Formation and Sleep Ethics

One of the things I have noted in Praying the Pattern and which I will be reworking and expanding (maybe with this research!) in the forthcoming Living our prayer and praying our lives is how choosing bad sleep and rest patterns is choosing to make it more likely that we behave less graciously than we might otherwise. There is research, now, to back that up:

if you don’t get enough sleep, research suggests you are more likely to engage with unethical and deviant behaviour, such as being mean, bullying your fellow employees or falsifying receipts.  -Disrupted sleep article

So, contrary to some medieval asceticism, we should probably not normally be skimping on sleep.
It does, however, make me wonder what the purpose of sleep deprivation regimes was in those medieval regimes. I have the impression (but without researching it further) that it may have had something to do with avoiding sloth; that lying a-bed was seen as sinfully lazy. But I also wonder whether for some at least, there was a sense that we do indeed tend to worse self-censoring and self-checking when we are tired, so the point in that case may have been to push themselves more closely to their limits to make the testing of benevolence etc more real and more frequent, to give more chance to practice.
If that was the case, then I have to say that I wonder whether that is not, in fact, putting God to the test .... more thought needed.

Is God Really Omnipotent?

I think that this paragraph really articulates where I've found myself after years of wrestling with scripture, systematics and life experience (my own and others'). It comes from this dialogue:Tripp Fuller and Bo Sanders: Is God Really Omnipotent?:

Jesus died with the power of empire inscribed on his cross-dead body.  It is that body that God raised from the dead, and it is the future of the Cross-dead Christ that we as Christians share. Yet for some reason, we so easily speak about God’s power as if God was being revealed in the building of crosses and not in their bearing. God’s self-revelation in Jesus was a rejection of the coercive, determining, and controlling power that the empires of this world love so much for the power of love.  Infinite divine love, the freedom it gives, the risks it takes and the possibilities it continuously creates offer an alternative ultimate theological principle for Christian theology and one I think coheres with the story of Jesus

The helpful thing about it is that it roots the thing in Christocentric reading of scripture and reflection on that. I love, too, the first two sentences of the quote. The 'building ... not... bearing.." phrase is also helpful.

The quote leaves me thinking of expressing some of the ideas in riffs.

"Jesus crossed out by
 a mobbed popular vote; the lynch-pin
of age-change
condemnation by rote.
Sold not just for thirty argent slivers
but
for for an Empirical peace
which passed all otherstanding" 

... maybe ...