SACRED REST: OBSERVING THE SABBATH IN FRENETIC TIMES
"God Reposing on the Sabbath." Engraving by Vasiliy Koren. This image appeared in the earliest known engraved Bible in Russian.
I grew up in a Catholic family. Weekly attendance at Mass was not optional; it was a holy obligation. Every Sunday, we’d arrive half an hour early for the noon service, and then spend the rest of the day preparing for the week ahead: organizing papers, schoolwork, laundry, notebooks, briefcases, the pantry. The fact that Sunday was the Sabbath was never mentioned, as though rest never crossed any of our minds.
By the time I reached divinity school, as an adult, the concept of the Sabbath was foreign to me, vague and incomplete. I had long distanced myself from Catholicism and found myself instead reaching toward contemplative wisdom. In a class on spiritual practices, the professor assigned us a surprising task: “Practice observing the Sabbath this weekend. Spend time with no electronics, no work, no bills. Instead, do restorative things, which bring you closer to God.”
Did practicing the Sabbath mean spending the entirety of Sunday at church? Don’t Seventh Day Adventists observe the Sabbath? What do they do on the Sabbath? How could I possibly take a Sabbath day while sharing a 500-square foot apartment with my consultant husband, whose workflow often thickens on weekends? I needed more context before I tried.
Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, in The Sabbath, writes, “The meaning of the Sabbath is to celebrate time rather than space. Six days a week we live under the tyranny of things of space; on the Sabbath we try to become attuned to the holiness in time. It is a day on which we are called upon to share in what is eternal in time, to turn from the results of creation to the mystery of creation; from the world of creation to the creation of the world.” (1) On the Sabbath, we empty our lives of worldly ‘spatial’ affairs – efforts to gain, build, occupy material things – to join in God’s rhythm of creation and rest. Sabbath honors the time which God made sacred in Genesis, time set apart from work.
I read Heschel for the first time while studying decoloniality. I couldn’t argue with his indictment of Western culture, for colonialism – fueled by religious and political doctrines of subduing bodies, cultures, and land – birthed Western society and culture. Colonialism gave way to industrialism – a doctrine of economic efficiency and accelerated productivity – which gave way to modern manifestations of the same ethics: capitalism and consumerism. We are indeed a culture obsessed by materiality, a culture of space.
Perhaps unsurprisingly given this cultural context, Heschel argues that religion frequently orients faith through space, asking the question, “where is God?” (2) This was certainly true of my experience in the Catholic Church, one of the largest landowners in the world. (3) Mass was only conducted within the physical walls of the church building, only outside on one day a year. God was, we were told, in this sanctuary, in this fount, in this wafer, in this cup, in this oil, only if sanctified by (male) priests. We could experience the presence of God through physical things made holy in particular ways. In contrast, Heschel defines Judaism in this way:
Judaism is a religion of time aiming at the sanctification of time. Unlike the space-minded man to whom time is unvaried, iterative, homogeneous, to whom all hours are alike, qualitiless, empty shells, the Bible senses the diversified character of time…Judaism teaches us to be attached to holiness in time, to be attached to sacred events, to learn how to consecrate sanctuaries that emerge from the magnificent stream of a year. The Sabbaths are our great cathedrals. (4)
While reading Heschel, I realized the Sabbath is an invitation away from the unrelenting demands of modern life: the never-ending emails, confusing commuting logistics, job applications, stacks of irrelevant mail, and bills. The Sabbath is an invitation away from human, earthly time and into God’s time, eternal presence.
On a bright and frigid Sunday in December, I placed my phone in a shut drawer and left my laptop under my bed. Without the harsh blue light, I suddenly felt freer. Instead of checking my email, rushing to the grocery store, looking at flight schedules for the holidays, vacuuming, writing, and exercising, my husband and I took milky cups of hot coffee with us on a walk by the Hudson River, as we did when we first move to New York City. The light shimmered on the water. The sky, unimpeded by city towers, stretched above. We rested in our home and neighborhood, reading, meditating, listening to music, making dinner. In my journal, that evening, I wrote a line drawn from the Quaker tradition, “My heart feels clear.”
In American culture, material demands from buying cereal to feed our children to working extreme hours to simply get basic healthcare coverage require most of us to sacrifice all boundaries around our time. Rest means sleep, which many need supplements to induce and apps to measure. Heschel argues repeatedly, however, that six days belong to the world; one day belongs to God. Our bodies belong to the world; our souls to God. (5) He writes, “What is the Sabbath? Spirit in the form of time. With our bodies we belong to space; our spirit, our souls, soar to eternity, aspire to the holy.” (6)The Sabbath is a way of drawing closer to God and honoring the part of us which is eternal - our souls – yet it is also a way of remembering our humanity. It is God, not us, who makes the Sabbath sacred, who makes time sacred. (7) We join God in this divine rhythm of rest.
Dorothy Bass, in Receiving the Day: Christian Practices for Opening the Gift of Time, discusses the Christian valence of Sabbath rest, writing, “As God worked, so shall we; as God rested, so shall we. Working and resting, we who are human are in the image of God.” (8) Considering Sabbath in terms of the imago dei makes Sabbath rest essential. Without rest from commerce and logistics, how can we remember who we truly are, held within grace, held within God’s love?
Bass contends, “The fact that society no longer protects a sabbath should not awaken either nostalgia for cultural homogeneity or desire for economic slowdown. Rather, it should alert all of us, whatever our faith, to become more mindful about opening the gift of time. If we are not mindful, the culture will not be mindful for us.” (9) It has been over a year since I observed the Sabbath. Instead, seven days of every week have been overrun by to-do lists and deadlines. Chronic health issues, including joint pain and swelling, have re-emerged. My mother-in-law passed away; grief now hangs in every corner of our house. It can feel impossible to observe Sabbath, and for many, it may in fact be impossible to push work aside, to request a shorter shift, to place a newborn in the basinet, take a break from a relative’s medical care, or more. Ironically, when we need rest the most, it feels impossible to rest. Or those of us who do need rest the most cannot rest. We leave mindfulness for another day, another week, another season. Sabbath, in what Richard Rohr calls this “mixed moral universe” of ours, is not an obligation, but rather a guidepost, a North Star, a loving invitation. Through Sabbath, Heschel writes, “the world becomes a place of rest.” (10) The earth rests, society rests, our families rest, we rest. When we can, even if just for a moment, we join God in God’s rest. We dwell, briefly, in God’s time.
Abraham Joshua Heschel. The Sabbath, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 19. Kindle Edition.
Ibid., 13-14.
Timothy Schuler. “Mapping One of the World’s Largest Landowners, Curbed: https://www.curbed.com/2017/10/18/16483194/catholic-church-gis-goodlands-esri-molly-burhans. October 18, 2017.
Heschel, 17.
Ibid., 22.
Ibid., 71.
Ibid.
Dorothy C. Bass. Receiving the Day: Christian Practices for Opening the Gift of Time, Fortress Press, 48. Kindle Edition.
Ibid., 59.
Heschel, 64.
