A Taste of Eternity

The Judean Wilderness (photo taken by me) 

“Unless one learns how to relish the taste of Sabbath … one will be unable to enjoy the taste of eternity in the world to come.” (Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Sabbath.)

"In the eyes of the world, there is no payoff for sitting on the porch. A field full of weeds will not earn anyone's respect. If you want to succeed in this life (whatever your "field" of endeavor), you must spray, you must plow, you must fertilize, you must plant. You must never turn your back. Each year's harvest must be bigger than the last. That is what the earth and her people are for, right? Wrong god...In the eyes of the true God, the porch is imperative—not every now and then but on a regular basis. When the fields are at rest—when shy deer step from the woods to graze the purple clover grown up between last year's tomato plants, and Carolina chickadees hang upside down to pry seeds from the sunflowers that have taken over the vineyard—when the people who belong to this land walk through it with straw hats in their hands instead of hoes to discover that wild blackberries water their mouths as surely as the imported grapes they worked so hard to protect from last year's frost—this is not called "letting things go"; this is called "practicing Sabbath." You have to wonder what makes human beings so resistant to it." (Barbara Brown Taylor, in Why God Wants You To Rest.) 

NB: I spent a lot of time on Zoom meetings this week with clergy across our diocese. One issue that was raised there and in social media is how challenging it is to move all work to home and work remotely and for many with technologies (like Zoom) that add a layer of complexity. People seemed exhausted. I felt exhausted! This makes me think even more about the importance of Sabbath-keeping and the challenges we are now facing that may make that even harder. And more necessary...

What is the best way to translate the Hebrew word “Torah” into English? This is not an academic question. When we say “Law” we tend to think about police officers, lawyers, and judges. Along with that train of thought we imagine God with the scales of justice in hand, ready to pounce when we transgress and break the rules.

But this is not how Jews read the Torah. A better translation would be Instruction or Teaching. When you hear those words in English you tend to think of books and classrooms. You then may even think about how monks talk about a Rule of Life or how Jews refer to their leaders as rabbis, which is to say "teachers." Along that train of thought we might imagine God as desiring to form a people to live in a the world as light shining in the darkness, as salt of the earth, as leaven that makes the whole loaf rise.

The Decalogue plays an important role in Lent. In some parishes there is a tradition to begin with The Penitential Order and include the reading of the Decalogue as a way into corporate confession. It was given to the Israelites at the beginning of their forty-year journey through the Sinai Desert. They came there, across the Red Sea, as a bunch of ex-slaves. The Torah is given as a gift by God, sweeter than honey according to the poets, in order to form a free people.

The problem with thinking about the Decalogue as a list of ten rules you better obey or else is that there are no clear punishments attached. So we assume penalties for murder and stealing for example. But what is the penalty for taking the Lord’s name in vain? Eternal damnation?

And really, I mean…what’s the harm in a little coveting. As Barbara Brown Taylor points out, the whole advertising industry is built on coveting. It’s not like stealing, right? You haven’t done anything wrong?

Besides, we live in a busy and complex world; not like those naïve ex-slaves who lived thousands of years ago. If we need to catch up in the office on the Sabbath, what harm is there in that one? God helps those who help themselves, right? It’s in the Bible! (Actually, to be clear, that is not in the Bible; that’s Ben Frankin!) As Barbara Brown Taylor puts it in the quote I shared above, “wrong God.” Rather, we worship a God who not only commands that we keep the Sabbath holy but who models this by resting Herself: six days of work is enough, and then it's time to sit on the porch and enjoy some lemonade. 

When the Bible speaks of the Sabbath, it is referring to the seventh day of the week, not the first. It is referring to that period from sundown on Friday night to sundown on Saturday night. We Christians worship on Sunday because that is the Day of Resurrection. Sometimes when we start talking about the Sabbath we do so because we miss those days of Christian preferential treatment and we wish for a time when there weren’t sports on Sunday morning to compete with us. Those days are gone. This post is not about trying to go back to those days, but rather about finding a way forward.

Sabbath is meant as a day of rest. It’s not just about what we cannot do. It’s about how we are made. Two reasons are given in Torah for keeping Sabbath. The first is that it is built into creation itself. Even God, with all God had to do, worked hard for six days creating the world and then took a rest. Sometimes we get self-important; we think our work can’t stop. But if God stopped God’s work, maybe we should trust the wisdom in that and let it go too. It'll be there when we come back to it. 

The second reason the Torah gives for keeping Sabbath is the Exodus. Slaves don’t get a day off. Slaves had to work in Pharaoh’s economy making bricks 24/7. Free people are always in danger of falling back into slavery, of becoming slaves to their work. So the Sabbath is a gift given so that God’s people can remember and give thanks.

I don’t think God is weighing the scales of justice and deciding to send us to hell when we forget to keep Sabbath. That is not how I imagine God, nor is it how I imagine God operating. But here is what I do imagine God saying. It goes something like this:

Burned-out people are of no use to me. Your work is important but sometimes it can wait. Sometimes it must wait. Go to the gym. Go for a walk. Turn off the computer. Read a book. Bake some bread. Choose to do the things that lead to life, not only for you personally but for your family, your friends, your parish, your neighborhood. Remember that you are dust. Remember that going full throttle even on good things can kill you. The way to life is to build in what Rabbi Abraham Heschel so wisely called “a sanctuary in time.” It is in finding time for reflection and quiet and rest, unplugged time so that your life reflects a balance between work and play and rest. And believing that. And living that. Because you can’t keep going and going and going like the energizer bunny all the time. Trust me. Trust me.

There are very different chapters in our lives. Retired people, I’ve learned, are not necessarily without work to be done. Empty nesters do not necessarily find more Sabbath time in their lives. We tend to think of how exhausting newborns are but I think the busiest phase in my shared vocation with Hathy as parents was the time in Middle School and early high school when our kids were involved in a hundred things and not yet driving, so we did a lot of taxi service stuff.

One size doesn’t fit all, especially in a culture where we don’t just have one 24-hour period where the world stops. That might be nice but it isn’t going to happen.

So we need to practice. We begin, I think, by valuing the Sabbath and by taking it seriously. And never apologizing for keeping it. By claiming rest as a sanctuary in time, as something good and holy; not as a shirking of responsibility. We do that by remembering that the work will be there the next day. We may think it’s hardest to do this when we are parents with young kids but look what we are doing, as a culture, to our kids. They never get downtime either, until the power goes out. How's that for a metaphor?! 

We are incredibly blessed to have a Sabbath place in our lives. For us it is this little cabin in the woods in Vermont. Before cell phones, there was no way to call anyone up there. In fact even if someone died, which over fifty years has happened, if family was up there you called a neighbor and the neighbor walked over and delivered the message. No television and no computer. Just God’s good creation. What do you do in such a place? You cross-country ski, or snow shoe, or hike, or walk. You build a fire. You read. You play board games and cards. You cook a meal together. You breathe in and you breathe out. I hope you all have such a place in your lives. And I trust that if you do then you know what I know when I am there: that Sabbath is good and holy and life-giving. Tastes like honey! 

And that God is trustworthy because God remembers what we are made of even when we forget.

Another Sabbath place in my life is with the brothers of the Society of St. John the Evangelist. I make it a practice to spend some time at the monastery in Cambridge at least quarterly. There I read and pray with the monks and meet with my spiritual director and pray on my own. Without fail I know that when I leave there to head back to whatever faces me, I return a better person for it.

I want to keep practicing at Sabbath-keeping and become better at it. Not perfect but more skilled. Why? Because I want to model it in some way for others, especially younger clergy in my diocese. I want to not only quote Heschel or Taylor about Sabbath keeping but speak out of the depth of my own experience. I hope that when I die someone will speak at my funeral not only about what I did, but who I was. 

Without apology and without fear, I want to practice Sabbath-keeping until I start to get it right. To know what it is to encounter what is holy, through rest. To taste and see how good the Lord really is.