Song of Solomon 5:2 Meaning I Was Asleep

The body sleeps and yet something inside stays awake and listening. This inner wakefulness is real. While the daily mind rests, a deeper part goes on living, and sometimes it knocks, asking to be let in.

The one who knocks is not a stranger. It is a piece of the person's own depths, long shut outside the door, longing to be received and made part of the whole. To open is to welcome what has been kept out. When a man lets that inner other in rather than turning over and sleeping, he becomes more nearly whole.

Sleep had taken the body, yet something deeper stayed listening and caught the knocking at once. That is the danger and the mercy together: the outer self grows drowsy and misses God, while the true heart never quite stops hearing Him. The fault is the drowsiness, the slow numbing of attention by comfort and routine.

The cure is simply to open, to let the awake part rule the sleepy one and unlatch the door. The one outside has come through the cold night still calling her his own, so the knocking was never a stranger's but the Beloved's, patient in the dark.

Sleep is the ordinary human condition, moving, working, talking, and not present, while something deeper in the chest never sleeps. That wakeful heart is the witness, and it goes on hearing what the busy mind cannot.

The knocking comes constantly, in a birdcall, in a silence between two thoughts, in a longing that arrives at night with no object. Hesitation is what loses it, the moment spent asking whether to rise, whether the dream should be finished first. Opening has to be immediate, and immediacy is possible only when the calculating mind is not consulted.