Sabbath

“How do we live so that the wonder and astonishment that so often comes to us unbidden and spontaneously isn’t dissipated in trivial pursuits?

“Albert Borgmann has given us the phrase ‘focal practice’ to guide us into an engagement with life—the way we ‘take up the world’ is his phrase—that doesn’t reduce the complexities into something meager, that doesn’t abstract them into something lifeless, that doesn’t manipulate them into something self-serving. A focal practice enables us to stay personally engaged and socially responsible in a culture that is increasingly depersonalized and alarmingly fragmented. The focal practice that enables us to take up with creation is Sabbath-keeping.  …

“Sabbath is a deliberate act of interference, an interruption of our work each week, a decree of no-work so that we are able to notice, to attend, to listen, to assimilate this comprehensive and majestic work of God, to orient our work in the work of God.  …

“ ‘Time,’ insisted Peter Forsyth, ‘is the sacrament of eternity.’ Sabbath is a workshop for the practice of eternity. … When we remember the Sabbath and rest on it we enter into and maintain the rhythm of creation. We keep time with God. Sabbath-keeping preserves and honors time as God’s gift of holy rest: it erects a weekly bastion against the commodification of time, against reducing time to money, reducing time to what we can get out of it, against leaving no time for God or beauty or anything that cannot be used or purchased. It is a defense against the hurry that desecrates time.” - Eugene Peterson, Christ Plays In Ten Thousand Places

The main frustrating thing about my meditative life these days is that I have to take it in sound bytes. I remember, when I first started blogging, I had entire days to do nothing but sit around and think (well, I was supposed to be studying). Now, I have little chunks of time: the thirty-minute commute to work, ten minutes here and there between seeing patients. Twenty minutes while nursing. An hour in the afternoon or at night, with the constant possibility of interruption by a crying baby or a kid that won’t stay in bed. Sometimes a good idea is just starting to take hold when I have to go make up a story with Lego’s, or wash more grapes, or mediate a dispute.

I’ve been enjoying the above book: it’s meaty enough to make me think, and satisfyingly lyrical. I like thinking about the Sabbath as a way to enter into the “rhythm of Creation,” as a way to participate in and enter into a world and existence bigger than the narrowness of our business. To understand that God is bigger than time, the way time has come to mean for all of us (time as money, as goals, as tasks; time as a means to get somewhere or keep from getting somewhere). To constantly redefine our perspective of work. To love our neighbor, allow for social justice (the Deuteronomy reason for the Sabbath command).

There are a lot of ways we can teach this to our kids. We sometimes have a quiet time, a break in the middle of the morning’s activities where the children can each lie quietly on blankets on the floor and think, or play quietly with toys. Ellie still lies in bed for her daily quiet time even though she doesn’t nap. We get into the habit of going to church and treating it as something we prepare for and enjoy. We can take Sundays as a time to do nothing but rest around the house, or plan some outing where we can enjoy the outdoors.

But this is hard too. It’s easy to rest from my out-of-home job. Three days a week, I see patients and operate, then I leave and come home. But how do you rest from the constant work of parenting? I guess in one sense, I take my Sabbaths in sound bytes. We get childcare so we can get away from the kids for a bit—and spending money, or relocating near parents, to do that is okay. I take bits here and there while the kids sleep or during the work commute. I have to create my Sabbaths, or they don’t happen.

But in another sense, don’t children point us to Creation, to wonder, to this idea of attentiveness and adoration, more than anything else? They are always asking to play—what is that, if not wonder in action? Or, as Peterson puts it, “the exuberance and freedom that mark life when it is lived beyond necessity, beyond mere survival.” They are always asking what’s that?—because they are looking; they see, and they wonder. They are always talking in exclamation marks—my favorite color! oh, buh-bee, so-cute-buh-bee!—because they adore.

So yes, parenting is work, and I never really get fully away from my work. I take my Sabbaths as I can, and I feel lucky we have as much support with childcare as we do, but the rest of the time, I let the spirit of the Sabbath inform my mothering-work as much as possible. Sometimes it’s just a messy, tiring trek from one nap to the next, but that sense of resting in creation, of mercy in community, is there too, and learning how to look for and cultivate it is probably as important in teaching my kids and myself about the Sabbath as anything else.