The Night Belongs to God

The night has its own silence. It strips away everything that daylight allows us to hide behind. In the small hours, when the world sleeps, the heart either meets its Maker or hides from Him. Saint Isaac calls the vigil the greatest of works, and I believe him, though I have barely touched its edge.

How different this is from the life we have built around labor and exhaustion. We rise early not for prayer but for profit, we chase after shadows, and when darkness falls we collapse, claiming fatigue as necessity. We call it realism, but it is bondage. We have forgotten that man was not made for labor alone. We were made to stand before God, awake in the night, while heaven sings unseen.

In the quiet of vigil, when the body trembles and the eyes ache for sleep, the soul begins to remember itself. Every psalm becomes a cry from exile. The darkness becomes an icon of the unseen kingdom. It is there, Saint Isaac says, that the mind learns to fly. Not with pride, but with lightness, stripped of the heaviness of the world. The one who keeps vigil rightly lives like an angel in flesh.

I have felt both sides of this. The nights when prayer becomes a flame and I feel lifted beyond weariness, and the nights when heaviness crushes me to the floor. Saint Isaac says this, too, is the mercy of God. Grace departs for a while to test our love, to see whether we pray for His sake or only for the sweetness that prayer brings. In that coldness, if we rouse ourselves even a little, grace returns, fierce and sudden, and the soul marvels at the change.

But how easily we scatter the fruit of vigil by day. How quickly we trade stillness for chatter, quiet for busyness, remembrance for distraction. The demons need not assault us at night if they can claim our hearts at noon. Saint Isaac’s warning cuts deep: we stay awake to sow and then waste the harvest in daylight carelessness.

To live as he describes is to reverse everything the world calls normal. We work only enough to sustain prayer. We sleep only enough to rise again and stand before God. The body becomes light through fasting and watchfulness. Tears come without effort, flowing like a second baptism. Even the passions begin to quiet, and what once stirred the flesh now reveals the pride that hides beneath.

He says that continual stillness joined with reading and vigil awakens awe, that tears spring like water from a heart humbled by love. I have known only a taste of this, yet I hunger for it. I want to live as one who believes the night belongs to God.

When sleep presses down and the flesh pleads for mercy, when the mind is dull and the psalms stumble from my lips, I will remember his final word: Do not cease to struggle and compel yourself until you find humility and your heart is brought to rest in God.

The heart’s rest does not come through sleep, but through love’s wakefulness. The night, then, is not for rest. It is for resurrection.