I haven’t made New Year’s resolutions for a few years now, having discovered a while back that it’s much easier to change in smaller chunks of time–say, a week, or better yet a day. It’s too easy to get overwhelmed by a year, or worse, “the rest of my life.” But…if I were to make a resolution for 2009, it would be to have a day of Sabbath each week. I just returned from a weekend retreat that was overflowing with Sabbath time, and this almost-resolution is sounding better and better.
It started a few months ago when I read Wayne Muller’s book, Sabbath: Finding Rest, Renewal, and Delight in Our Busy Lives. At the same time I was teaching the Ten Commandments to our congregation’s middle-schoolers in confirmation, and struggling with how to teach the third, “Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy.” In seven years of ordained ministry, I’d never taught the commandments before, so the class was forcing me to understand them in a new way–particularly the third (or the fourth, as some count them).
The understanding that made the most sense to me, at least, was this: Sabbath is a time to receive all the good gifts God wants to give you: time, relationships, and the earth, to name just a few. But in order to receive these gifts, you have to let go of some other things. Muller illustrates this with an image of building a fence around bulbs planted in the ground, so that they won’t get eaten as they begin to grow. This is the question of Sabbath: what fences do I need to build in order for good things to grow? Things like connection with God, others, and myself–”things that only grow in time,” Muller says.
To find Sabbath I have to build the fence around this space by letting go of “work.” To do that, I have to give up the idea that my work (whether it’s work for church or work around the house or another kind) is ultimate. For one day each week, I live as if God is ultimate, because–oh yeah–God is ultimate. I like the way Barbara Brown Taylor puts it in her book Leaving Church: A Memoir of Faith. She says, “One day each week I live as if all my work were done.” For those of us who are always convinced we need to do “just one more thing” before we can rest or before things will be okay, this is both really difficult and absolutely necessary to our souls.
As I use the internet and email more and more in my work and personal lives, I find that the more constantly “connected” I am, the more desperately I need Sabbath time to DISconnect and REconnect with God, others, and myself. In her article, “Keeping Sabbath,” Dorothy Bass–the great explainer and inspirer of Christian practices–quotes the Jewish scholar Abraham Joshua Heschel: ” “The solution of mankind’s most vexing problems will not be found in renouncing technical civilization, but in attaining some degree of independence from it,” writes Heschel. Sabbath keeping teaches that independence….Overworked Americans need rest, and they need to be reminded that they do not cause the grain to grow and that their greatest fulfillment does not come through the acquisition of material things” (The Christian Century, January 2007).
Count me in as one who desperately needs that reminder, especially the first part. On the retreat this weekend I discovered a poem by Robert Bly, “Things to Think”. It ends with the lines, “Or that it’s not necessary to work all the time,/Or that it’s been decided that if you lie down no one will die.”
Like many I’d never admit to believing that if I stop working someone “will die,” but also like many, sometimes I live as if I do. I forget that if I don’t “lie down,” something good in me might die, or get consumed just as it begins to sprout. I forget that God has gifts to give, and when I “have my hands full,” there’s no room to receive them.
I suppose I’m not “seeking” Sabbath so much as God is seeking me, ready to pour out the blessings that “grow in time” into hands and a life that are ready to receive them. With all these Sabbath references crossing my path over the past few months, it seems more like Sabbath is seeking me. And I’m beginning to think I’m ready to be found.
[...] down some other opportunity simply because you’ve had enough, or because it’s time for Sabbath. And now that I think about it, perhaps that word is the most subversive thing of [...]
Pingback by Subversive acts « New Houses from Old Bricks — August 9, 2009 @ 2:30 am |