI audience hall, and now soon to be Blessed John Paul II was praying the Rosary. In fairness, I was 17, and I had just gotten off of a plane from the US hours before. Although my body should have thought that it was somewhere around one in the afternoon at the 7pm Rosary that John Paul II used to hold, the truth is that the red-eye out of Logan Airport and the night spent trying to sleep on a plane had taken its toll. I clutched in my hands the rosary that I had bought outside and tried to keep up, even as my eyes began to close under the irresistible weight. I looked up at the stage at the front of the hall and saw the man that many have already acclaimed a saint kneeling in front of the statue of Christ emerging from the tree of life, and I fell asleep.

            I think it was my friend Joe who woke me up, I had fallen asleep during the first decade, and the Pope was now just saying the Salve Regina, it was over. Joe whispered in my ear, "Mikey, I would have let you sleep, but when you started snoring.. well." "Thanks Joe," I muttered, my eyes still half shut. I sat up in the chair disappointed, I had just missed praying the rosary with the Pope, and I was more than a little ashamed.

            The truth is, of course, that in retrospect there was little to be ashamed about. What had happened was perfectly normal, and human, and understandable. I am sure that I am not the only one in our group who nodded off, and the likes of Joe, Erin, Dave, and Mary Clare who were all there and might read this, can let me know if I am right. St. Theresa of Avila famously once said something like falling asleep in prayer is the surest sign of surrender to God. If that is true, then that night the surrender was unconditional.

(almost) Bl. John Paul II... yep he was
praying the rosary during this nap....

            The truth is that sometimes in the moment we make too much of something simple, or we can demand too much of ourselves. To have stayed awake obviously would have been preferable, but at the same time, that night I sadly didn't have it in me. I remember, as a 17 year old, being disappointed that I had missed out on that night, but also feeling somehow guilty about not being able to stay up for that rosary. The truth is that in that strange way that only a college kid can think of themselves as the center of the universe, I honestly thought I had been disrespectful to the Pope.

         12 years ago this week, I feel asleep in the audience hall at the Vatican. So what? The next time I was in that hall was 6 months ago, when I went in the hall this time in a freshly pressed suit and clerical collar and sat right up front, because I was now a Jesuit. The truth is that in life (and I do this even still now) we can make too big of a deal out of something that is really nothing.

             We need to remember that we are always in front of the God who made us, who knows our resting and rising, who knows us well enough to know where our hearts are and to know what fills our desires. We are going to be subject to our own frailties, and sometimes we'll even make bad choices. We need to be patient enough with ourselves and trusting enough in God to know that in those moments where we nod off God delights in our being just as he created us. We need to remember that we are not nearly so powerful, or even important in some sense, to think that in those moments where we really do fall down,  that we would be able to make God stop being loving and forgiving. It took a long time for me to realize that, as St. Paul tells us, nothing can separate me from the love of God. In no small part because of confession, not even the things that we do can really separate us from the love of God, a lesson that I have learned all too well over and over again. Sometimes we just need to relax. God didn't make us to be perfect, he made us to be in relationship with him. The God who knows us better than we know ourselves delights in who we are, and always welcomes us home. This is the same God that I am pretty sure was fine with my falling asleep that night. For my own sake, though, the next time you see me sleeping in Paul VI hall, wake me up!