Bedtime prayers and Memento Mori

It Sounds about Time for Lent

Mar 03, 2025

Do you know that feeling where you can’t remember the name of a book, only the general idea of the story? It’s a maddening itch, an elusive idea just out of reach. Thankfully, there are entire subreddits devoted to helping readers find their long-forgotten book titles.

If only there was the same for vague-concepts-found-in-books! I have been scouring my memories and bookshelves this week, trying to source a quote I remember reading several years back. Even as I type this, I can feel it there, hovering on some forgotten page in my visual imagination…just out of reach. Where it will, apparently, remain. So for this post, I will have to make do with the general idea and hope for the best.

The “Little Death”

For centuries, monks and other religious teachers have talked and written about “the little death,” the way sleep is a daily reminder of our mortality. We also culturally often talk about death as entering into eternal rest or sleep, so the imagery goes both ways. Indeed, the Book of Common Prayer’s order for Compline, the evening prayer, opens with: The Lord Almighty grant us a peaceful night and a perfect end. The readings that follow echo this theme with excerpts from the Psalter recounting the Lord’s trustworthiness and deliverance and declarations of trust:

I will lay me down in peace, and take my rest; for you, LORD, only, make me dwell in safety (Ps 4:8).

Rhönblick vom Noppen bei Keulos (Gemeinde Künzell, Landkreis Fulda) in die Morgendämmerung hinter der Rhön. Das Bild wird dominiert von der Milseburg und der Wasserkuppe, by: Garrit R. Licensed for reuse by Wikimedia

I’ve written before about my time spent at a monastery and how much I’ve loved praying the hours. I remember the first time I went to Mepkin Abbey for a week long solo retreat. It was strange to spend my days in silence, to wander the gardens, to return to a small bedroom at night . . . and to feel a bit afraid—not about anything in particular, just the prickling realization of the vulnerability of being alone in the world as the darkness and quiet closed in. But every evening, the monks and their guests would gather in the Abbey church to pray. The chanting of the Psalms mingled with an arrangement of 2 Corinthians 4:6

For God, who said, “Let light shine out of darkness,” made his light shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of God’s glory displayed in the face of Christ.

And, then, at the end, the lights dimmed to candlelight, as the monks’ together sang the Salve Regina, a baritone lullaby that moved me to tears nearly every time.

After that, come the closing words of compline, the final prayer:

Guide us waking, O Lord, and guard us sleeping; that awake we may watch with Christ, and asleep we may rest in peace.

We are All Dying

Memento Mori. Remember that you must die. An ancient phrase replayed in a thousand ways: the skulls found tucked away in famous paintings, the architecture of cathedrals, words and phrases woven through literature and poetry and songs and any number of things as humans throughout the ages have attempted to grapple with the great and terrible reality of human mortality.

Many of us live and breath a culture that fights this tooth and nail. We value youthfulness. We alter our appearance, spend millions to try and age backwards, hide our wrinkles and gray hairs. Which all makes sense. Death, after all, is our last enemy (1 Cor 15:26), and it is never timely. We were made for life.

Yet, the truth remains that today we all are one day closer to the day we will die. Teach us to number our days, the Psalmist prayed, so that we might gain a heart of wisdom (Ps 90:12). If we permit it, the uncomfortable recollection of our deaths holds out an invitation to reconsider the way we live. It can be tempting to springboard from there to contemporary ideas of living in the present, where now is now, and we make every day count. So, too, can it be tempting to approach the season of Lent with a New-Year’s-Resolutionish attempt at a reset, where we promise ourselves to make healthier choices. It’s a bit funny and more than a little bit telling that curious onlookers hear a description of Lent and name it a “40-Day Challenge.”

Self-improvement attempts, whatever you think of them, aren’t the point of Lent. Lent is a season of penitence, a time of contemplation that invites humility and welcomes inevitable failure. We don’t “win” at Lent, as though our capacity at self-denial is the goal. Lent reminds us of our frailty—from the moment the priest wipes that cross on our foreheads on Ash Wednesday to the time a few days or weeks into Lent when we forget or fail to keep our fast. And in the darkness, in the quiet, in the loneliness, we wait for deliverance.

Prayers and Songs at Bedtime

The quote I so long to retrieve is a gentle exhortation from a wise monk who said something along the lines of: Parents should make every effort to wrap children up in gentleness at bedtime, to make it a time of songs and lullabies and stories such that children learn not to fear sleep. Bedtime becomes a unique opportunity, the monk suggested, to practice a day-in-and-day-out preparation for slumber that trusts in parental goodness and nearness.

He said it better, of course, and, let’s be honest: bless all the monks, but most of them have never once faced the bedtime gauntlet after a day of over-stimulation, let alone attempted it night after night. But the monk wasn’t offering parenting advice; he was reflecting on the way every sleep is a “little death” that prepares us for the one we all must make some day.

Lately I’ve been thinking about what it means to be a child who frightened at night. Six children have finely-tuned my ears to the sound of light footsteps tripping down the hall long after bedtime. I can wake out of a dead-sleep to the sound of a hesitant sniffle followed by the half-sobbed-recitation of the bad dream that sent a child looking for parental comfort in the early hours. Maybe it’s a troubling scene from a book or movie grown large, or sometimes it’s the developing awareness of the hugeness and scariness of the world—the thought that there are such things as lions or volcanoes or disease. But whatever the fear, the reality is that the distraught child is simply seeking the nearness of the parent.

That’s it. That’s all they want. They want me.

It’s a wild and powerful thing to realize that, for a brief and precious time in these tender years, the presence of a loving caregiver can quell every fear. You draw the child near or make up a pallet at the foot your bed or settle down with a book within eyeshot—and the fearful sobs soon turn into the deep, regular breathing of a sleeping child at rest. I love the monk’s words, because they remind me that I as a parent have a profound opportunity to help soothe my child, but, even more than that, they remind me that my own fear of death comes from my human smallness. My developing awareness of my vulnerability and powerlessness in a world filled with hugeness and scariness and things well outside of my control sometimes leaves me feeling alone and afraid.

There is something here for us, I think, in remembering that icy vulnerability of childhood, the way our primal human rejection of death comes at bedtime, when we feel alone in the dark and all the scary things chased away in the sunlight hours come coldly creeping back. Until we ourselves die, death is unknown, something outside of our first-hand experience—except for the heart-wrenching grief we experience when we are left bereft of loved ones who have died.

Jesus Himself wept when He witnessed and experienced human bereavement. There are so many good and understandable reasons we hate and fear death and eagerly await the day when death will be defeated, when every tear will be wiped away, when all will be put right again. And yet the doorway to that day of resurrection and restoration isn’t through our ability to retain eternal youth or to reverse our aging. Resurrection arrives mysteriously, impossibly, almost ridiculously . . . through death, the one thing none of us can prevent, no matter how hard we try.

We don’t want to go to sleep. We want to stay up. I remember when I was very small, I heard something about it being always light in heaven, and this immediately became its most attractive draw for me. No night. No sleep. No bedtime. And yet bedtime wasn’t so bad when my father would come up and read one last story to me, when he left on the bedside lamp, or, even better, if he sat near while I fell asleep.

The Christian story reminds us that God is and always has been near. The Lord is “our dwelling place for all generations (Psalm 90:1),” and even when the day comes for us to walk through the valley of the shadow of death, the Lord is right beside us. I like the monk’s suggestion to catechize our souls into trust. It pairs well with the Psalmist’s prayer to number our days. I’m not entirely convinced either will ever fully remove the terror of the night, but they do help us remind ourselves of what is true. We are not alone. We never have been. The God who loves us is always with us.

There’s a lovely excerpt in Catherine Marshall’s book Beyond Ourselves that illustrates this well:

. . . during Kenneth’s long illness, I had so many examples of God’s tender father-love. Like that time soon after Kenneth himself suspected that he was going to die and asked me ‘Mother, what is it like to die? Mother, does it hurt?’ . . . I remember that I fled to the kitchen, supposedly to attend to something on the stove. I leaned against the kitchen cabinet. Queer, I’ll never forget certain tiny details, like the feel of my knuckles pressed hard against the smooth, cold surface. And I asked God how to answer my boy.

God did tell me. Only He could have given me the answer to the hardest question that a mother an ever be asked. I knew – just knew how to explain death to him. ‘Kenneth,’ I remember saying, ‘you know how when you were a tiny boy, you used to play so hard all day that when night came, you would be too tired to undress – so you would tumble into Mother’s bed and fall asleep?’

That was not your bed. It was not where you belonged. And you would only stay there a little while. In the morning – to your surprise – you would wake up and find yourself in your own bed in your own room. You were there because someone had loved you and had taken care of you. Your father had come – with his great strong arms – and carried you away.’

So I told Kenneth that death is like that. We just wake up some morning to find ourselves in another room – our own room, where we belong. We shall be there, because God loves us even more than our human fathers and takes care of us just as tenderly.

This makes me think of another prayer, one The Book of Common Prayer offers as a prayer for the evening:

O LORD, support us all the day long, until the shadows lengthen and the evening comes, and the busy world is hushed, and the fever of life is over, and our work is done. Then in thy mercy grant us a safe lodging, and a holy rest, and peace at the last. Amen.

I think Kenneth’s mother and the unnamed monk and even long ago younger me are all on to something, because Jesus Himself promised to go and prepare a place for us and to come and get us at, as the NLT translates it, “at just the right time.” The Bible is filled with words of comfort and promise and hope, but God isn’t like a parent who rushes through bedtime (we’ve all been there) with easy reassurances that there’s no monsters in the closet to fear. He doesn’t just tell us words and expect us not to worry about death. He comes down to Himself walk through it before us, to hold our trembling hands, to scoop us up and carry us through. The concept of the “little death” reminds us of this, reminds us to look up and out of our fear and loneliness, and, like a child, go padding down the hall to find the God who is always near.

Contemplative Listening on Death, Resurrection & the Life to Come

Many years ago we watched a close friend walk with a loved one through a diagnosis of terminal cancer. In 2007 we made this recording as a gift of courage to the suffering and their families, particularly for those who find themselves physically unable—for whatever reason—to read the Scriptures. I like to share it every Lent as a resource for reflecting on death, resurrection, and the life to come. Please forgive the older sound quality. All readings come from the NLT, and the music is an original composition. You can listen to it below or linked here as a podcast episode:

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