“Jesus said to his disciples: ‘Stay awake! For you do not know on which day your Lord will come’” (Matthew 24:42). And in the following chapter He says, “therefore, stay awake, for you know neither the day nor the hour” (Matthew 25:13). St. Ignatius Loyola, in his Spiritual Exercises no. 84, follows Christ, recommending curbs on sleep as a form of penance. “The second kind of exterior penance concerns sleep,” he writes.
Now Christ Himself never said anything like “make sure you get a good night’s sleep,” but St. Ignatius did: “We should not deny ourselves a suitable amount of sleep, except to come to a happy mean in case we had the habit of sleeping too much.”
Most of us today, if we seek to come to the happy mean, need to force ourselves to go to bed earlier, but we must never go so far as to make some kind of an idol out of our sleep. Parents frequently sacrifice a good night’s sleep for the sake of their children, there are many people who have to work the night shift, and there are many groups of Christian ascetics to this day who arise during the night to praise God.
Let us be vigilant, too, those of us who read things on the internet. We have to discipline ourselves, refusing websites that impose a distracting fog on our brains, covering our minds with a sleepy restlessness. While we strive to get an appropriate amount of true, restful sleep, let us remain vigilant for opportunities to find God and to love Him, and to find our neighbor in need and love him, too.