I know I’m not the only person who occasionally awakens in the wee hours of the morning and is suddenly, thoroughly awake. It’s the hour of the night when all our worries seem dark, as pitch black as the night outside our window. It’s the hour of regret, fear of the future, replay of conversations and doubts about everything you believe. It’s the hour of wakefulness when you deeply fear things that in the morning seem unlikely to happen and not worth worrying about. It’s the dark night of the soul. It’s the time of turning and twisting under the sheets, of feeling too warm and then grabbing that blanket you just threw off. It’s the time when, just as with Tevye in “Fiddler on the Roof,” long dead relatives come to haunt you. And it’s the hour when countless worries about our children erupt.
Three a.m. is another world that seems remote in the bright light of dawn – if you’re fortunate enough to have gotten back to sleep by then. It’s a dark, uninhabited island that you don’t wish to visit again.
I’m sure there are many people who never awaken at that time, and they should realize how fortunate they are in their unbroken sleep.
But, I wonder, for the rest of us, what is the best solution to the three o’clock hour?
A friend on a Catholic online writers’ group says she feels God is calling her then, and she prays. That’s challenging. My only prayer at that time is usually, “Help,” as I hold my mother’s rosary. My mind wanders and refuses to concentrate on anything but trouble.
Often, I’ve considered getting up. But to do what? I’m exhausted, I don’t feel like reading, there’s nothing on TV, and I’m not a nighttime eater. I am glued to the bed. Besides, the dog would decide to accompany me on my nocturnal rambling, and together we’d probably wake up the member of the household who almost never has trouble sleeping.
One night, during this fall’s baseball playoffs, I awoke from a dream in which I’d said to my son, “I should have named you Mariano.” (Note to non-baseball fans: Mariano Rivera is the great closing pitcher for the Yankees.) Fully awake then, I let my newly named son Mariano occupy my worries. Other nights, it may be the nuclear power plant in Japan, an ongoing online conversation or my checkbook. The three o’clock hour, for those of us who have labored there, is a non-discriminatory employer of worry.
The great poet Wendell Berry must be a denizen of the three o’clock hour, for in his poem “The Peace of Wild Things,” he recounts how “I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be. . .”
Wendell Berry’s solution is to “go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.”
I am not likely to wander out at three a.m. into my edge-of-Omaha neighborhood, where deer and skunk and very large spiders still occupy land recently used as cornfields.
But like all poets, Berry speaks in metaphor. “I come into the presence of still water,” he writes, and I don’t think he’s talking about leaving his bed.
My online friend is probably right. No matter how unnerving the three o’clock hour, maybe it is a time when God is calling us to the challenge, tossing and turning, of coming into the presence of “still water.”
The writer is formerly a parishioner at St. Elizabeth Ann Seton Church in Anchorage, Alaska. She now lives in Omaha, Nebraska
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