Brainstorming: Sabbath Rest and Stricter Separation From the World, etc.

In the last couple of weeks I have done more thinking than I have ever done in the past on the Sabbath. Now that is embarrassing to admit. How could someone do theology and miss focusing on Sabbath? It also means though that this post is more a matter of initial  and somewhat chaotic brainstorming than finished post. There are several threads below that I am hoping to flesh out in more concrete and helpful ways.

As part of my reflection on last Friday's first reading from Hebrews I was moved by Walter Brueggemann's book, Sabbath as Resistance, and as a result have moved on to Elton Fishbane's, The Sabbath Soul: Mystical Reflections on the Transformative Power of Holy Time. What struck me most last week was how far from the real understanding and practice of Sabbath we have come. It is remarkable and tragic how easily we have transformed it into a time which has nothing to do with God, our deepest selves, or with genuine rest and even more remarkable how little we tend to understand what it even means to truly rest. I was especially struck by how similar Sabbath rest is to many dimensions of the requirement of canon 603 (or monastic and eremitical life generally) described as, "stricter separation from the world," and how truly prophetic the Sabbath actually is.

One of the most unfortunate terms that comes up in monastic literature is "contemptus mundi" (hatred of the world) or, similarly, "fuga mundi" (the imperative that we flee the world) and in canon 603 there is another form of the same demand, "arctiore a mundo secessu" (a stricter, closer, tighter, or more narrow separation from the world) in canon 603. In Scripture we know that the term "the world" has several meanings and that in its negative sense it means that which is resistant to Christ. In it's more ambiguous sense it means the world around us that is not completely as God created it to be but is still essentially good. We are generally called to be in the world but not of it and we are called to this relative separation so that we might actually help in the transformation of the "ambiguous world" into one where God is all in all. What fuga mundi and related terms NEVER mean, is the wholesale rejection of material reality. Neither is it the rejection of all reality outside the monastery or hermitage. Instead it is primarily a state of heart and mind brought about when we rest in God. That requires some physical separation, of course, but I am convinced that monastic literature would be more helpful to many if we understood that "separation from the world" is better expressed as a form or variation on "Sabbath observance" or "Sabbath rest."

It may surprise us that one of the most significant ways in which we achieve this "flight" or "live in the world without being of it" is to learn to rest. Dependence upon God means learning to rest in faith -- that is, rest in the trust we have for God and God's sovereignty. Renunciation of the driven, sometimes frantic attempts to secure ourselves whether in work, investing, overscheduled and addictive behaviors of all sorts, etc, is really a commitment to rest, to stop, to step back, make a clear break with so much of the dominant culture and adopt a different rhythm in our lives. It also means a commitment to ground our lives on the rock of God's love and mercy rather than on the shifting sands of our own unceasing and futile efforts to bring meaning to those same lives.

The attitude of one who has learned to do this efectively is identified in today's readings as being hope-filled. The certainty of hope is rooted in the certainty of God's faithfulness and in our trust in that. The restfulness of hope is similarly grounded and depends on similar renunciations. Learning to really rest, to stop and let God be God will involve all the kinds of weaning, unlearning, and "detoxification" that addictions demand. After all, we know how to do and do and do; we think we know how to BE --- if being is defined in terms of doing. Even prayer is too-often seen as something we do rather than as something we allow God to do within us while all-too-often spirituality is a matter of struggling to "climb" or "achieve", etc. Sabbath is profoundly prayerful and certainly leads to spiritual growth but it does so by resting in the God who makes all things holy.

 We find ourselves in a culture that does not know how to truly rest or celebrate Sabbath. There is nothing simple either about how we have come to this essentially "Sabbathless" place in our culture or, should we choose to make the journey, in our way from non-observance to observance. As I think about either dynamic they seem almost overwhelming in their complexity and difficulty. Especially I wonder how do we move from being persons who do not even know what Sabbath and Sabbath observance are to being persons who understand in the depths of our souls the profound light and joy of these realities? Still, Christians struggle to find effective ways to proclaim the Good News to the world and to do so with our lives. How powerful it would be, and how tremendously countercultural and authentically prophetic if we each and all of us undertook to do what we are legitimately expected to do as a sign of our baptismal consecration, our freedom in Christ --- our covenant existence with God (Exodus 30) --- and simply rested in all the ways Sabbath observance calls us to!

A Contemplative Moment: Sabbath

The Sabbath Soul

We live in a world dominated by speed and distraction, with demands for our attention at every turn. We are conditioned to approach time as a reality to be managed for optimal productivity; often we rush about our weeks with the frenzy of accomplishing and earning, worshiping the idols of egotism, pride, and greed. We are so consumed by that hunger for acquisition and expedition that we frequently forget the restorative blessing of stillness, our desperate need for rest. I speak not only of a rest from physical and emotional exhaustion --- a rest that aims to recharge us for greater productivity and speed --- but also a rest that brings us back to the center of existence, a calm that allows us to reconnect with the divine breath at the soul of All. It is a spirit that we feel when we are in tune with the rhythms of our own breath. It is the Sabbath, the seventh day.

On the day of rest we are liberated from our enslavement to multitasking, from all the electronic communication that pervades the six days of work. Unplugged from the world of commerce and the forms of connection that keep us at a remove from the living voice of the other, we are released into a zone of quiet and reflection --- a time in which the calm of solitude can find perfect balance with the community and relationship of Sabbath life. That is the true mystery of the Sabbath --- the sublime secret that so many religious people already know intimately.

On Shabbat, the world around us becomes still --- all the demands and the heaviness that we carry are released. They will return soon enough, but on Shabbat we are able to step back, to look at our lives from a protected distance, from the warm interior of sacred time. It is the twilight glimmer of the sun in descent --- the otherworldly texture of a time that is neither day nor night. The ancient rabbis called this moment "bein ha-shemashot" --- literally, "between the suns" --- an instant that stands both within the arc of earthly time and decidedly beyond it. . . .It is a time that whispers of mystery and redemption, a corridor within the hours that transports us to a new level of feeling and thought.

from The Sabbath Soul: Mystical Reflections on the Transformative Power of Holy Time

by Eitan Fishbane, PhD

Sabbath: Striving to Enter into God's Rest

In tomorrow's first reading we are exhorted to try and enter into God's own rest. The basic idea is that in Christ, through his life, death and resurrection  the world has changed. Every story of Jesus' healing, exorcism, or justice-making authority witnesses to this. Heaven, which is the realm of God's sovereignty has interpenetrated this world and is accessible to us by faith.  Faith is an act of trust. It involves not only letting God grasp us but also letting go of our own grasping, controlling, and driven ways; it involves detaching ourselves from all that holds us in bondage, all that prevents us from simply being ourselves. While the Christ Event has changed reality in ways which essentially set us free from death, meaninglessness, and the fear of these which leaves us either anxious and driven or, alternately, despairing and paralyzed, we must still make choices for the new reality and for the God revealed there. In other words we must not just celebrate the victory of the past but we must let it be real in our own lives and allow God to extend God's sovereignty as we can. We focus our lives on receiving the gifts of freedom and peace which God gives us. In the paradoxical words of Hebrews we are called to strive to enter into God's rest.

One of the most powerful symbols of and means to this is an observance of Sabbath. Today we are apt to associate this practice with attending Church but we may also think of blue laws and other puritanical concerns which set unnecessary and even scrupulous constraints on the lives of many. Others will associate it with obsessive participation in professional or collegiate sports, shopping, over-scheduled playdates, etc etc. It hardly seems an important, much less a powerful symbol of freedom. But Sabbath observance grew directly out of the Hebrew's bondage to Pharaoh and the validating gods of the Egyptians. It is a central piece of the Hebrews' liberation from that and their own faith in the God who rests and gives rest.

Consider what life was like under the Pharaohs after Joseph. Fear and Greed drove the Pharaoh. The Hebrews worked under taskmasters. What they grew was stored in cities made for the purpose. The more they grew and harvested, the larger the cities had to become. The Hebrews were responsible for making the bricks out of which the cities were constructed. When Pharaoh was concerned the Hebrews might leave Egypt he required they gather the straw needed to make the bricks and he maintained the same quota of bricks. His reasoning? In this way the Hebrews would be so overwhelmed by their workload, they would not be able to consider the fundamental dishonesty or injustice (Exodus reads 'deceit') at the heart of this system.

The system fostered a demeaning mindlessness and the Hebrews were forced to define themselves mainly in terms of the dynamics of exploitation, production, etc rather than as precious individuals or even members of a family or Tribe. Especially they had neither the time nor the space to offer sacrifice to their own God nor to fully understand themselves in terms of this God. It was a life of continuous toil, not simply of the labor associated with human dignity and worth. More, it was a restless and anxious life, insecure, oppressed, subject to ever-increasing demands made not on the basis of need but on whim, pique, greed and the insecurity associated with greed. Finally, it was a life where the rich got richer on the backs of the poor who only got poorer while leisure or time to simply rest or cultivate mindfulness was associated with the oppressors, not the oppressed. It was a "Sabbathless" world.

The world created by Pharaoh should remind us of our own. Like ours it involved a market ideology of production and consumption. We live in a society where the more we have the more we want and where we are driven by peer pressure, advertising, etc to own more, use more, eat and drink more, and so forth. There are a number of symbols of this world-dynamic: workaholism, multi-tasking, mindless gaming, texting, shopping, or hoarding -- to name a few. Addiction to sport, to competition, or to always having the newest gadget are others. This dynamic even infiltrates our school system where instead of inculcating the value of wisdom or teaching to genuinely form and educate, we teach to test. Similarly we now give "advanced degrees" as a commodity. Such degrees can be bought and sold and their sole purpose in some places seems to be to make someone capable of earning more and more money and standing out from the crowd --- not being their best selves or giving back to society. In fact, this approach exacerbates the rich get richer and the poor get poorer dynamic and underscores the difference between elites and the underclass already so prominent in our contemporary culture.

Sabbath is the way members of the Judeo-Christian tradition practice standing in time as ourselves, hands and hearts open to the gift God gives. It is the way we distance ourselves from a culture that exploits, divides, and distorts us. In Judaism the Sabbath is celebrated by cultivating a host of ways of resting mind, body and spirit. No work is done, money cannot be handled without desecrating the day, families celebrate together and there is a kind of leveling in society; on the basis of Sabbath observance on the Sabbath there are no have or have nots, nor is there competition or drivenness. All stand as human beings loved by and delighted in by God. The various seductions and addictions of contemporary society are left aside as are any sources of competition, elitism, etc. Sabbath creates a society of neighbors. It is a primary way we break the chains of bondage and gain some degree of independence over the culture which pressures, defines and even alienates us from one another in every way.

Walter Brueggemann identifies it as an act of resistance to such a culture and an alternative to "the demanding, chattering, pervasive presence of advertizing, liturgy of professional sports" and other seductions "that devour all our rest time." Sabbath is the way we regain an appropriate stewardship over our world rather than exploiting it in ways which produce ever greater dysfunction and anxiety. Above all, it is a powerful way we assert our trust in the new world Jesus has made real amongst us and in the God who is its creator and Lord. By giving ourselves over in this way we participate in God's completion of the work of new creation which has yet to be brought to fulfillment. Genuine Sabbath celebration requires tremendous commitment and discipline but it is something we need to recover. After all, it is a huge piece of what it means to trust in and praise God. It is the countercultural praxis of entering into God's rest so that his will may truly be done on earth as it is in heaven.