God of compassion, you have willed that the gate of mercy should always stand open for your people. Look upon us with your mercy, that we who are following the path of your will may continue in it to the end of our lives.

The Promise of his Glory (from the Leonine Sacramentary)

EARLIER this year, I suffered from a profound disturbance in my regular pattern of sleep. It is not an experience that I would ever want to go through again. Its periods of wakefulness verged on hyperactivity, and it was coupled with the fear that there was nothing I could do about it, and that I mightbe stuck with it for the rest of my life.

Among the friends who gave me support, I discovered a few who had had the same experience, and had managed to come to terms with it, and lived a normal life. I was, however, determined to find a complete cure, even though the small hours spent emptying the dishwasher and ironing shirts meant that, for once,I was on top of my domestic chores.

Now I sleep better than I have ever done before. Deo gratias. And one of a number of devices that I used to induce sleep during those desolate nights was to repeat to myself over and over again the words "mercy, compassion, forgiveness".

Somehow, I felt that if I constantly reminded myself that sleep was nothing less than sinking into the infinite love of God, then sleep would come that much more readily. And I was right, because eventually it did.

God is a God of mercy. This was lodged firmly in my mind some years back by that icon of traditional Anglo-Catholicism and dedicated cigarette-smoker, Canon Gonville ffrench-Beytagh. He explained to me that, in Hebrew, mercy is linked to the idea of a mother's bending over her baby and putting comforting arms around the tiny body and holding it to herself. This was enough to fix in my mind forever the image of God as utterly merciful.

Ever since then, I have been convinced that much of the time we get it plain wrong. Almighty, eternal, consubstantial - oh, and he's merciful, too. No, let's start again. Mercy is not an afterthought. This God whom we call abba, who revealed himself in Christ, is above all else a God of mercy.

In mercy, he draws us to himself to know him in worship and prayer. In mercy, he sends his Holy Spirit to breathe life into the Church, and to give us the sacraments. In mercy, he, the Creator, presides over a broken world, and works away at its redemption, slowly and doggedly. Any concept of God that doesnot glow and vibrate with the divine mercy is not worth bothering with.

In this prayer, mercy is the gate that always stands open. Mercy is never closed to us. If it were, it would not be mercy. So let us think of mercy in this way: not as a religious transaction between us and a God who has to be persuaded to love us, but as an open gate, through which we are invited to go, and come face to face with the merciful God. Now sleep on that.

The Revd Robin Vickery is a priest-worker in the diocese of Southwark.